What the Hell Is a "Discombobulator"? And Could You Actually Build One?

The News That Started All of This

On January 3, 2026, U.S. special operations forces executed a raid in Caracas that resulted in the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. That alone would have been the story of the decade. But then President Trump started talking about a weapon.

He called it "the Discombobulator." Though he made further remarks which seemed to place all electronic warfare capabilities, including radar jammers, into the "discombobulator" category, which further muddied the waters.

Speaking to troops at Fort Bragg in February, Trump boasted that the device completely neutralized Venezuelan defense systems—Russian radar, Chinese equipment, all of it—without a single conventional shot being fired. "They pressed buttons and nothing worked," he said. Members of Maduro's security detail later described experiencing intense sound waves, nosebleeds, vomiting blood, and temporary paralysis. Their radar went dark nationwide, and then the drones came.

Now, if this were the only data point, you might write it off as presidential hyperbole. But it's not the only data point. Not by a long shot.

The Havana Syndrome Thread

For years—since at least 2016—U.S. diplomats and intelligence officers have reported what the government calls "Anomalous Health Incidents." Havana Syndrome. The symptoms are eerily consistent: sudden onset of intense head pressure, vertigo, nausea, cognitive fog, memory loss, and in severe cases, lasting brain damage visible on MRI. Dozens of cases across Cuba, China, Russia, Austria, and right here in Washington, D.C.

The intelligence community spent years arguing about whether it was even real. The CIA's official position, as of 2023, was that a foreign adversary was "very unlikely" responsible. Mass psychogenic illness, they suggested. Stress reactions. Pre-existing conditions. And of course, this could very well be the case in some reported cases of this so-called syndrome.

Then, in 2024, two things happened that made that position very hard to maintain.

First, the Department of Homeland Security quietly purchased a portable, backpack-sized pulsed radio-frequency device containing Russian-origin components, spending over $10 million in Pentagon funding on the covert acquisition.

Second—and this is the one that really matters—a Norwegian government scientist built his own version of the device. According to reporting by Reuters and The Washington Post, this researcher had been a prominent skeptic of the directed-energy hypothesis. He built the thing specifically to prove it couldn't work. He turned it on himself.

It worked.

The scientist suffered verified neurological damage—symptoms consistent with, though not identical to, the Havana Syndrome cases he'd been trying to debunk. Norway alerted the CIA. The Pentagon and White House sent at least two delegations to examine the device and review the medical data. By early 2025, the NSA and the National Ground Intelligence Center had formally broken ranks with the CIA, concluding that yes, a foreign actor could plausibly possess and deploy technology capable of producing these effects.

The Patent That Got My Attention

So here's where my nerd brain kicked in. If these devices exist—and the evidence now very strongly suggests they do—what would one actually look like? What would it take to build? The first place that I often turn in these types of research efforts is to Google Patents. Defense contractors are famously patent-heavy, and thus very few low-level components of the most cutting edge defense technology are actually all that secretive if you have enough time to read through hundreds of patents.

In this case, just like with so many others, it turns out someone already wrote it down.

U.S. Patent 11,801,394 B1, granted October 31, 2023, is titled—and I am not editorializing here—"Systems and methods for covertly creating adverse health effects in subjects." The inventors are Elwood Norris and Seth Putterman.

If you don't recognize the name Elwood "Woody" Norris, you should. He's the inventor of the LRAD—the Long Range Acoustic Device. That's the directional sound cannon you've seen deployed at protests, on naval vessels, and by police departments around the world. Norris's company, which started as American Technology Corporation and eventually became GENASYS Inc. (ticker: GNSS), is the name in directed acoustic systems.

So when the guy who invented the world's most well-known sonic weapon files a patent for a system that uses pulsed electromagnetic radiation—specifically tuned to the frequency of human neural oscillations—to induce nausea, vertigo, cognitive disruption, and general "discombobulation" in targeted subjects... you pay attention.

The patent goes further. It describes a multi-modal approach: pulsed EM radiation combined with pulsed ultrasonic stimulation, delivered simultaneously with a precise time offset to account for different neural processing speeds. If anyone on earth has the expertise to engineer something like that—marrying directed acoustics with directed electromagnetic energy—it's the LRAD people.

