Anomalous Experiences & the Heart
- FATE Magazine
- 10 hours ago
- 14 min read
For 25 Years, the HeartMath Institute Has Tried to Prove How Human Hearts Communicate.
The heart generates and receives magnetic fields. HeartMath says hearts exchange information—and that this may help explain why anomalous contact keeps returning to the “open heart.”
This special report for FATE Magazine comes from journalist RM McLaren. He’s been all over the UFO scene, penning popular pieces about Jacques Vallée, Canadian UFO detectors, and Neil deGrasse Tyson as “The Kardashian of Science.” Check out his catalog and support him here!
One Heart in the Noise
Somewhere in the mountains of southwestern Iran, an injured American airman was trying not to be found.
His F-15E Strike Eagle had been shot down deep inside hostile territory on April 3, 2026. The pilot was rescued within hours, but the weapons systems officer had ejected separately. Bleeding and moving away from the crash site, he climbed into mountainous terrain as Iranian authorities urged local residents to help capture him.
Nearly two days after the jet went down, U.S. forces brought him home.
The operation involved dozens of aircraft, hundreds of personnel, a CIA deception campaign and what CIA Director John Ratcliffe called “exquisite technologies that no other intelligence service” possessed. President Donald Trump said surveillance operators finally noticed what appeared to be a human head moving in the darkness. The CIA declined to describe the technology that helped locate him. (AP News)
Then the New York Post published a far more extraordinary version of the story.
Citing two unnamed sources, the newspaper reported that the CIA had deployed an experimental system called Ghost Murmur. The device allegedly combined artificial intelligence with quantum magnetometers built around microscopic defects in diamonds. According to the account, it isolated the magnetic signature of the airman’s heartbeat from the surrounding noise—possibly from dozens of miles away. (New York Post)Neither the CIA nor Lockheed Martin has publicly confirmed the Ghost Murmur name, the reported range or the claim that the system located the airman through his cardiac magnetic field. Physicists interviewed by Scientific American said the public description conflicts with the known limits of magnetometry. A survival beacon was also involved in the search. (Scientific American)
Every heartbeat produces electrical current. That current generates a magnetic field outside the body. In a January preprint, months before the Iran rescue, researchers reported the first direct measurements of human cardiac magnetic activity using room-temperature sensors based on nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamonds—the same general sensing technology invoked in the Ghost Murmur story. But the researchers placed their sensors close to the body, averaged hundreds or thousands of beats and required powerful noise suppression even in controlled conditions. (arXiv)
The story reminded me of an institution that has spent three decades investigating the possibility that human hearts communicate with each other electromagnetically.
I first encountered the HeartMath Institute more than a decade ago through Tom Shadyac’s documentary I Am. I later bought one of their biofeedback devices. Using it had a profound effect on my meditation and emotional regulation. I have been curious about HeartMath’s claims ever since.
HeartMath claims that emotional states alter the information encoded in the heart’s electromagnetic activity. It argues that these patterns extend outside the body, can be registered by other living systems and may help synchronize people in pairs and groups. At its most ambitious, the institute proposes that coherent groups generate collective energetic fields and participate in larger networks linking living organisms with the Earth’s magnetic environment.
The idea would already be strange if it stopped with human relationships, but it does not.
Across the literature of UFO encounters, near-death experiences and anomalous contact, witnesses repeatedly describe fear as interference. They speak of love, balance, surrender or an “open heart” as if these states change what can be perceived—or what can approach.
This article asks whether there is any scientific reason to take that language literally.
What does the heart actually transmit? What can it receive? What did HeartMath’s strongest experiments find? Can genuine physiological synchrony be distinguished from electromagnetic communication? And if the organization of the receiver matters, could that help explain why high strangeness keeps returning to the heart?
The Institute Jacques Vallée Visited
HeartMath began in 1991 with Doc Childre.
