President Maduro was captured with ease - apparently his guards were incapacitated by a mysterious weapon

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“We had no way to compete with their technology, with their weapons. I swear, I’ve never seen anything like it,” a Venezuelan security guard says in a video widely shared on social media and promoted by the White House.

His account tells how U.S. special forces in Venezuela captured then-President Maduro using new technology which incapacitated the entire protective team and allowed two dozen U.S. troops to easily defeat hundreds of defenders.

Unverifiable and scarcely credible stories like this are common enough in wartime. But in this case there might just be real-world weapons technology behind it.

“Sonic Weapon” Attack

The interview spread rapidly after being retweeted by no less than White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt with the comment “Stop what you are doing and read this…”

The account, which cannot be verified, describes an attack which the interviewee struggles to put into words:

Guard: At one point, they launched something—I don't know how to describe it... it was like a very intense sound wave. Suddenly I felt like my head was exploding from the inside. We all started bleeding from the nose. Some were vomiting blood. We fell to the ground, unable to move.

Interviewer: And your comrades? Did they manage to resist?

Security Guard: No, not at all. Those twenty men, without a single casualty, killed hundreds of us…. I swear, I've never seen anything like it. We couldn't even stand up after that sonic weapon or whatever it was.

This might all seem like a far-fetched excuse for why Maduro’s guards failed to protect him, taking heavy casualties while a small force abducted the man they were supposed to defend with their lives. In fact, the U.S. has spent decades researching weapons to produce the type of effects described.

The Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate Gets To Work

In the 90’s and early 2000s, the Pentagon poured resources into the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate, now rebranded the Joint Intermedia Force Capabilities Office. Their task was to develop non-lethal, or less-lethal weapons which fall somewhere in the spectrum between shouting and shooting. These would disable or incapacitate people without harming them.

The idea was that future wars, in particular insurgencies, would require the carefully calibrated use of force, for example when dealing with riots and acts of resistance like stone-throwing. In the ‘Three Block War’, there might be high-intensity combat in one block, peacekeeping operations in the next block and a humanitarian aid mission in the next. Troops needed to be able to respond without causing civilian deaths and escalating the situation.

Existing weapons like rubber bullets, water cannon and tear gas are seen as both ineffective and too dangerous. The term “less-lethal” was adopted because even weapons not intended to kill can be deadly – there are dozens of recorded deaths from rubber bullets.

The Pentagon worked on a wide variety of concepts, including strobe dazzlers , malodorants and electroshock projectiles, plus oddities like the laser flash-bang Pulsed Energy Projectile. One of the biggest was the millimeter-wave Active Denial System or ‘pain beam’ which could inflict severe pain and drive back rioters from several hundred meters away. While many of these systems were deployed, none was notably successful. Active Denial was an expensive truck-sized unit that took several hours to reach operating temperature before it could be used.

There were also a number of projects for acoustic weapons.

Sonic Blasters

Sound has arguably been used as a weapon since the invention of military music, not just the horns of Jericho but the drums used to intimidate and overawe enemies. The British government classified bagpipes as weapons of war right up until 1996.

Serious development of sonic weapons started in WWII with the development of systems loud enough to cause physical damage by sheer volume like the Nazi Schallkanone or Sound Gun which could burst eardrums from fifty meters away. This was, however, much less efficient than conventional armament.

Loud noise alone was not an effective nonlethal weapon, and researchers explored what are termed “non-acoustic effects,” physical or psychological effects caused by audible sound, or by infrasound or high-frequency ultrasound.

There are a myriad of urban legends about the effects of sound, such as the low-frequency “brown note” which causes hearers to lose control of their bowels, but this has never been replicated. There are more plausible accounts of “sick building syndrome” caused by infrasound but specific cause and effect have proved hard to pin down.

Many developers claimed that their acoustic weapons could produce paralysis, panic attacks or other effects. But Dr. Jürgen Altmann’s definitive 1998 work Acoustic Weapons - A Prospective Assessment did not find any credible claims of non-acoustic effects.

The nearest thing to a sonic weapon deployed by U.S. forces is the Long Range Acoustic Device or LRAD, and while this is sometimes termed a sonic cannon, the makers are keen to emphasize that it is not a weapon, merely a hailing device which can be used to convey messages from a distance – whether a warship hailing a small boat, or security forces telling a crowd to disperse.

While civil rights campaigners have complained about police use of LRAD in the U.S. and elsewhere, there is no evidence it is more harmful than other loud sound sources.

EPIC: Electromagnetic Interdiction

However, while the guard thought the weapon that floored his squad was sonic, it may have been something else entirely.

Back in 2008 I talked to developers working on a patented device known as Electromagnetic Personnel Interdiction Control (EPIC) under a contract for the Marine Corps.

EPIC uses radio waves “to excite and interrupt the normal process of human hearing and equilibrium” – effectively the tiny hairs in the inner ear act as radio antennas. One factor that made this approach useful was that unlike sound waves, the radio waves work through walls and other obstacles.

Specifically EPIC seeks to temporarily disable the vestibular system which controls balance. The target would not be able to stand up, let alone walk. Eye tracking would be affected – that unpleasant sensation that the room is spinning is caused by vestibular problems – so anyone affected might not even be able to see straight.

According to the patent, EPIC will produce “incapacitation sufficient to temporarily render the subject powerless to resist arrest or subjugation. Removal of the electromagnetic energy leaves the nerve cells and surrounding tissues with no damage and second order effects of severe motion sickness and psychological effects of helplessness remains until the subject’s body chemistry returns to normal.”

When I talked to the developers they were still working with chinchillas and planning to graduate to rats. These would be trained to traverse a course for a food reward; the researchers planned to determine if EPIC could prevent rats from moving. This elaborate setup was required because, as the developer explained, a stationary rat with a disabled vestibular system does not show any outward signs beyond hunkering down. Unlike bipeds, they do not fall over.

There is no evidence that EPIC progressed beyond early laboratory stages. We do not even know if it worked on rats, let alone humans. There are no known contracts for further development, and the Joint Intermedia Force Capabilities Office does not mention any such capability. No such weapon has ever been openly displayed or demonstrated.

However, the effects described in the Venezuela attack appear consistent with EPIC technology.

The radio pulse might be perceived as a loud sound as it hits the inner ear, and might give a feeling that the head is exploding. If it worked as intended, it would specifically cause the victims to fall over and not be able to recover their feet or aim a weapon. Some, suffering from that extreme motion sickness, would likely vomit, though they would not vomit blood. The feeling of helplessness seems to have been effectively induced.

Certainly this sounds like exactly the type of weapon that Special Forces might use to disable defenders before going in to capture a high-value target alive…if it exists.

Because it is quite likely that the whole account is pure propaganda with no relation to reality and EPIC never progressed as a weapon.

The security guard, whose identify cannot be confirmed, says “I’m sending a warning to anyone who thinks they can fight the United States. They have no idea what they’re capable of…They’re not to be messed with” – a line which could hardly be more perfect if it was scripted by the White House. And including a grain of plausible truth, like a real if unproven technology, makes propaganda more effective.

The Venezuelan account would be easy to dismiss as classic tin foil hat story. But as further accounts of the electromagnetic hardware supposedly causing the Havana Syndrome hit the news, we can expect a lot more interest in this area.

UPDATE: Apparent confirmation from President Trump in an interview that a secret ‘sonic’ weapon was used: "It’s something I don’t wanna…nobody else has it, But we have weapons nobody else knows about. And, I say it’s probably good not to talk about it, but we have some amazing weapons.”