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Claims that a "mysterious sonic weapon" has been used in Venezuela have fueled speculation about exotic US military technology and its possible effects on the human body.
An eyewitness account (a Venezuelan guard) shared on social media by White House Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt claimed that the gun knocked Venezuelan and Cuban security forces to their knees, causing them to “bleed from their noses” and vomit blood.
While the Trump administration has not confirmed what weapon may have been used, defense experts point to a known acoustic device that has been in use for years.
Known as a long-range acoustic device (LRAD), it has been described as "the voice of God," according to Mark Cancian, a retired Navy lieutenant colonel and senior advisor to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The device uses a directional, short-range "sound cone."
"It's not like a microphone, you know, where everyone's neighborhood, it's just inside this cone," Cancian said.
American operators may have planted it while landing in Caracas, Venezuela, as a way to disorient security forces and warn them to drop their weapons.
LRADs can project high-volume spoken commands or emit a loud, piercing tone designed to attract attention and deter movement. At close range, the sound can be painful and disorienting, and in extreme cases can damage hearing or rupture eardrums, but the devices are not designed to cause long-term physical harm.
According to Cancian, US forces used them for crowd control in Iraq when Iraqis got too close to US military installations.
The devices can produce noise up to 140 decibels. The intensity drops off rapidly with distance and angle. This is why operators can stand close by but out of range.
Other defense analysts say this account raises questions that go beyond conventional acoustic devices.
For decades, the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has studied non-lethal technologies that aim to temporarily incapacitate adversaries without causing permanent injury.
Publicly available research has explored acoustic and electromagnetic effects designed to overwhelm the senses, disrupt balance or motor control, and render targets briefly unable to fight or maneuver.
Can Kasapoglu, a defense analyst at the Hudson Institute, said such research has fueled speculation about more advanced incapacitation systems, but stressed that there is no public evidence that any experimental DARPA technology has been used in Venezuela.
"There are several non-lethal technologies that DARPA has been working on, including acoustic weapons systems, sound waves, and also some neurological weapons systems that don't kill, but cause an unbearable sensation that makes you feel like you're just being rendered inoperable on the battlefield," he said.
While the symptoms described in the post shared by Leavitt are not verified, "they closely match examples from DARPA research."
The White House and the Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment.
In addition to the reported voice attack, the US launched a cyberattack that disrupted communications systems as operators were landing in Caracas, Venezuela.
"It was dark, the lights of Caracas were mostly off because of a certain expertise that we have, it was dark and it was deadly," Trump said earlier.
"We were on guard, but suddenly all our radar systems went off without any explanation," the local guard said in the account shared by Leavitt, which noted "the next thing we saw were drones, lots of drones, flying over our positions. We didn't know how to react."
After the operators arrived on the scene, "at some point, they let out something; I don't know how to describe it," he said.
"It was like a very intense sound wave. Suddenly I felt like my head was exploding from the inside."
"We all started bleeding from our noses. Some were vomiting blood. We fell to the ground, unable to move. We couldn't even get up after that sonic weapon, or whatever it was," he says.
The physical effects described by the guard go far beyond what experts say LRADs are known to cause.
Vomiting blood, in particular, is not a typical reaction to acoustic exposure, raising questions about whether the account exaggerates the effects, misattributes their cause, or reflects an entirely different factor.
Experts warn that, while guided acoustic devices are real and widely used, there is no publicly known "sonic weapon" capable of producing the extreme injuries described, and there is no official confirmation that any such system has been used in Venezuela.
Venezuela's Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello said 100 people were killed in the operation against Maduro. Cuba has said 32 members of its security forces, who were guarding Maduro, were killed in the operation. /Adapted from Foxnews /
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