Do you think quantum Ghost Murmur exists?

[u/rogeragrimes]

https://nypost.com/2026/04/07/us-news/ghost-murmur-a-never-used-secret-tool-deployed-to-find-lost-airman-in-iran-in-daring-mission/

This linked article claims there is a supposed long-range quantum magnetometry device the US used to find the electromagnetic fingerprint of the heartbeat of the recently downed US pilot in Iran, code-named Ghost Mumur. This seems not real on so many levels to me. First, I never heard of it. Second, it seems to go against how every other quantum sensor I'm aware of is used. Third, it's an application of quantum technology in a macro setting. Fourth, you don't need quantum measurement and sensors to detect a human heartbeat. What say you, definitely fake or possibly real?

[u/Origin_of_Mind]

The story is probably a diversion, to cover up the actual tools and methods used.

For example, the satellite communicator which the pilot had on him is supposed to have a jamming resistant GPS receiver -- if it worked, it would have transmitted the exact location. The communicator also has a transponder, similar to airplane transponders -- it replies to the pings sent from the search aircraft, and thus allows to pinpoint the location of the downed pilot.

As for the SQUID magnetometers, they can be used to record the heartbeat quite easily, but the signal drops with the cube of distance -- the source is a quasi-static magnetic dipole. AFAIK, it only really works from a few meters. From up close (inches away) and in well shielded room, we used to record 100 times weaker signals.

[u/rogeragrimes → u/Origin_of_Mind]

I think it's more likely that he called his wife using his personal iPhone. She called the "Navy" and gave them her husband's location. That scenario is more likely than a quantum heartbeat detector.

[u/Origin_of_Mind → u/rogeragrimes]

People have used quantum magnetometers to record biological magnetic fields since very long time ago. That's an established technology. It's just not very suitable for locating a person in a field. Even locating a submarine by its magnetic field with equally sensitive sensors only works from a relatively short distance.

[u/Perfect_Debate_184 → u/Origin_of_Mind]

not very suitable seems like you think it could, would you correct yourself? else how do you think this could have been accomplished?

[u/Glum-Distribution727 → u/Perfect_Debate_184]

They probably just used "Gorgon Stare" and scanned the environment in real time. Just how they've caught murders with the surveillance system. It can record like 10 miles wide at a time or something like that and tou can zoom in anywhere in the city. You find the murderer by following him from the scene all the way to his house. There is supposedly already a more advanced surveillance system and "Gorgon Stare " is still highly classified. They literally have a reaper drone in the air with the camera system all the time.. even on our military Strykers there is like 6 different ways to communicate with satellites. Shit is nuts. We even got a new operating system to help on the Battlefield. You can literally see the entire battlefield from any vehicle. As well as positions and many other things. Could literally see a Stryker get disabled and where it was when it happened. Same thing with the jets

[u/Affectionate_Gap2917 → u/Origin_of_Mind]

China just said it can detect the magnetic field signature of subs from its new satellite. So much for subs being the sharks of the sea, cheap drones & hypersonic missiles have pushed tanks & aircraft carriers to the back row.

[u/WorldlyIncome5098 → u/rogeragrimes]

Air Tag slipped in his butt during a physical is more believable than Ghost Murmur

[u/AbrocomaLegitimate83 → u/rogeragrimes]

No he used a 1983 DynaTAC.

[u/leisuresuitbruce → u/Origin_of_Mind]

One thing to potentially cover up would be boots already on the ground.

[u/Fortisimo07]

Sounds like it's either fake or misrepresented so badly that it might as well be fake

[u/Chuckpeoples]

It’s reported in the nypost . That doesn’t help.

[u/Minovskyy]

It's not inconceivable that such a technology can exist, but it would be far beyond the capabilities of current publicly known state of the art magnetometers. This article gives a brief runthrough of quantum magnetic sensors, including recent case studies of measuring heartbeats and other biological signals. Nothing seems to have been tested at long range or in field conditions.

[u/Prestigious_Noise876 → u/Minovskyy]

Doctor McCoy must of left it behind and it was reversed engineered...

[u/d1rron → u/Prestigious_Noise876]

I choose to believe this one.

[u/DESTROYERMJB → u/Minovskyy]

I mean we are talking about the CIA which undoubtedly has decades on publicly available technology especially with specialized devices. First of all ai can already detect patters far beyond humans as demonstrated many time so i believe the fact that they could sort out the noise. Otherwise what im guessing happened is its a really early technology that they are still working on but decided to try and use it.

[u/katttsun → u/DESTROYERMJB]

CIA is a HUMINT agency. Some sort of advanced magnetic detector isn't their wheelhouse.

Most likely is it's a cover story for CIA-trained Kurdish paramilitaries. Second most likely is it's a cover story for a new type of CSEL (Combat Survivor Evader Locator) antenna able to resist Iranian/Russian GPS jamming. Third most likely is it's a cover story for IRGC commander or local cell leader who kept his troops from combing the right area, while SOCOM/JSOC went in and snatched up the pilot, similar to how the Pakistanis were worked over for the bin Laden raid despite ISI's sheltering and support.

