The U.S. military rescued a stranded airman in Iran over the weekend after his F-15E fighter jet was shot down in the country. The rescue effort took hundreds of troops, and back-of-the-napkin estimates suggest it cost hundreds of millions of dollars in lost equipment. But a new story started to emerge days later that tried to tell a slightly different story about how the airman was found. The CIA supposedly has new, magical technology for finding people.
Citing two unnamed “sources close to the breakthrough,” the New York Post ran a story on Tuesday about a new CIA tool called Ghost Murmur. It’s described as tech that uses “long-range quantum magnetometry to find the electromagnetic signal of a human heartbeat” and supposedly pairs that data with AI to “isolate the signature from background noise.”
CIA Director John Ratcliffe hinted at the existence of the tech during a press conference with the president on Tuesday. Ratcliffe talked about “exquisite technologies that no other intelligence service in the world possesses” and signaled the airman was alive, “still invisible to the enemy, but not to the CIA.”
Gizmodo reached out to experts who had more questions than answers about the tech. That was unsurprising, given the nature of what’s being billed as highly secretive developments. But it makes the claims by the CIA, apparently filtered through the Post, difficult to assess.
“How would you differentiate signal and noise for something that sensitive and at long distances?” asked Alex Wellerstein, a historian of science at the Stevens Institute of Technology.
It’s a great question. And honestly, we don’t know. Scientific American tried to tackle the question of whether Ghost Murmur could work as reported and came away with one conclusion: it’s “almost certainly not true.”
The magazine notes that quantum magnetometers are real and capable of detecting heartbeats by measuring magnetic fields. But the heart’s magnetic field is so weak, the claims being made seem physically impossible.
Even if you could find a way to pick up such a weak signal from a great distance, you’re competing with the heartbeats of wildlife and other humans.
“People have been measuring the magnetic field of the heart for 60 years, and 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,” Bradley Roth, a physicist at Oakland University, told Scientific American.
Roth went on to say that the tech being described would be a “revolutionary advance from the state of the art.” Another expert speculated that it could just be someone at the CIA “yanking a reporter’s chain,” or intentionally spreading disinformation.
And it’s the disinformation angle that’s most intriguing, given the CIA’s history of lying to the world. The CIA even took credit for intentionally spreading disinformation during the hunt for the airman to throw the Iranians off the scent. According to the New York Times, the CIA “aimed to spread word in Iran that the airman had been found and was moving out of the country in a ground convoy.”
The Trump regime clearly wants people to believe they’re utilizing not just the most advanced technology in existence, but super-secret techniques you’ve never heard of. Another example is the so-called discombobulator touted by Trump. That was, once again, first reported by the New York Post, a right-wing tabloid friendly to the administration.
“The Discombobulator. I’m not allowed to talk about it,” Trump told the Post as he bragged about the operation to kidnap Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro.
There’s speculation that Trump could be talking about a directed energy weapon used to disable electronic equipment, but this is another case where we simply don’t know enough to tell whether he’s BS-ing.
There’s no question that American intelligence agencies have a virtually unlimited budget and spend ridiculous sums of money to develop new tech. And there is a history of scientific experts being caught off guard by classified advancements being made by the U.S. military.
In the early 1980s, DARPA researchers were working on telescopes that correct for the visual distortion caused by the atmosphere. The military wanted to be able to accurately spot potential missiles launched by the Soviet Union, and the atmosphere made it difficult to understand their trajectory.
The researchers solved the problem in 1983, according to the 2006 book The Jasons: The Secret History of Science’s Postwar Elite by Ann Finkbeiner. When the DARPA researchers finally announced their findings at a press conference in 1991, some astronomers were furious that such an important solution had been kept secret for so long.
“I think it is not an exaggeration to say that the secrecy held up progress in adaptive optics for ten years,” one expert told Finkbeiner.
It’s hard to say what’s real and what’s fake when it comes to Ghost Murmurs, Discombobulators, or really anything emerging from the Trump White House these days. The president lies as easily as he breathes. But there’s plenty of classified tech that we don’t know about based on available information in the public domain.
In fact, the most logical explanation for many UAP sightings is that the U.S., China, or Russia is testing advanced aircraft. Trump has also promised to release classified documents on aliens. But that’s another thing we’ll believe when we finally see it.
