President Trump gushed about the technical wizardry the CIA deployed, claiming it was able to locate the airman from “40 miles away.”
Later that same day, the New York Post revealed in an exclusive report that the tool Ratcliffe was referring to was something called “Ghost Murmur.”
“The secret technology uses long-range quantum magnetometry to find the electromagnetic fingerprint of a human heartbeat and pairs the data with artificial intelligence software to isolate the signature from background noise,” two sources close to the breakthrough told the Post.
I’m calling bullshit.
Perhaps the CIA does have a tool called Ghost Murmur. Maybe it can detect faint signals from a not-too-far distance away. But it didn’t locate the downed airman from 40 miles away as Trump suggested. Nor can it locate a heartbeat across 1,000 square miles of desert, as one of the Post’s sources claimed. Not unless the CIA has figured out how to rewrite the laws of physics.
A heartbeat does produce a magnetic signal, but don’t confuse that with the electrical signal picked up by the electrodes that get stuck to your chest in the hospital, the ones that generate the beeping waveform patterns we all recognize from The Pitt. (Great show, by the way.) The heart’s magnetic signature is far weaker than its electrical one.
The tesla is the unit used to measure the strength of a magnetic field.. The Earth’s magnetic field measures about 50 microtesla. Studies I’ll get to in a minute have measured the cardiac magnetic signal at chest contact to be about 25 picotesla, already 2 million times weaker than Earth’s own field.
Quantum sensors can detect this extraordinarily faint signal without touching the body. But only under optimal conditions and at very close range.
I’m no expert in this field, but Quantum Insider, which tracks these developments, pointed to several studies that show the limits of this technology.
One study published this year on diamond quantum magnetometry, the same technology Ghost Murmur supposedly uses, required sensors placed 1 centimeter from the chest inside a magnetically shielded room and an average of up to 12,000 heartbeats to detect a signal.
“Averaging was necessary since magnetic field recordings did not reveal the MCG signal in the NV trace in real-time,” the study reported.
In plain English: The quantum sensor could not detect a heartbeat in real time in a shielded room at one centimeter.
A 2024 study detected the heartbeat of an anesthetized rat, a weaker signal than a human heart, using a sensor placed 5 millimeters from the animal’s chest, inside a magnetic shielding cylinder, after an hour of continuous data accumulation.
Ghost Murmur supposedly detected a single beating heart, in real time, from 40 miles away, over open desert, from a moving aircraft, in an environment saturated with competing signals from the Earth’s magnetic field, electronic devices, and other living creatures. Not likely.
“The secret technology uses long-range quantum magnetometry to find the electromagnetic fingerprint of a human heartbeat and pairs the data with artificial intelligence software to isolate the signature from background noise,” two sources close to the breakthrough told the Post.
I’m calling bullshit.
Perhaps the CIA does have a tool called Ghost Murmur. Maybe it can detect faint signals from a not-too-far distance away. But it didn’t locate the downed airman from 40 miles away as Trump suggested. Nor can it locate a heartbeat across 1,000 square miles of desert, as one of the Post’s sources claimed. Not unless the CIA has figured out how to rewrite the laws of physics.
A heartbeat does produce a magnetic signal, but don’t confuse that with the electrical signal picked up by the electrodes that get stuck to your chest in the hospital, the ones that generate the beeping waveform patterns we all recognize from The Pitt. (Great show, by the way.) The heart’s magnetic signature is far weaker than its electrical one.
The tesla is the unit used to measure the strength of a magnetic field.. The Earth’s magnetic field measures about 50 microtesla. Studies I’ll get to in a minute have measured the cardiac magnetic signal at chest contact to be about 25 picotesla, already 2 million times weaker than Earth’s own field.
Quantum sensors can detect this extraordinarily faint signal without touching the body. But only under optimal conditions and at very close range.
I’m no expert in this field, but Quantum Insider, which tracks these developments, pointed to several studies that show the limits of this technology.
One study published this year on diamond quantum magnetometry, the same technology Ghost Murmur supposedly uses, required sensors placed 1 centimeter from the chest inside a magnetically shielded room and an average of up to 12,000 heartbeats to detect a signal.
“Averaging was necessary since magnetic field recordings did not reveal the MCG signal in the NV trace in real-time,” the study reported.
In plain English: The quantum sensor could not detect a heartbeat in real time in a shielded room at one centimeter.
A 2024 study detected the heartbeat of an anesthetized rat, a weaker signal than a human heart, using a sensor placed 5 millimeters from the animal’s chest, inside a magnetic shielding cylinder, after an hour of continuous data accumulation.
Ghost Murmur supposedly detected a single beating heart, in real time, from 40 miles away, over open desert, from a moving aircraft, in an environment saturated with competing signals from the Earth’s magnetic field, electronic devices, and other living creatures. Not likely.
by Seth Hettenna, After-Action Report | Read more:
Image: White House
[ed. Interesting technology. But, why does it seem like everyone is lying these days? Hmm... maybe because they are? And everybody just expects it and lets them keep doing it?]
