A Norwegian government scientist who doubted that pulsed-energy weapons could harm the brain decided to test the idea on himself. He built a pulsed-energy device in 2024 and, according to people familiar with the episode, used it in a self-experiment. He later developed neurological symptoms that those people said were strikingly similar to those reported by U.S. diplomats and intelligence officers since 2016, a condition widely known as Havana syndrome.
A Skeptic Builds His Own Weapon
The researcher, employed by the Norwegian government, was skeptical that directed pulsed microwaves could produce the headaches, dizziness, and cognitive problems described by American personnel stationed overseas. So he constructed a device capable of emitting pulsed-energy bursts and, in 2024, tested it on himself. Afterward, he developed neurological symptoms that, according to four people familiar with the events, closely matched the anomalous health incidents reported by U.S. government personnel around the world.
Norway subsequently briefed the CIA on the scientist’s condition and the circumstances of his experiment. The episode is remarkable not just for its outcome but for the method: a trained researcher deliberately exposing himself to a suspected weapon mechanism, then becoming a case study in the very phenomenon he set out to debunk. No primary medical records or independent neuroimaging results from his self-test have been made public, so the full clinical picture remains unclear. Still, the incident has added fresh fuel to a debate that U.S. intelligence agencies, medical researchers, and Congress have struggled to resolve for nearly a decade.
NIH Studies Found Symptoms but No Visible Brain Damage
The Norwegian case lands in a scientific landscape already defined by a sharp tension. On one side, affected U.S. personnel describe debilitating headaches, memory loss, balance problems, and fatigue. On the other, the most rigorous imaging research conducted to date has failed to find structural evidence of injury. A peer-reviewed neuroimaging study led by Pierpaoli and colleagues used MRI and other imaging measures to compare anomalous health incident participants with matched controls, and the authors reported no consistent brain differences between the two groups.
A companion clinical investigation led by Chan analyzed biomarkers and functional testing across affected personnel and their family members. It documented severe self-reported symptoms but few objective clinical differences separating those who reported incidents from those who did not. According to an overview from the National Institutes of Health, the two studies together found no evidence of MRI-detectable brain injury or clear biological abnormalities. The distress is real and measurable on self-reported scales, but the scans and blood work have not revealed a smoking gun.
That gap matters for the Norwegian scientist’s case. If his symptoms mirror those of American personnel but future imaging also shows no structural damage, it could support a hypothesis that pulsed microwaves produce transient neurological disruption without leaving lasting physical traces. Alternatively, it could point toward expectancy effects, where a person who anticipates harm from an exposure may develop genuine symptoms driven partly by that anticipation. Without blinded replication studies comparing exposed subjects to unexposed controls who believe they were exposed, distinguishing between these explanations will remain difficult.
Washington Used ‘Brain Injury’ Language Anyway
The scientific ambiguity has not stopped Washington from treating the condition as serious and real. When the Helping American Victims Afflicted by Neurological Attacks Act was signed in 2021, the accompanying presidential statement described affected personnel as suffering “debilitating brain injuries” and committed the administration to providing care while working to determine the cause. That language sits in direct tension with the NIH findings. The law authorized financial support for affected employees, which was the right humanitarian call regardless of etiology. But framing the condition as brain injury in official rhetoric, when peer-reviewed imaging research has not supported MRI-detectable injury, may have shaped public expectations and intelligence priorities in ways that outran the evidence.
This disconnect deserves more scrutiny than it typically receives. Political urgency and genuine concern for affected personnel pushed officials toward definitive language before the science was settled. That is understandable, but it also created a feedback loop: once “brain injury” became the official descriptor, any research failing to find one looked like a failure of the instruments rather than a signal that the mechanism might be something other than tissue damage. The Norwegian episode, by suggesting that a single self-exposure may reproduce the symptom pattern, intensifies pressure on policymakers to reconcile their rhetoric with the uncertain state of the science.
Intelligence Agencies Question a Foreign Adversary
While political leaders emphasized the possibility of attacks, the intelligence community’s own assessment has been more cautious. A March 2023 Intelligence Community Assessment, summarized by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, concluded that a foreign adversary was unlikely to be responsible for most reported anomalous health incidents, though it acknowledged significant gaps in collection and analysis. Reporting the following year indicated that multiple spy agencies saw no persuasive evidence that a hostile government had mounted a sustained global campaign using a novel weapon, as detailed in a review of internal findings across the intelligence community.
Those judgments do not rule out that some subset of cases might involve directed energy or other external factors, but they undercut the early narrative of a coordinated foreign plot. The Norwegian self-experiment therefore occupies an awkward space: it appears to suggest that pulsed-energy exposure may have induced Havana-like symptoms in at least one person, yet the broader pattern of incidents still resists neat attribution to an adversary. Intelligence officials must now weigh a laboratory-style anecdote that seems to validate a contested mechanism against population-level data that point toward a mix of medical, environmental, and psychological explanations rather than a single, orchestrated campaign.
What the Norwegian Case Can – and Cannot – Prove
The most responsible way to interpret the Norwegian scientist’s ordeal is as a provocative data point, not a definitive answer. On its face, the episode shows that a person who believed microwaves were unlikely to cause harm nevertheless developed symptoms after exposing himself to a custom-built device. That undermines the simplest suggestion that all Havana reports are conscious fabrication. It also offers a potential model for future controlled experiments, provided they are conducted with rigorous safety protocols, independent oversight, and robust pre- and post-exposure testing that far exceeds what has been publicly described in this case.
At the same time, a single unblinded self-experiment cannot settle questions of causation. Without sham exposures, control subjects, and detailed physiological monitoring, it is impossible to know how much of the Norwegian scientist’s reaction was driven by the physical stimulus, by stress and expectation, or by other factors entirely. The absence of publicly available clinical documentation further limits what outside experts can conclude. For now, the incident mainly sharpens existing contradictions: U.S. leaders have spoken of brain injuries that advanced imaging does not confirm; intelligence agencies doubt a sustained foreign attack even as a government researcher appears to have reproduced the symptoms with a pulsed-energy device.
Those tensions point toward a research agenda rather than a tidy verdict. Future studies will need to combine the methodological rigor of the NIH imaging and biomarker work with carefully controlled exposure experiments that can test specific mechanisms under blinded conditions. Until that happens, the Norwegian case will remain what it currently is: a striking and unsettling story that complicates easy dismissals of Havana syndrome, but that falls short of proving that an invisible weapon is stalking diplomats and spies around the world.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