Childre founded the nonprofit institute in Boulder Creek, California, and developed a set of practices centered on directing attention toward the heart while cultivating emotions such as appreciation, compassion and care. He called the larger concept heart intelligence: the idea that working deliberately with the heart could reorganize emotional experience, cognition and behavior. HeartMath’s early institutional literature describes its mission as researching positive emotion and developing practical methods for reducing stress and restoring internal balance.
A psychophysiologist who joined HeartMath at its creation, Rollin McCraty helped formulate its research program and became the principal scientific author of much of HeartMath’s published scientific work. He remains the institute’s executive vice president and director of research. (HeartMath Institute)
Childre proposed that the heart could become an organizing center for human experience. McCraty spent decades trying to turn that intuition into measurable physiology.
While working through Vallée’s journals for my recent retrospective on his career, I found a short entry dated Dec. 6, 1994. Three years after HeartMath’s founding, Vallée visited its Boulder Creek headquarters after an introduction from his longtime friend and business associate Ren Breck.
Vallée recorded only one detail from the visit. An unidentified Russian researcher claimed that the Soviet Union possessed a weapon capable of stopping the hearts of living people within a five-mile radius.
A month later, Vallée encountered a discussion of psychologist Michael Persinger’s experiments with magnetic “cardiac driving,” along with a military researcher’s description of disrupting electrical activity in heart muscle to produce asystole. Vallée immediately connected the material to the claim he had heard at HeartMath.
The journal does not tell us why Breck arranged the visit beyond introducing Vallée to the staff. It does not say whether Vallée met Childre or McCraty. It offers no evidence that he collaborated with HeartMath, returned to the institute or endorsed its theories. Nor should an extraordinary claim made by one visiting or resident researcher be treated as an official HeartMath position.
But the meeting fit into Vallée’s broader investigations into high strangeness.
Vallée had spent decades investigating the intersection of anomalous phenomena, human physiology, consciousness, information and technologies that might simulate effects attributed to UFOs. HeartMath was beginning to study whether the human body itself participates in an exchange of subtle patterned information.
In Dimensions, Vallée argued that UFO encounters could not be understood solely as physical machines entering the atmosphere. The phenomenon appeared to combine physical effects with psychic, symbolic and cultural consequences. Its manifestations could not, he wrote, be separated from their effects on the people who encountered them.
According to Vallée, the witness is no longer merely an observer standing outside the event. The human receiver—its expectations, physiology, emotions and state of consciousness—may be part of the event itself.
HeartMath would eventually make a parallel claim about ordinary human interaction: that the internal organization of a person may change not only what that person emits, but what they can receive.
What Is Already True About the Heart
HeartMath’s larger theory begins with several uncontested facts.
Electrical activity in cardiac tissue creates both the voltage recorded by an electrocardiogram and the magnetic field measured by magnetocardiography. Scientists first detected the heart’s magnetic field in 1963. Modern systems can recover increasingly faint cardiac signals, often using sensitive sensors, shielding, averaging and aggressive noise cancellation. Better technology can reveal signals once lost in noise. It cannot reconstruct a field that never reaches the detector.
The heart is also physiologically responsive. Its rhythm responds to autonomic nerves, hormones, respiration, blood pressure, temperature and electrolytes. A local network of cardiac neurons helps regulate the organ, though the popular phrase “heart brain” should not be mistaken for a second conscious mind.
Electrical stimulation can alter cardiac rhythm, as pacemakers and defibrillators demonstrate. Whether extremely weak magnetic fields generated by another living body can produce meaningful cardiac effects is a separate question.
In 1973, Michael Persinger reported that a rotating magnetic field appeared to influence the contraction rate of drug-impaired rat hearts. Later research has produced mixed results, with effects depending on field strength, frequency, waveform and biological condition. These experimental fields were vastly stronger than the field produced by another person’s heart. They establish susceptibility in principle, not interpersonal reception.
