Terry B
>http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/970707/7weir.htm
>
>http://www.patents.ibm.com/details?&patent_number=5081900]
>
>
> New Scientist, 3/29/73, pg 726
> Working Paper on Infrasound, Report to the United Nations, 8/4/78
>(excerpted in Amok Journal: Sensurround Edition, Amok Books, 1995)
>
>http://www.sara.com/
>
>Huntington Beach-based Scientific Applications & Research Associates
>Inc. (SARA) has built a device that will make internal organs resonate:
>The effects can run from discomfort to damage or death. If used to
>protect an area, its beams would make intruders increasingly
>uncomfortable the closer they get. "We have built several prototypes,"
>says Parviz Parhami, SARA's CEO. Such acoustic fences, he says, could be
>deployed today. He estimates that five to 10 years will be needed to
>develop acoustic rifles and other more exotic weapons, but adds, "I have
>heard people as optimistic as one to two years." The military also
>envisions acoustic fields being used to control riots or to clear paths
>for convoys.
>
>SARA's acoustic devices have already been tested at the Camp Pendleton
>Marine Corps Base, near the company's Huntington Beach office. And they
>were considered for Somalia. "We asked for acoustics," says one
>nonlethal weapons expert who was there. But the Department of Defense
>said, "No," since they were still untested. The Pentagon feared they
>could have caused permanent injury to pregnant women, the old, or the
>sick. Parhami sees acoustics "as just one more tool" for the military
>and law enforcement. "Like any tool, I suppose this can be abused," he
>says. "But like any tool, it can be used in a humane and ethical way."
>
>Toward the end of World War II, the Germans were reported to have made a
>different type of acoustic device. It looked like a large cannon and
>sent out a sonic boomlike shock wave that in theory could have felled a
>B-17 bomber. In the mid-1940s, the U.S. Navy created a program called
>Project Squid to study the German vortex technology. The results are
>unknown. But Guy Obolensky, an American inventor, says he replicated the
>Nazi device in his laboratory in 1949. Against hard objects the effect
>was astounding, he says: It could snap a board like a twig. Against soft
>targets like people, it had a different effect. "I felt like I had been
>hit by a thick rubber blanket," says Obolensky, who once stood in its
>path. The idea seemed to founder for years until recently, when the
>military was intrigued by its nonlethal possibilities. The Army and Navy
>now have vortex projects underway. The SARA lab has tested its prototype
>device at Camp Pendleton, one source says.
>
>