Secret Pentagon project to merge soldiers and machines exposed amid fears of futuristic
As the White House boasts that the US is now using futuristic military weapons never seen before, details about America’s attempt to merge soldiers and machines have been uncovered.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) quietly published a report detailing how scientists were working on a new kind of brain-computer interface that would form a direct link between military personnel and weapons of war without requiring surgery.
DARPA has been called the Pentagon’s ‘idea factory’ because of its documented role in creating futuristic tech, such as the Internet, GPS and stealth technology.
This program, which the agency posted on its public website and listed as ‘complete,’ was geared specifically for ‘able-bodied service members’ with the goal of giving them direct mind control over military drones and other national security tools.
Called the Next-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology (N3) program, DARPA said this breakthrough would provide the military with a ‘portable’ device that would read the user’s brain signals and also send messages from the drone back to the brain.
However, the project, announced in 2018, appeared to mysteriously go silent after reaching the third and final stage of development, which involved testing the device on real people.
Since July 2023, there has been no mention of what happened, whether the devices were successful or if soldiers are currently using the technology to control military aircraft with their minds.
The discovery comes as the US confirmed it had used futuristic ‘sonic weapons’ in the raid to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and a secret CIA tool to help locate an American pilot shot down over Iran by his heartbeat alone.
DARPA has made their experiments to control military hardware with a mind control device public knowledge
Pictured: Northrop Grumman’s X-47B Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle X-47B Stealth unmanned aircraft near Edwards Air Force Base in California in 2011
President Donald Trump himself boasted about the technological superiority of the American military during his second term in office, specifically during the conflicts in Venezuela and Iran.
On January 20, Trump bragged: ‘We have weapons nobody else knows about. And, I say it’s probably good not to talk about it, but we have some amazing weapons.’
Current brain interfaces, such as Elon Musk’s Neuralink, have mostly been limited to medical patients battling paralysis or lab settings because the devices must be implanted into a patient’s brain through surgery.
DARPA set out to make powerful brain-tech safe, portable and practical enough to be used by healthy people, starting with the military, but potentially opening the door for broader real-world usage later.
The N3 program provided funding to six research teams in 2019, including Battelle Memorial Institute in Ohio, Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, Rice University in Texas and California’s Palo Alto Research Center and Teledyne Scientific.
Researchers structured the project into three phases. The first 12-month phase tested the basic components for reading and recording brain signals and sending signals back into the brain.
Phase II lasted 18 months and involved the teams integrating those components into a working system and testing them in living animals to show if the system could actually read from and write to the brain safely and effectively.
The third phase, also scheduled to last 18 months, focused on refining the futuristic device, enhancing its performance to send signals faster and finally starting human trials for the military.
Ghost Murmur reportedly uses long-range quantum magnetometry, a cutting-edge technology which uses lasers and lab-grown diamonds to measure tiny magnetic fields. Pictured: A quantum magnetometer developed by NASA
However, once the project reached Phase III, the mystery began, as there has been no word of the outcome of those human trials in three years.
A July 20, 2023 report from Carnegie Mellon University provided an in-depth update on the N3 project, confirming that scientists were testing the mind control device on people.
‘Now in Phase 3, the team has initiated testing on human subjects,’ the press release revealed.
Carnegie Mellon also noted that their team’s specific technique for high-resolution, noninvasive brain stimulation, nicknamed ‘SharpFocus,’ appeared to achieve what the government had set out to accomplish for national security.
Researcher Derya Tansel said: ‘For this project, I designed high-density patches for rodents, monkeys, and humans and all of them provided strong evidence that the team’s ‘SharpFocus’ strategies are radical improvements over what is possible today.’
Despite the reported breakthrough, DARPA’s current webpage for the N3 only states the goal of the research and notes that: ‘This content is available for reference purposes. This page is no longer maintained.’
DARPA told the Daily Mail that the agency’s ‘effort in this program is complete.’
In a statement, DARPA added that it ‘does not operationalize technologies’ and stated that the six research teams handling the experiments would have the most up-to-date knowledge on the technology’s usage in 2026.
While countless government projects remain a mystery to the public, the Trump Administration has made it publicly known that US military hardware is still state-of-the-art.
In January, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt took to X to share an interview with an unnamed Venezuelan security guard who claimed to be working the night the US struck President Maduro’s compound in Caracas.
‘Suddenly I felt like my head was exploding from the inside,’ the security guard reportedly said. ‘We all started bleeding from the nose. Some were vomiting blood. We fell to the ground, unable to move.’
‘We couldn’t even stand up after that sonic weapon or whatever it was.’
The security guard also claimed that moments before the raid that captured Maduro, ‘all our radar systems shut down without any explanation.’ Then eight helicopters arrived and around 20 soldiers descended.
‘They didn’t look like anything we’ve fought against before,’ the guard claimed.
According to the unverified account, the 20 US soldiers ‘killed hundreds of us.’
Three months later, the CIA used a secret tool dubbed ‘Ghost Murmur’ to find the American airman who had been shot down over Southern Iran during US military strikes.
According to sources familiar with the technology, this futuristic device uses ‘long–range quantum magnetometry’ to find even the faintest heartbeats.
The tool reportedly scans for the subtle electromagnetic fingerprint of the human heart. This data is then filtered through AI software to isolate an individual signature from the background noise.
‘In the right conditions, if your heart is beating, we will find you,’ an anonymous source told the New York Post.