HeartMath’s practical work centers on coherence. Heart-rate variability, or HRV, is the changing interval between beats. During slow breathing near cardiovascular resonance, HRV often becomes smooth and sine-wave-like. HeartMath teaches people to produce a similar pattern through heart-focused breathing and sustained appreciation, care or compassion, then measures it with a proprietary coherence score.
A person can learn to change that pattern.
The disputed question is whether anyone else can register the change.
What HeartMath Claims It Found
HeartMath’s theory escalates from one body to two people, from two people to a room and from a room to a field.
Its strongest evidence comes from paired recordings.
In “The Electricity of Touch,” published in the 1998 volume Brain and Values, Rollin McCraty and colleagues recorded ECG and EEG signals from pairs of participants. They used one person’s heartbeat as a timing reference and averaged the other person’s brainwave activity across repeated cardiac cycles. When participants held hands, one person’s ECG appeared in electrodes attached to the other. Touch, however, provides an ordinary conductive pathway. The result showed that cardiac electrical activity can cross between bodies, not that the receiver’s brain had responded. (“The Electricity of Touch,” HeartMath Institute)
The more provocative findings came without contact.
In demonstrations later described in The Energetic Heart and Science of the Heart, two participants sat several feet apart. HeartMath reported that alpha activity in one participant’s EEG became time-locked to the other participant’s heartbeat. The effect appeared in only one direction. The apparent receiver was also the participant maintaining greater cardiac coherence.
HeartMath proposed that coherence may change not only what a person emits, but how sensitive that person becomes to information generated by others.
That is its most consequential finding. It is also based largely on selected traces from exploratory experiments, not a large randomized study comparing coherent and noncoherent receivers under isolated, blinded conditions. The same figures later reappeared across multiple HeartMath publications, making the evidence base look broader than the underlying experiments were.
A 1994 study by Linda Russek and Gary Schwartz added suggestive support. In an analysis of 20 Harvard graduates then in their 60s, those reporting more loving parental relationships showed stronger apparent registration of an experimenter’s heartbeat in frontal EEG channels. The sample was small, the groups relied on retrospective self-report and the result has not been independently established. The participants had also interacted with the experimenter beforehand, creating another possible route for ordinary emotional or physiological coupling. (“Interpersonal Heart-Brain Registration and the Perception of Parental Love,” Subtle Energies)
HeartMath then moved from pairs to groups.
In 2010, psychologist Steven Morris studied whether three HeartMath-trained participants could increase coherence in an untrained person sitting with them. Across 148 trials, Morris reported periods of heart-rhythm synchronization and associations involving bonding and group comfort. But the receiver’s coherence improved in only about half the simplest matched comparisons, and deliberately trying to influence the receiver did not produce a clear, consistent effect. Everyone also shared the same room, breathing patterns, timing and social atmosphere. (“Achieving Collective Coherence,” HeartMath Institute)
HeartMath nevertheless extended the theory to couples, families, animals, literal group fields and eventually planetary coherence.
The evidence weakens as the claim expands. Individual HRV regulation is established. Physiological synchrony is real. HeartMath’s paired recordings are suggestive but contested. Coherent receivers, electromagnetic group fields and planetary information networks remain unconfirmed.
Signal, Synchrony or Shared World?
The strongest skeptical argument is not that HeartMath observed nothing. Interpersonal physiological synchrony is real.
A systematic review led by Richard Palumbo found that autonomic activity between people can become associated across many social settings. Later meta-analysis found small links between synchrony and relationship or performance outcomes, though methods and definitions vary widely. Parents and infants co-regulate. Partners, therapists and clients sometimes show linked arousal. Musicians, teams, ritual participants and audiences can develop shared physiological rhythms. (Palumbo et al., systematic review, PubMed)
But synchrony does not identify the channel.