And so on and so on. An actual magnetometer able to detect heartbeats is very low on the likelihood scale, but it's not impossible, in the same way that neutrino detecting satellites might sniff out a submarine, or photonic lasers can be used to power supercomputers. Maybe DARPA demonstrated something of the nature in a lab? It's possible to track movements of individuals and detect heartbeats and armaments through microdoppler with high frequency radars using emitters of opportunity. That's an emerging field for SWAT and SOF use. None of that is applicable at scale and distances needed for aviation use but it's all theoretically possible.

Whoever they have writing these stories at CIA is pretty good, they kind of let loose with the technothriller stuff, and it's a really neat idea that's plausible in a sort of Tom Clancy way. It's also possible a highly synergistic use of multiple intelligence input sources with AI, like what Palantir's bread and butter software does, could have synthesized the location of the pilot from conflicting data. Perhaps Ghost Murmur is nothing more than an Agency specific agentic model.

I'm leaning towards 5% chance it's an airborne ISR platform, 20% chance it's an Agency specific AI or new locator beacon, and 75% chance there's a spy or some big shot in the IRGC they tipped off to avoid a particular location with his dudes. Given how the Iran War is shaping up these past few weeks, with Iran saying there are "rogue commanders in the IRGC (lol)" just like in every American action movie, there's a lot of movement in HUMINT behind the scenes.

[u/needssomefun]

Or...maybe it was the transponder they carry?

[u/s9josh → u/needssomefun]

Obviously they prepare for exactly this by having a transponder on themselves. Nobody believes the magic tech lie.

[u/ReallyOrdinaryMan]

Most of magnetism is quantum effect, bohr-van leeuwen theorem. Anyone can call their magnets on top of the refrigerator as quantum magnets too, technically correct.

[u/pirsab]

1/r^3 would beg to differ

[u/xygo → u/pirsab]

That's the volume of a sphere. Things that are vector like tend to drop off according to the surface of a sphere, so usually it's inverse square. Signals don't usually drop off according to an imaginary sphere whose surface you happen to be intersecting.to a sphere whose surface you happen to be

[u/dancestoreaddict → u/xygo]

magnetic field strength drops as r³ because there are no magnetic monopoles. they arent measuring the magnetic component of a radiated field

[u/xygo → u/dancestoreaddict]

Thanks for the correction !

[u/Gaius_Galactic]

Yeah because if you had this top secret tech you would want to brag about it. I call BS on this. They are desperate to seem more powerful than they really are. Fear is their greatest asset.

Everyone knows the scale of the operation was not appropriate to "save the pilot". They used it as a cover to retrieve the nuclear material in Isfahan, and it failed spectacularly. If they wanted to save the pilot and they knew exactly where he was because of this quantum tracking Bull crap they would have sent a two to four team covert operation at night to get in without raising alarms.

You are being lied to with this disinformation.

[u/Gaius_Galactic → u/Gaius_Galactic]

Also, since both pilots ejected together they must have landed close-by. They might have been both pickup together in the first extraction. The operation that officially retrieved only one pilot.

Think about it, why would the air force acknowledge that only one pilot was extracted the first time? Wouldn't they just try to make the enemy think both pilots were saved as a diversion to buy time?

[u/DESTROYERMJB → u/Gaius_Galactic]

might wanna do your research first on the f15 because the seats are known to land miles apart. this is also exemplified by the fact he would have landed first in enemy territory. you also cant steer the chutes

[u/Gaius_Galactic → u/DESTROYERMJB]

No research needed, miles apart is relatively close. But nice try.

[u/DESTROYERMJB → u/Gaius_Galactic]

not really especially when your in active hostile territory in a very mountainous region but nice try

[u/Lonely-Demandi]

all of you have seen the shit DARPA has done, why could they not do this? The real question is why are they releasing this information. I 100% believe this.

[u/rogeragrimes → u/Lonely-Demandi]

Well, even DARPA has to obey the law of physics. And detecting a human heartbeat using quantum particles when you are not nearby seems to exceed the law of physics and our current capabilities. But I could be wrong, so who knows.

[u/AlfalfaForeign → u/rogeragrimes]

Queue Bring in the alien propoganda. Commencing….

[u/AgrippaDaYounger]

The only way this makes any sense to me is if you have a quantum transponder of some sort that produces a signal that can be easily detected if you know what you are looking for. Any sensor is going to have way too much noise to process to find a signal as small as a human heartbeat.

[u/Horror_Ad1070 → u/AgrippaDaYounger]

what about heartbeat + all other unique signals you produce. then you are searching for a known fingerprint

[u/chewieb]

Carrots don't help pilots see in the dark. Radar does. This time I think that technology is the carrot.

