In combination with the downed F-15 weapons systems officer, known publicly only as "Dude 44 Bravo," activating Boeing's Combat Survivor Evader Locator, or CSEL, U.S. forces were reportedly able to narrow the search area and then locate the second crew member shot down over southern Iran using a secret CIA reconnaissance tool known as "Ghost Murmur."
The New York Post reports that the long-range quantum magnetometry surveillance tool, powered by AI, was used in the U.S. search-and-rescue operation for the second crew member from the downed F-15 fighter jet.
Sources described Ghost Murmur as able to detect something as faint as a human heartbeat's magnetic signal at long distances in complex environments using AI to filter through the noise.
President Trump and CIA Director John Ratcliffe hinted at the new super-surveillance tool at a White House press conference on Monday afternoon. This was Ghost Murmur's first operational field use, or at least the first publicly known one.
"It's like hearing a voice in a stadium, except the stadium is a thousand square miles of desert," a source briefed on Ghost Murmur told the NYPost. "In the right conditions, if your heart is beating, we will find you."
Ghost Murmur was reportedly developed by Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works and has been tested on Black Hawk helicopters, with possible future use on F-35 stealth fighter jets.
"The name is deliberate. 'Murmur' is a clinical term for a heart rhythm. 'Ghost' refers to finding someone who, for all practical purposes, has disappeared," another source said.
The source continued:
It was "about as clean an environment as you could ask for" because of low electromagnetic interference, "almost no competing human signatures, and at night the thermal contrast between a living body and the desert floor," which "gave operators a secondary confirmation layer."
"Normally this signal is so weak that it can only be measured in a hospital setting with sensors pressed nearly against the chest."
"But advances in a field known as quantum magnetometry — specifically sensors built around microscopic defects in synthetic diamonds — have apparently made it possible to detect these signals at dramatically greater distances."
"The capability is not omniscient. It works best in remote, low-clutter environments and requires significant processing time."
Before Ghost Murmur went operational, Dude 44 Bravo activated Boeing's Combat Survivor Evader Locator, or CSEL, a secure communications device that can transmit encrypted location and status bursts without exposing his position to enemy forces.
"It's like finding a needle in a haystack, finding this pilot, and the CIA was unbelievable," Trump said Monday, referring to Ghost Murmur.
"The CIA was very responsible for finding this little speck," the president said, adding that the CIA spotted the missing American from "40 miles away."