Two people may show similar cardiac changes because both respond to the same film, conversation, task or emotional atmosphere. Speech coordinates breathing, attention and movement. In collaborative construction experiments, Riccardo Fusaroli and colleagues found shared heart-rate dynamics, but those patterns were largely predicted by speech, behavioral coordination and task structure. (Fusaroli et al., arXiv)
Physiological data also create statistical traps. Heart rate is autocorrelated, so apparent alignments can emerge when researchers search many time windows, lags and frequency bands. EEG adds another problem: each person’s own heartbeat can contaminate scalp recordings. Modern heartbeat-evoked-potential studies use surrogate beats and pseudotrials to separate genuine neural responses from cardiac artifact. (MIT Press Direct)
HeartMath considered some of these problems, including conductive transfer and the receiver’s own heartbeat. But it has never cleanly isolated the proposed electromagnetic mechanism.
A decisive test would place sender and receiver in sensory-isolated rooms with independent equipment, continuous monitoring of breathing, movement, sound and environmental fields, randomized coherence conditions, preregistered shielding and sham-shielding conditions, with blinded analysis and preregistered predictions. Independent teams would then reproduce the effect.
The distinction is simple: A signal reaches an instrument. A biological response changes the receiver. Synchrony means two systems move together. Communication means one system encodes information another can discriminate.
HeartMath has produced evidence adjacent to each step. It has not completed the chain.
The fairest verdict is that HeartMath may have observed genuine interpersonal coupling without proving the electromagnetic channel it proposed. Even if the channel is ordinary, however, the state of the receiver still matters.
An Open Heart and the Contact Experience
Vallée’s model of contact was never primarily about proving that witnesses receive radio-like transmissions from UFOs. It was about interaction.
In Dimensions, he argued that the phenomenon must be approached as a system operating across physical, psychic and symbolic dimensions. It did not merely appear before witnesses. It altered them, entered culture through them and adapted its presentation to human expectations. The witness was part of the circuit.
Whitley Strieber reached a similar conclusion through experience rather than theory.
Communion documented terror: beings in the night, paralysis, violation and a collapse of the boundary between the familiar and the impossible. In Transformation, Strieber described trying to move from helpless fear toward a relationship with whatever he called “the visitors.”
He did not simply decide that the beings were benevolent. He repeatedly warned against imposing an easy interpretation on them. Instead, he tried to hold fear and acceptance simultaneously. He wrote that his encounters became most useful when he actively confronted his fear and maintained an inner state of balance.
For Strieber, changing his response changed the relationship.
He advised approaching the mystery openly, asking genuine questions without dictating what the answers must be. The most effective method, he wrote in Transformation, was to open oneself without imposing conditions on what might follow.
Harvard psychiatrist John Mack found related language among people who reported abduction experiences.
In Abduction, Mack described subjects moving through terror, helplessness and violated control toward experiences of profound connection, ecological urgency and expanded identity. One subject’s habitual defensiveness gave way only after a frightening experience of vulnerability and surrender.
Mack also reported experiencers who believed the beings responded to human emotional warmth and “openhearted love.” In their accounts, the entities appeared fascinated by affection, sensuality, parenting and the emotional intensity of embodied human life.
These are testimonies filtered through memory, interpretation and Mack’s controversial therapeutic framework. They are not controlled evidence of nonhuman beings.
But the pattern is difficult to miss. Kenneth Ring noticed it, too.
In The Omega Project, Ring compared people reporting UFO encounters with people reporting near-death experiences. The events looked radically different, yet both groups frequently described lasting changes in values, greater concern for the Earth and a sense that living systems were interconnected. Ring explicitly framed extraordinary encounters as possible feedback mechanisms carrying information about individual and planetary transformation.
What, then, do experiencers mean when they say an open heart changes contact?
There are several possibilities, and they are not mutually exclusive.
The Role of the Heart
An “open heart” may be a metaphor for courage, compassion, sincerity or willingness to enter relationship with the unknown. But it may also describe a measurable physiological state. Fear alters breathing, heart rhythm, attention and prediction, preparing the body to fight, flee or freeze. Greater regulation does not guarantee accurate perception, but it may help a witness remain observant without collapsing ambiguity into threat or desire.
