A classified device known as Ghost Murmur, which the CIA reportedly used to detect a downed airman’s heartbeat from miles away, has drawn sharp skepticism from physicists. They say such a murmur-detecting device cannot function as described under known laws of physics.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe said this week that the agency relied on human assets and technologies that no other intelligence service in the world currently possesses.
The goal was to find a missing US Air Force colonel in southern Iran. President Donald Trump, speaking to The New York Post, said the equipment used was something the world had never seen or heard of before.
The colonel was a weapons systems officer aboard an F-15E Strike Eagle. Iranian forces shot down his aircraft with a shoulder-launched missile, and he spent two days hiding in a crevice along a 7,000-foot mountain ridge. He activated his rescue beacon only occasionally, worried that Iranian search teams were tracking the signal.
“Ghost Murmur” device reportedly pinpointed colonel 40 miles away
The New York Post identified the tool as Ghost Murmur. It is said to have been developed at Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works laboratory.
The device reportedly applies long-range quantum magnetometry to detect cardiac magnetic signals, with artificial intelligence filtering out surrounding interference. A source described the task as isolating a single voice inside a stadium stretching across a thousand square miles.
@will.robinsonx CIA found the missing pilot in Iran by detecting his heartbeat from miles away with Ghost Murmur — April 7 🚨
Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps troops were actively searching the same area that night. Ghost Murmur reportedly pinpointed the colonel’s location across roughly forty miles of terrain.
Seal Team Six then moved in on AH-6 Little Bird helicopters, with operators positioned on external benches for a fast exit. The broader rescue involved more than 150 aircraft and hundreds of special operations personnel.
Physicists say claims defy decades of established research
Scientists say the physics behind the claims is difficult to accept. John Wikswo, a biomedical engineering and physics professor at Vanderbilt University, said the heart’s magnetic field is barely measurable even at 10 centimeters (4 inches) from the chest.
He added that the signal drops to one-thousandth of its strength with every additional meter (3.3 feet) of distance. Chad Orzel, a physics professor at Union College in New York, said clinical cardiac sensors must be pressed directly against the body to work.
Wikswo also noted that no AI system can recover a signal that is physically too faint to detect at long range. Bradley Roth, a physicist at Oakland University, said a working airborne version would not be a modest upgrade but an entirely different category of technological advancement.
CIA ran separate deception operation targeting Iranian leadership
In a parallel effort, the CIA reportedly used Pegasus spyware, linked to an Israeli firm, to access phones of Iranian leadership and Revolutionary Guard commanders. False messages were then pushed through WhatsApp and Signal, indicating the colonel had already been recovered.
Orzel suggested Ghost Murmur may be deliberate misdirection, a way to ensure adversaries never learn what method was actually used to find the airman.
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