Spy tech or science fiction? Experts question CIA ‘Ghost Murmur’ claims
Scientists challenge claims of a secret CIA tool used in high-stakes Iran rescue.
The American secret service, the CIA, reportedly used a new secret device called “Ghost Murmur” in the operation to locate the navigator whose plane was shot down in Iran, according to the New York Post.
However, in contrast to the Post’s report, the scientific magazine Scientific American, which commented on Wednesday on the wave of attention generated by the story, said that according to senior physicists familiar with the field, the claim is compelling, but almost certainly not true.
The wounded navigator had taken shelter in a mountain gorge after his F-15E was shot down last weekend, surviving for two days deep inside Iran while Iranian soldiers and civilians searched the area.
Earlier this week, it was revealed that the navigator was equipped with a special locator transmitter, a Boeing-made device known as CSEL. However, it now appears that until a relatively late stage, his exact location remained unclear to search-and-rescue teams. According to the new report, the decisive moment came when the so-called “ghost murmur” device identified him.
The device, the newspaper claims, citing “sources briefed on the program,” allowed American forces to detect the electromagnetic signature created by the navigator’s heartbeat from a great distance. The final location was determined only after processing field data using advanced artificial intelligence software, which filtered out background noise.
““It’s like hearing a voice in a stadium, except the stadium is a thousand square miles of desert,” a source told The Post. “In the right conditions, if your heart is beating, we will find you.”
The technology behind the alleged device is known as “quantum magnetometry,” which uses principles of quantum mechanics to detect extremely weak magnetic fields, often through diamond-based quantum sensors. It already has applications in medicine (such as brain and heart imaging), geology, and security. According to the New York Post, this would mark its first operational use in the field by an intelligence agency.
U.S. President Donald Trump and CIA Director John Ratcliffe appeared to hint at such capabilities during a White House briefing on Monday following the rescue operation. Ratcliffe said the CIA had “achieved our primary objective by finding and providing confirmation that one of America’s best and bravest was alive and concealed in a mountain crevice, still invisible to the enemy, but not to the CIA..”
“It’s like finding a needle in a haystack, finding this pilot, and the CIA was unbelievable,” Trump said Monday. “The CIA was very responsible for finding this little speck.”
According to the Post’s sources, the device was developed by Skunk Works, the advanced development division of Lockheed Martin, known for pioneering highly classified technologies, including the U-2 spy plane. The company declined to comment.
“Normally this signal is so weak that it can only be measured in a hospital setting with sensors pressed nearly against the chest,” the source told the Post.
The source added that advances in quantum magnetometry, combined with the relatively barren landscape, may have created ideal conditions for such a deployment.
Even so, the same source acknowledged significant limitations: the system would work best in remote, uninhabited areas and would require substantial data-processing time.
Despite the attention the report has drawn, Scientific American cast serious doubt on its plausibility. According to senior physicists cited by the publication, the story is great, but almost certainly not true, and it clashes with the fundamental limits of magnetic sensing.
Quantum magnetometers are indeed highly sensitive, for example in detecting cardiac arrhythmias by measuring the heart’s magnetic fields. But even at short distances, those signals decay rapidly.
“At the surface of the chest, where you’re about 10 centimeters away from the source, the magnetic field is just barely detectable,” John Wikswo, a professor of biomedical engineering and physics at Vanderbilt University, told Scientific American. “Now, if instead of going 10 centimeters away, which is a tenth of a meter, you go a meter away, the amplitude of the signal has dropped to a thousandth of what it was.”
According to the magazine, detecting a heartbeat from afar would require overcoming not only the Earth’s magnetic field and environmental electromagnetic noise, but also interference from animals and other biological sources.
“People have been measuring the magnetic field of the heart for 60 years,” said Bradley Roth, a physicist at Oakland University. “Usually it’s done in a lab with shielding, and it’s done just a few centimeters or a couple inches from the heart, and even then you can barely record it.”
