Makes so much more sense than ultrasonics. Microwaves have the advantage of extremely short wavelengths which means they behave in a truly confusing fashion from the perspective of normal humans. I built a microwave fixture once for testing; it didn't work at first because my ground lugs were not equilaterally spaced around the lug which caused an impedance mismatch at 15 GHz or some shit. You can also beam super high frequency stuff at a surface and under the right circumstances, with the right carrier wave witchcraft, you can cause the harmonics to be more useful. Sennheiser had a "speaker" for sale for a while that you could bathe a wall in tweaky ultrasound and have program audio reflect back (it was like the 4th subharmonic of the parent waveform). But it had a range measured in feet. Acoustic energy is a lot more finicky than emf when it comes to range.
Absolutely agree. EMF has superior directivity, but even better, it's dispersionless. The standard microwave oven is ~2.5 GHz, which gives a wavelength near 10 cm, not that far away from the dimensions of a brain (of course, microwave ovens constitute a Faraday cage, so only a small tinfoil hat is needed while making some delicious popcorn). But yeah these guys probably have some bitchin' microwave lasers that slow roasted the poor saps' heads with low intensity radiation over many nights. I hope they get caught, because that's disgusting. Why would Cuba do this? Because it's probably not Cuba?
It's interesting. You go to a maser pointed at people's heads. I go to magniplanar listening devices. The Great Seal Bug was 3' across back in '45. They never did figure out all the gack in the US Embassy in Moscow. What I know is that if you type in "planar microwave emitter array" into Google Images you see a bunch of SEM graphs. Imagine this: you've got some passive surveillance devices that are acoustic cavities that modulate when excited by microwave energy. You've got them tuned such that you can literally stick them into the wall like a thumbtack and have a listening device in a room. Only problem is, the gain is dependent on a bunch of correct collimation: your microwave emitter has to be just so. Your bug has to be just so. And if you're FSB, you're probably good at this. But if you're Cuba, you jack the shit out of your emitter gain. And people's brains start to cook.
That certainly sounds much more plausible. Perhaps their level of gain is somewhere between enough microwave intensity (and flux) that a human body would have a noticeable sensation of heating, vs. enough microwave intensity and flux to seriously damage the brain. Something tells me that it's not a particularly well-characterized parameter space, certainly at least not in the public record. Random thoughts because this is fun: To effectively transmit something of a given wavelength, you need something very near the size of the wavelength (I know you know, 'bl00, this is for posterity). So if they targeted the second harmonic of brain resonance, they could get to masin' with using something ~2.5 cm for an antenna half of the wavelength. Small enough to hide, but there might still be issues related to power dissipation. It would be interesting to measure a sample of ceiling, wall, and floor material and check the skin depth across the microwave range. Or maybe they've found a polarization technique that is especially suited for brain scrambling? Regardless, I'll never be a diplomat anyway.
Let's continue the thought experiment. Wifi is 2.4gHz and around 100mW. Suppose they were boosting that at 10GHz to steal it? Cell phones are in the watt range; the shear amount of RFI you've got spitting around is going to make monitoring tough. And what if you PWM your wave and duty cycle it under 50%? If you're building hysteresis into your passive device, you're good to go and the average sweep probably won't pick it up. And you can jack it. It's really the cavity volume that will give you your resonance. The size is whatever. 2.5cm diameter? Fine, I'll make something the thickness of a playing card, feather the edges and put it under the paint at the tape and mud stage. I can hide an inch anywhere especially if I don't have to feed it power or pull off signal. If the duty cycle is under 100%, living tissue may easily act differently than anything else. And your own testing might not even reveal what those effects are unless you bathe convicts in it for a year at a time.