The purportedly channeled text A Course in Miracles describes a comparable movement in explicitly psychological rather than physiological terms: a shift from fear-based perception toward love, in which the world appears to change because the perceiver has changed. That does not support electromagnetic communication, but it helps explain why “opening the heart” so often functions as language for a reorganization of perception.
That matters in Vallée’s model, where the witness is not simply observing an external object. Perception, symbolism and expectation may help shape the event itself. It also matters in Strieber’s accounts, where fear, curiosity and inner balance appeared to alter the relationship with the visitors. A genuinely interactive anomaly might respond differently to terror, aggression, openness or trust without requiring any paranormal cardiac transmission.
HeartMath offers the most literal possibility: coherence may reorganize cardiac, respiratory and autonomic activity in a way that changes sensitivity to weak patterned fields. Current evidence does not establish such a channel. Coherence corresponds to a measurable change in heart-rhythm pattern, although slow breathing is a major contributor.
That does not mean the altered state receives aliens. It means the receiver is physically different.
This is where Vallée and HeartMath genuinely touch. HeartMath treats the human organism as an information system whose receptivity may change with coherence. Vallée treats anomalous contact as an information process in which the human organism is part of the event.
Together, they raise a legitimate question:
If contact is an interaction with an information system, could the physiological organization of the receiver change what can be received?
HeartMath does not explain contact. Vallée does not validate HeartMath. Strieber, Mack and Ring do not prove that the heart is an anomalous organ of perception.
But across their very different bodies of work, the same pattern returns: In these accounts, fear produces separation. Regulation permits relationship. The receiver changes, and then the experience changes with it.
Networked Hearts
HeartMath’s electromagnetic theory may ultimately fail, but its deeper intuition would remain: human beings are not physiologically sealed. We regulate and dysregulate one another through expression, voice, touch, expectation, power and attention. Infants depend on caregivers to help organize states they cannot yet manage alone. Partners carry tension and safety into each other’s bodies. Clinicians, teachers, employers and political leaders create environments in which nervous systems must continually adapt. Our internal states are personal, but they are not entirely private.
That recognition should not become another system of blame. Grief is not energetic pollution. Anxiety is not a moral defect. Trauma does not make someone a dangerous transmitter of “incoherence.” Any philosophy of shared regulation that becomes compulsory positivity has misunderstood both suffering and interdependence. The ethical implication runs toward care: if bodies participate in one another’s regulation, then those with power over homes, schools, workplaces, hospitals and societies bear responsibility for the physiological environments they create.
If a direct electromagnetic channel were someday established, it would not suddenly make humanity interconnected. It would reveal another layer of an interconnection already visible through ordinary biology.
The reported Ghost Murmur sensor was said to find a single heartbeat buried inside a mountain of noise. Perhaps that story will eventually prove to be mythology constructed around a more conventional intelligence system. Perhaps it contains a fragment of a classified technological advance. Publicly demonstrated science remains nowhere close to detecting an ordinary cardiac magnetic field across miles of hostile terrain. But one part of the story is beyond dispute: a beating heart leaves a trace outside the body.
HeartMath has spent 30 years asking whether living systems do something with those traces—whether they detect them, respond to them or join with other bodies in patterns larger than themselves. Its experiments have not proved electromagnetic heart-to-heart communication, established a literal group field or shown that collective emotion becomes encoded in the magnetosphere. What they have done is make the question experimental.
Anomalous contact adds a final possibility: perhaps the condition of the receiver is not incidental to the mystery. Perhaps it is part of the mechanism.
The question is no longer whether the heart leaves a trace outside the body. It does. Nor is it whether other people can change its rhythm. They can. The mystery begins in the space between those facts.
How much of one heart can another receive?
by RM McLaren
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