The US State Department issued a health alert to US citizens in China on Wednesday after an American embassy employee suffered a traumatic brain injury. According to the State Department, the injury was due to an “abnormal sensations of sound and pressure.”

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The incident is ominously reminiscent of a series of similar attacks in Havana, Cuba that left 21 State Department employees with serious injuries. Now, after urging Americans not to visit Cuba, the government is similarly warning US citizens to be on the alert in China.

The State Department’s reports:

A U.S. government employee in China recently reported subtle and vague, but abnormal, sensations of sound and pressure. The U.S. government is taking these reports seriously and has informed its official staff in China of this event. We do not currently know what caused the reported symptoms and we are not aware of any similar situations in China, either inside or outside of the diplomatic community.

The incident comes as the new Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, is preparing to meet Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Washington on Wednesday to discuss trade.

As NBC reports, Jinnie Lee, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Embassy in Beijing said the employee reported the symptoms from late 2017 through last month and was eventually taken to the U.S. for further evaluation.

“On May 18, the embassy learned that the clinical findings of this evaluation matched mild traumatic brain injury,” she said. “The department is taking this incident very seriously and is working to determine the cause.”

According to the State Department, citizens in China should take the following actions:

  • If you have concerns about any symptoms or medical problems that developed during or after a stay in China, consult a medical professional.
  • While in China, if you experience any unusual acute auditory or sensory phenomena accompanied by unusual sounds or piercing noises, do not attempt to locate their source. Instead, move to a location where the sounds are not present.

President Donald Trump has yet to respond to the incident in China, although the incident in Cuba was met with backlash.

“Some very bad things happened in Cuba,” Trump said at the time. “They did some bad things.”

After the alleged attack in Cuba, the State Department issued a similar warning, telling Americans not to visit the country which prompted a drop in tourism to Cuba.

In March, a team of computer scientists claimed to have cracked the mystery behind the Cuban sound attack.

Professor Kevin Fu and members of the Security and Privacy Research Group at the University of Michigan say that the incident in Havana could’ve been caused by two sources of ultrasound — such as eavesdropping equipment —  placed too close together could generate interference and provoke the intense sounds described by the victims.

Whether or not this was a deliberate attack, however, remains a mystery.

As the Free Thought Project has previously reported, the idea of a sonic attack is not some far-fetched conspiracy theory. In fact, the US Army has been exposed for studying audio and visual technologies in order to use them as weapons.

On December 16, 1997, children across Japan plopped down in front of their TVs to watch an episode of Pokemon.

700 of them never saw the end.

Hundreds of children experienced seizures and were rushed to the hospital after witnessing Pikachu use his lightning powers to blow up missiles.

The episode, called ‘Electric Soldier Porygon,’ was banned from airing again, even in edited form.

The effects were so damning to Pokemon that the entire show was removed from the air for four months.

However, while the world was scrambling to understand what could’ve possibly caused this reaction, the US Army quietly began researching the episode — to weaponize it. Seriously.

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The Army wanted to blast pulses similar to those used in the episode into the faces of its adversaries to overload their brains and cause them to convulse.

Application of “electromagnetic pulses” could force neurons to all fire at once, causing a “disruption of voluntary muscle control,” reads a description of the ominous “seizure” weapon, contained in a declassified document from the Army’s National Ground Intelligence Center. “It is thought by using a method that would actually trigger nerve synapses directly with an electrical field, essentially 100% of individuals would be susceptible to seizure induction.”

The report was discovered thanks to an activist filing a Freedom of Information Act request. It revealed the Army’s sinister intentions in making electromagnetic weapons — propaganda.

According to a report in Wired, the military needed weapons like these because TV news had hamstrung the military’s traditional proclivities to kill its way to victory: It now lived in a world where “You don’t win unless CNN says you win,” the report lamented. But while the Pentagon still laments the impact of the 24/7 news cycle on the U.S. military, it hardly thinks less-lethal weapons are a solution to it. In fact, the U.S. has kept most of its electromagnetic arsenal off of the battlefield, in part because the idea of invisible pain rays would sound so bad coming out of an anchor’s mouth.

This disturbing Pokemon weapon would disrupt chemicals in the brain and induce an immediate seizure — in 100% of the population.

“The onset of synchrony and disruption of muscular control is said to be near instantaneous,” the 1997 Army report reads. “Excitation is directly on the brain.” And “100% of the population” is supposed to be susceptible to the effects — from distances of “up to hundreds of meters” — “[r]ecovery times are expected to be consistent with, or more rapid than, that which is observed in epileptic seizures.”

The report showed how Army officials likely drooled over the notion of inducing seizures in their unwitting victims, specifically mentioning the Pokemon episode.

“The photic-induced seizure phenomenon was borne out demonstrably on December 16, 1997 on Japanese television when hundreds of viewers of a popular cartoon were treated, inadvertently, to photic seizure induction,” the analysis noted.

Naturally, the Army has denied any such weapon exists. However, as we have consistently reported, the US government also has no problem lying.

*Article originally appeared at Free Thought Project.