A declassified 1998 Pentagon report reveals exploratory projects involving the use of lasers for what the article calls “non-lethal torture”. These used to be called “non-lethal weapons” or NLW:

Some of the applications the report investigated include putting voices in people’s heads, using lasers to trigger uncontrolled neuron firing, and slowly heating the human body to a point of feverish confusion – all from hundreds of meters away.

…words could be transmitted to be heard like the spoken word, except that it could only be heard within a person’s head. In one experiment, communication of the words from one to ten using ‘speech modulated’ microwave energy was successfully demonstrated. Microphones next to the person experiencing the voice could not pick up these sounds.

I can’t imagine these projects were given up on. If I were the Pentagon, I’d be spending a lot of money on things like domestic crowd control right now.