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Because the NY Post ran an article that said

"The CIA used a futuristic new tool called “Ghost Murmur” to find and rescue the second American airman who was shot down in southern Iran, The Post has learned. The secret technology uses long-range quantum magnetometry to find the electromagnetic signal of a human heartbeat"

Note, I agree that it was probably some novel beacon technology. Just answering your question about why people are debating whether it was a device that could detect a human heartbeat from long range.

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Almost all of those words could be true if the beacon is disguised as an implanted medical device that creates some EM "interference" on each heartbeat, or every X heartbeats. From the outside it would look like sloppy design or a minor malfunction, in reality the signal is designed to be highly trackable

Not that I believe any of those words are true beyond the code name. The incident is exactly the kind of thing you'd want to create false rumors about

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We literally know what beacon device was used: Boeing CSEL

https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/nation-politics/in...

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it just sounds like the submarine communication technology, very low baud rate, used to transmit the pilot's location and liveness, using quantum magnetometry to measure a magnetic field without huge coil areas.
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Or just rocking up to the nearest village with a thousand dollars in cash and asking where the pilot is.
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I think the fear of being located isn't based on the fact that someone can decrypt an encrypted transmission, its simply because someone can trace that a particular location is transmitting some radio waves.
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That's a complicated way of describing Professor Xavier's Cerebro, but that's basically how it works.
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