Down the Rabbit Hole: Could You Actually Build This?

This is the question that consumed me for the better part of a month, and it's the question that the accompanying research paper attempts to answer in rigorous engineering detail. But let me try to distill it here, because not everyone wants to wade through 30+ pages of IEEE-formatted equations and TikZ block diagrams. (No judgment. I barely wanted to.)

The core idea is deceptively simple, even if the execution is not:

Your brain runs on electricity. Specifically, it runs on rhythmic electrical oscillations—brainwaves—at specific frequencies that govern specific functions. Alpha waves (8–13 Hz) handle vestibular processing and sensory gating. Beta waves (13–30 Hz) drive motor coordination and active cognition. Gamma waves (30–100 Hz) handle perceptual binding—your brain's ability to stitch sensory inputs into a coherent experience of reality.

These oscillations can be disrupted from the outside. This is actually well-established science. Strobe a light at someone's face at 10–30 Hz and a significant fraction of the population will experience nausea, vertigo, and cognitive impairment—it's called the flicker effect, and it's been known since the 1950s. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) can modulate brainwaves with a coil held against the skull. The question isn't whether external energy can mess with neural oscillations. The question is whether you can do it at range, without physical contact, and with enough precision to target specific neurological functions.

The answer, at least in theory, is yes. And you don't need alien technology to do it.

Here's the basic recipe: You take a high-frequency electromagnetic carrier wave—something in the 100 to 300 GHz range (that's the "sub-terahertz" band)—and you pulse it on and off at the exact frequency of the brainwave you want to disrupt. Want to make someone nauseous? Pulse at 10 Hz (alpha band). Want to degrade their motor coordination? Pulse at 20 Hz (beta band). Want to fragment their perception entirely? Pulse at 40+ Hz (gamma band).

The carrier frequency—the 100+ GHz part—determines how you deliver the energy. It gives you a tight, directional beam from a physically small antenna, long-range propagation, and importantly, a form of radiation that is almost completely absorbed by the skin surface. (More on why that matters in a moment.)

The pulse rate—the 10 Hz part—determines what it does when it gets there.

The Parts List: Nothing Exotic Required

This is the part that might surprise people. Every single component needed to build a system like this exists today, commercially, off the shelf. We're not talking about classified metamaterials or physics-defying unobtainium. We're talking about products with model numbers, datasheets, and sales teams that will take your call.

• Signal source: Berkeley Nucleonics Corporation (BNC) Model 871 signal generator. Covers 1 kHz to 51 GHz. You can buy one.
• Frequency multiplication: Virginia Diodes Inc. (VDI) Schottky diode multiplier chains.They'll take that 51 GHz signal and double, triple, or sextuple it into the 100–300 GHz range. Catalog products.
• Power amplification: At W-band (around 100 GHz), companies like Quinstar and Eravant sell solid-state GaN power amplifiers that output 1–2 watts in waveguide-mounted packages. For higher frequencies and more power, Communications & Power Industries (CPI) manufactures Extended Interaction Klystrons (EIKs) that produce hundreds of watts peak.
• Antenna: A corrugated horn feeding a 15–30 cm dielectric lens at 100 GHz produces a pencil beam with 35–45 dBi of gain. At these wavelengths, a modestly sized antenna is extremely directional.
• Pulse timing: A Keysight 33600A arbitrary waveform generator handles the neural-rate pulse generation. $5,000 on the used market.

Assemble these in the right order, add a battery and a microcontroller, and you have a system that—at least on paper—can deliver neural-oscillation-rate pulsed electromagnetic energy at a specific person from across a parking lot. (Note: This is not a HAM radio weekend project. A great deal of testing, tuning and polishing would surely be required.)

As part of organizing my research on this topic, I wrote a research paper. I do this all the time, on all kinds of topics, and I rarely even publish the papers. In this case, the paper details three complete system configurations: a solid-state W-band setup, a high-power EIK-based system, and a sub-THz variant—plus a man-portable version that fits in a rifle-style form factor, a backpack-and-tripod setup, or even a briefcase, all under 8 kg.

