For years, “Havana Syndrome” was treated by much of the establishment press as a punchline — mass hysteria, anxiety, crickets, anything but what the victims described. Independent investigative journalist Catherine Herridge’s latest reporting makes that dismissiveness harder to sustain, because the pattern she lays out is not what psychosomatic illness looks like. It’s what targeting looks like.
Herridge, reporting on NewsNation, says more than two dozen suspected directed-energy incidents have now been reported on American soil — including a significant cluster at an off-site U.S. government intelligence and research facility in Northern Virginia. Read that location again. Not Havana, not Guangzhou, not some far-off embassy. A government research site inside the United States:
More than two dozen suspected directed energy attacks have been reported inside the US including a significant cluster of cases at an off-site U.S. government intelligence and research facility in Northern Virginia.
Multiple incidents reported in 2021 involving U.S. government personnelinvestigating directed-energy weapon technology, as well as efforts to reverse-engineer a directed-energy device.
CIA, ODNI, DoW, DHS did not respond to questions seeking comment.
WATCH:
EXCLUSIVE: More than two dozen suspected directed energy attacks have been reported inside the US including a significant cluster of cases at an off-site U.S. government intelligence and research facility in Northern Virginia.
Multiple incidents reported in 2021 involving U.S.… https://t.co/paxgw3uoim
— Catherine Herridge (@C__Herridge) September 4, 2026
The detail that should stop anyone cold is which people got hit. According to Herridge, some of the 2021 incidents struck U.S. personnel who were themselves investigating directed-energy technology — including individuals working to reverse-engineer a device. If accurate, that is not random and it is not stress. Whoever was behind it knew who was getting close to understanding the weapon and appears to have gone after exactly those people. Illness doesn’t select for the investigators studying its cause. An adversary does.
She also interviewed a Space Force veteran she calls “Chris,” who says he was hit five times in his own home outside Washington and showed her medical records documenting multiple conditions, including a service-connected traumatic brain injury. Whatever one concludes about the broader phenomenon, a decorated veteran with documented brain injury describing repeated attacks in his own house is not a man to be waved off with a shrug about anxiety.
Herridge describes the suspected device in unsettlingly practical terms: portable, programmable, easily concealed, and not requiring much power. That profile matters. It means this isn’t necessarily the province of a superpower with exotic infrastructure — it’s something that can be moved, hidden, and operated quietly, on American streets, against Americans in their homes.
These remain “suspected” attacks; the U.S. government has pointedly stopped short of assigning blame, and prior intelligence assessments have been divided on whether a foreign weapon is even involved. Herridge is careful with her language, and so should anyone repeating her. This is reporting on an open question, not a closed case, and the mechanism is still genuinely disputed among serious people.
But notice who wasn’t talking. The CIA, the ODNI, the Department of War, and DHS all declined to respond to her requests for comment. On a question this grave — whether Americans are being attacked with a covert weapon inside their own country — silence from every relevant agency is its own kind of answer, and not a reassuring one.
The people describing these injuries served their country. The least their country owes them is a serious investigation and a straight answer, rather than another decade of treating them as an embarrassment to be managed. Herridge is asking the question. Someone in government should be made to answer it.
