Overview
- After Friday’s shootdown of a U.S. F-15E over southern Iran, the CIA reportedly used a tool called Ghost Murmur to confirm the missing airman’s location, enabling a weekend rescue.
- Sources describe Ghost Murmur as a system that reads the tiny magnetic field from a human heartbeat using quantum magnetometry and then uses AI to pull that signal out of background noise.
- President Donald Trump said the airman was detected from about 40 miles away, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe said the agency confirmed he was alive and concealed in a mountain crevice.
- Multiple outlets attribute the technology to Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works and say it has been tested on Black Hawk helicopters, though neither the CIA nor the company has publicly confirmed those specifics.
- Reports say the tool works best in remote, low-clutter areas and can take significant processing time, and officials noted the airman’s emergency CSEL beacon helped narrow the search but did not give precise coordinates on its own.