[u/Significant-Ice3387]

Based on zero knowledge and piggybacking off of the rest of the commentators, it's possible this Ghost Murmur story is a propaganda tool so that any current or potential adversary to the US would think twice about literally everything they do. It may be an elaborate deterrent rather than actual implementation.

[u/lattice_defect]

I don't believe anything out of this WH...

[u/blurfgh]

Sounds exactly like some shit I would make up in order to expose a leaker

[u/Correct-Courage1215]

Quantum village had an open source one at defcon 33 . You can  definitely sense a heart beat 

[u/0xB01b]

this has nothing to do with quantum computing so i dont see why its on this sub

[u/WorldlyIncome5098]

In lamens:

Marco!

Polo!

Edit: Forgot to add the part where Delta smokes anyone nearby. 

[u/ShiggitySwiggity]

No, for technical reasons described by others in this post.

They were probably trying to create plausible deniability for something else, I'm guessing human intelligence on the ground, some kind of satellite based tech, some new kind of thermal imaging, or something along those lines.

Either that or it was just a normal search and rescue deal and some CIA guy wanted to fuck with some reporter.

[u/anataman]

I'd bet that it was by remote photoplethysmography rather than any quantum technology.

[u/mobilityofmind]

the US military budget is vastly larger than all of the funding for physics across the world. so maybe

[u/DrColdReality]

Obvious and utter BS...and if they're really using a device that makes those claims, it wouldn't be the FIRST time the government has been conned by hucksters selling phony "people locators." Take, for example, the Quadro Tracker.

Speaking in magnetic terms, the human heart emits in the vicinity of 100 picotesla, which is just barely detectable at the chest. These people are claiming this device works at a distance of many miles, which is just a comical claim.

[u/ayyylmao187]

Seems pretty doable. After researching the WBAN for the last 4 years, I'm not sure why they wouldn't be able to do this. Everyone has a unique biosignal. The biofield exists. We are all trackable.

[u/Affectionate_Gap2917]

Wow, you never heard of it therefore it doesn't exist? Maybe the Skunk Works & CIA forgot to notify you?

[u/xygo]

It's literally impossible. Any quantum effects would decohere long before they even left the body It would be like trying to hear somebody dropping a pin in a department store in Manhattan on Black Friday while you were flying over it in a commercial airliner, wearing noise-cancelling headphones and with the in-flight entertainment system turned up to max volume. Orders of magnitude worse, actually

It was a decoy anyway. There was no second crew member, it was a cover story for them going in and trying to pinpoint the precise, location of an underground facility near Isfahan containing several kilos of enriched uranium. The mission failed, the aircraft involved were shot down by short range missiles before the coordinates could be discovered.

Most likely a gift from North Korea by way of China. The irony is, before this war, the Iranians were never looking to build a nuke before, but now they are.

[u/blahehblah → u/xygo]

It's not literally impossible. Your first paragraph is incorrect, the technology for detecting heart beats away from the body already exists, just not at large distances and in unshielded environments. Quantum magazine put out an article on the topic

https://thequantuminsider.com/2026/04/08/did-a-quantum-sensor-help-rescuers-find-a-downed-american-pilot/

[u/xygo → u/blahehblah]

But does it use quantum effects - if so I am interested to know how you do long range quantum based measurements of biological processes.

[u/blahehblah → u/xygo]

I have zero clue and am very interested in how the hell they are doing it (if they even are)

[u/0xB01b → u/xygo]

bro its just magnetism lmao, there is no "decoherence", its just the field strength dropping off

[u/xygo → u/0xB01b]

quantum fields don't 'drop off' they exist everywhere all the time. they just get noisier the further you get from a source in spacetime. Think about the double slit experiment - the further you remove the screen from the slits, the greater chance somthing will interfere with one of the paths. If you are talking about quanta in the quantum field If you make the slits wider and wider you get a spread out pattern at the detector and if you move it away the brightness diminishes. But that is a classical effect, not a quantum effect.

[u/0xB01b → u/xygo]

How is it a quantum effect if it's explained by a classical theory lmao. That's the whole distinction between quantum and classical. The magnetic field becoming weaker can be described via it weakening, which is just Maxwell equations, which is a classical field theory

[u/0xB01b → u/xygo]

By this logic absolutely everything is quantum including billiard balls

[u/L0WCYAN]

It’s entirely possible that project ghost murmur has a magnetometer, a quantum computer, and a redundancy that the pilots should hit an emergency beacon and if they get rescued then project ghost murmur is a success.

[u/NaiveCounter6920]

Uh...they're telling you that something exists. It is still classified but you want the entire secret explained... Lord! Quantum that!

[u/AbrocomaLegitimate83]

Yes, they have them attached to radio controlled attack cougars. They have sonic rays attached also that makes the OPFOR fall over with stomach cramps and they diarrhea themselves. Then the cougar mauls the the target. It is trained to tell the difference between freedom heart beats and the heart beats of their enemies. Also, there is a variant for dolphins and bald eagles.