# Voices from Nowhere: The Targeted Individual Phenomenon
On September 16, 2013, Aaron Alexis walked into the Washington Navy Yard and killed twelve people. When the FBI finished its investigation, they found something in his history that stopped investigators cold. Alexis had told police he was being controlled by extremely low frequency electromagnetic waves. He believed the signals followed him from city to city. He believed they were being beamed into his body.
Two months later, on November 20, 2014, Myron May opened fire at Florida State University, injuring three people before police shot him dead. May had been a lawyer. Educated, credentialed, professionally functional — until, by his account, the voices started. He believed he was under government surveillance. He believed the voices were real. On July 17, 2016, Gavin Eugene Long killed three police officers in Baton Rouge. He had been a member of an online group dedicated to helping people suffering from what they called "remote brain experimentation."
Three mass violence events. Three perpetrators with the same belief. And behind them, invisible to most of the internet, tens of thousands of people who shared it.
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The New York Times estimated more than 10,000 people self-identify as Targeted Individuals — TIs, in the community's own shorthand. The real number is impossible to verify. They organize on forums, on YouTube channels, in Facebook groups and subreddits, exchanging testimony about electromagnetic harassment, gang-stalking, voices transmitted directly into their skulls through a technology they call Voice to Skull, or V2K. They map their symptoms. They share countermeasures. They build, in short, a community — one that medical professionals largely regard as a community organized around shared psychosis.
The internet didn't create the belief. But it gave it architecture. Before online forums, a person experiencing paranoid delusions about surveillance and electromagnetic attack had no easy way to find others with identical convictions. After the internet, they could. Palm Springs psychiatrist Alan Drucker has suggested that these online support communities may negatively reinforce delusional thinking, creating feedback loops where symptoms are validated rather than questioned. Psychologist Lorraine Sheridan has argued something similar — that TIs are people with paranoid symptoms who encountered the gang-stalking framework online and adopted it as the explanation for what they were already experiencing.
But the TI community had one thing the medical establishment found inconvenient to dismiss entirely: history.
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In 1953, the Soviet Union began bombarding the U.S. embassy in Moscow with microwaves. The program ran for years before American intelligence discovered it. The intent, investigators eventually concluded, was eavesdropping and electronic jamming — not mind control. But the revelation that a foreign government had been silently irradiating American diplomats for years seeded a question that never fully went away. If they did that, what else was possible?
DARPA launched Project Pandora to find out, commissioning research into the biological and behavioral effects of microwave radiation. Its scientific review committee ultimately concluded that microwave radiation could not be used for mind control. A 1987 report from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, commissioned by the Army Research Institute, found no scientific literature supporting claims of psychotronic weaponry, describing such claims as a "colorful example" of psychic warfare mythology. The science said no. The classified programs said they were looking anyway.
Then, in 2002, the Air Force Research Laboratory patented a method for using microwaves to send spoken words directly into a person's head. The patent was real. It was public. And for the TI community, it was the closest thing to a confession the government had ever produced.
In 2001, former U.S. Congressman Dennis Kucinich had included a provision banning "psychotronic weapons" in a House bill. The provision was later dropped, but its existence — in an official piece of legislation, authored by a sitting member of Congress — gave the community another foothold. By 2012, Russian Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin were publicly commenting on plans to develop psychotronic weapons. Military analyst Lieutenant Colonel Timothy L. Thomas had noted as far back as 1998 that belief in mind-attacking weapons ran deep within Russia, even if no working devices had been confirmed.
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The contradictions accumulated in ways that made clean dismissal difficult. In 2008, a Missouri man named James Walbert went to court claiming his former business associate had threatened him with "jolts of radiation" and that he was experiencing electric shock sensations and strange sounds. A judge issued a protective order banning the use of "electronic means" to harass him — the first ruling of its kind in the United States. The court did not scientifically validate Walbert's claims. But a judge had taken them seriously enough to act.
Former NSA employee Mike Beck presented a stranger case. Beck developed Parkinson's disease and believed it was caused by electronic harassment. His attorney obtained a statement from the NSA acknowledging intelligence about a high-powered microwave weapon associated with a hostile country — while simultaneously stating there was no proof Beck had been attacked. The NSA knew such a weapon might exist. They just couldn't confirm it had been used on one of their own.
In Russia, a group calling itself "Victims of Psychotronic Experimentation" attempted in the mid-1990s to recover damages from the Federal Security Service for alleged mind control experiments. A committee member of the Russian State Duma, Vladimir Lopatkin, acknowledged in 1995 that decades of government secrecy around psychotronic research had created fertile ground for conspiracy theories. He wasn't wrong. But fertile ground for conspiracy theories and fertile ground for legitimate grievance are not always different places.
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The most rigorous outside examination of TI claims came in 2006, when British researcher Vaughan Bell published a study in the Journal of Forensic Psychiatry & Psychology. Bell had collected a sample of online accounts from people claiming mind control experiences and submitted them to independent psychiatrists for blind evaluation. The psychiatrists found signs of psychosis were strongly present. The study was careful and peer-reviewed. It was also limited — it examined online accounts, not the people behind them, and could not rule out that some percentage of posters were not themselves experiencing symptoms.
What investigators confirmed was a consistent clinical picture: the experiences described by TIs — hearing voices, feeling physical sensations attributed to external sources, believing in organized surveillance — map closely onto the symptom profiles of paranoid schizophrenia and delusional disorder. Multiple medical professionals across multiple countries reached the same conclusion independently.
What remained contested was the edge cases. The NSA's partial acknowledgment regarding Mike Beck. The Air Force patent. The Kucinich legislation. None of these confirmed that any government was targeting civilians with electromagnetic weapons. But they confirmed that the technology, at some level of development, existed — and that official bodies had thought seriously enough about it to patent it, legislate against it, and investigate it.
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What the community came to believe was something more total. That the CIA's MKULTRA program — a confirmed, documented history of illegal human experimentation — had never truly ended. That Project Pandora's public conclusions were a cover for classified findings. That the 2002 microwave patent was not a curiosity but a confession. Some TIs went further, claiming Russian psychotronic weapons were responsible for events including the sinking of the USS Thresher and outbreaks of Legionnaires' disease. These claims have no evidentiary support.
The violence remained the hardest part to process. Fuaed Abdo Ahmed killed two hostages and himself at Tensas State Bank in Louisiana on August 13, 2013, convinced a microphone device had been implanted in his head. Police concluded he had paranoid schizophrenia. Matthew Choi murdered a taxi driver in Hong Kong in October 2021, telling authorities he had been under V2K electronic harassment since 2015. The TI community did not celebrate these men. But it also did not always distinguish between the belief system and the violence it sometimes preceded.
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Today, TI forums remain active. The belief has not contracted — if anything, the proliferation of surveillance technology, the exposure of programs like PRISM, and the documented existence of acoustic weapons like the LRAD have given the community new material to absorb. The Havana Syndrome cases, in which U.S. diplomats reported mysterious neurological symptoms attributed to possible directed-energy attacks, landed in mainstream news after 2016 and complicated the medical consensus further. Those cases are not part of the TI framework, but they occupy the same conceptual territory: invisible weapons, disputed evidence, institutional denial.
The question the TI phenomenon leaves open is not whether the technology exists — some version of it demonstrably does — but where the line sits between documented capability and active deployment, between a community of people suffering from psychosis and a community of people suffering from something that has no clean name yet. That line has never been drawn with any precision. And in the silence around it, tens of thousands of people are still listening for voices that no one else can hear.