The Honest Caveats

Now, I want to be very clear about what we're not claiming.

We are not claiming to have built this. The paper is a feasibility study—an exercise in "could you, using known physics and available hardware, assemble a system matching the descriptions in the patent and the intelligence reporting?"

We are not claiming that any specific vendor's equipment is actually used in any such system that may exist. The component references are there to demonstrate commercial availability, not to reverse-engineer classified, secret or otherwise sensitive hardware. And to be clear, absolutely zero classified, confidential or otherwise secret information was reviewed or discussed in my research for this paper.

We are not claiming certainty about the biological mechanism. The paper discusses the "indirect afferent pathway"—the idea that pulsed energy absorbed by the skin surface activates peripheral thermoreceptors, which fire at the pulse rate and send signals up the spinal cord to the brain. This is a plausible hypothesis, not a proven mechanism. Sub-terahertz radiation does not penetrate the skull. It does not directly zap your thalamus. The interaction pathway is indirect, and there are legitimate scientific questions about how much attenuation occurs along the way.

The Frey Effect is a different thing. The "microwave auditory effect"—where pulsed microwaves at lower frequencies (around 1 GHz) penetrate the skull and create perceived sounds via thermoelastic expansion—operates by a fundamentally different mechanism. Lower frequencies, deeper penetration, different physics. The paper references it for historical context, not as the proposed mechanism of action.

So What's the Takeaway?

Here's what I think the evidence, taken in totality, tells us:

1. Directed-energy devices capable of producing neurological effects almost certainly exist. The Norwegian self-experiment confirmed it with hardware. The DHS purchase confirmed it with procurement records. The Norway reporting alone shifts this from "plausible" to "demonstrated"—at least if we assume that all of this reporting isn't an elaborate disinformation campaign.

2. The components to build one are commercially available. Nothing in the parts list requires access to classified or military-only supply chains. ITAR-controlled, in some cases, sure. Specialized, absolutely. But not secret. Not theoretical. Not "maybe someday." Available now, with model numbers.

3. A man-portable version is feasible. The paper works through the size, weight, and power math in detail. At W-band (100 GHz) with a solid-state GaN amplifier, the whole system fits under 8 kg with a standard military battery providing hours of endurance. At most, the system might be in the neighborhood of a light machinegun, in terms of weight and bulk.

4. If the U.S. and Russia have this capability, others do or will. The physics isn't classified. The components aren't unobtainable. China, in particular, has a massive investment in millimeter-wave and sub-terahertz technology for 6G communications research. The overlap between those capabilities and what's described here is... significant.

Why I Wrote This

I wrote the paper—and this post—because the public conversation around Havana Syndrome and the "Discombobulator" has been dominated by two equally unhelpful camps: people who insist it's all psychosomatic nonsense, and people who think it's alien death rays from a Bond villain's lair. I largely attribute this to journalists lacking the requisite expertise to report on this issue coherently.

The truth, as usual, is both more interesting and more mundane than either extreme. The technology is real, it's grounded in known physics, and it's buildable with hardware you can spec from vendor catalogs. That doesn't make it simple—the interdisciplinary challenge of simultaneously understanding neural oscillation dynamics, sub-terahertz RF propagation, and directed-energy system engineering is genuinely daunting. It's a vanishingly narrow Venn diagram of expertise, which is part of why the public discourse has been so confused.

My hope is that the paper provides the technical rigor, and this post provides the context, for people to have a more informed conversation about what these devices are, what they can and can't do, and what it means that multiple nation-states appear to have them.

Because whatever the "Discombobulator" turns out to be—whether it's a single exotic device or a coordinated package of electronic warfare, acoustic systems, and directed energy deployed in concert—the era of pretending this technology doesn't exist is over.

The Research Paper

The full research paper, "Directed Sub-Terahertz Neural Disruption System: RF Chain Design, Pulse Architectures, and Man-Portable Implementation at 100–300 GHz," is embedded below. It contains no classified information and was prepared exclusively from public sources.