Date: 11000 B.C.E.–Present
Location: Low Earth orbit
The Conspirators: NASA, unknown alien civilization
The Victims: Unknown
According to conspiracy theorists, the Black Knight satellite is an artificial satellite of alien origin that has been orbiting the Earth for some 13,000 years. NASA and other space agencies know all about it, but they cover up its existence to prevent the general public from panicking from the knowledge of other civilizations. It is even alleged that there is at least one clear photograph of it, taken from the space shuttle Endeavour.
There is no Black Knight satellite, and never has been. The photograph that allegedly exists of it actually shows a well-documented piece of debris from the space shuttle that took the picture.
Black Knight was first “discovered” by Nikola Tesla when he picked up a radio signal coming from space in 1899, a repeating click that was so regular that Tesla believed it had to have been artificially and intelligently created. He didn’t know what it was at the time, and neither did anyone else. But the signal he received is still being transmitted today.
Then in 1928, Norwegian scientists experimenting with shortwave radio discovered a phenomenon called long delayed echoes (LDEs), and their explanation was that the radio signals were being reflected off something in orbit. This explanation seemed to be confirmed in 1954 when newspapers reported an Air Force announcement that at least two artificial satellites were currently in orbit around the Earth, at a time when no nation yet had such an ability. (It soon came out that this announcement was a hoax made up by an author trying to sell a UFO book, and that the Air Force had never made any such statement. There goes that evidence!)
In 1960, newspapers reported that another unknown object had been found in orbit. It was in an eccentric semi-polar orbit (an elliptical orbit that’s almost, but not quite, in line with the Earth’s North and South Poles), and it made a complete trip around this orbit every 104.5 minutes. Astronaut Gordon Cooper’s 1963 flight on the Mercury-Atlas 9 mission brought a new dimension to the story. Over the radio, he reported seeing a strange, greenish object. NASA later reported that his CO2 levels were wonky and he had been hallucinating. However, about 100 people at NASA’s Muchea Tracking Station near Perth, Australia, also saw the object on the radar screens. Conspiracy theorists claimed that NASA was covering up whatever the object was.
Stories about Black Knight always give a special mention to Duncan Lunan, a Scottish researcher who set about finding the cause of the LDEs in 1973. In studying the Norwegian data, he found that by plotting the LDE on a graph, the graph ended up looking like a map of the stars. This map led to the star Epsilon Boötis, a double star in the constellation of Boötes. One principal star, Arcturus, was not where it is today, but rather where it was 12,600 years ago. Thus, the story was born that Black Knight came to us from Epsilon Boötes 12,600 years ago.
Rounding out the story were the photographs of Black Knight taken from the space shuttle. NASA’s Endeavour launched in 1998, and on a space walk, astronauts reported seeing something. They took numerous high-quality photographs that were soon published on the NASA website; however, they were available only very briefly before being mysteriously taken down. They reappeared on the site later with different URLs and with new descriptions explaining them away as pieces of space junk. But it was too little, too late. The story of the Black Knight satellite had become essentially complete, evidence included.
All that remains unknown is why NASA is denying the existence of Black Knight, what its true purpose is, and who its alien creators might be.
Deconstructing the story of the Black Knight satellite is an exercise in trying to connect dots that don’t line up very well. Even the name Black Knight doesn’t seem to relate to anything! The name has been used many times in various nations’ space programs, most notably by the UK. None of the events surrounding the satellite’s discovery actually mention the name Black Night, though. So the name Black Knight was probably added in the modern Internet era.
That first dot to connect came from Tesla, who in 1899 did indeed pick up mysterious radio signals from space. They were regular, repetitive, and gave every indication of being artificially produced. Today, we know what he discovered: pulsars, which are stars that emit a beam of electromagnetic radiation. (These signals are so regularly timed that when they were rediscovered in 1967, researchers playfully named them LGMs, for Little Green Men.) So, as it turns out, Tesla’s discovery had nothing to do with any alien satellite.
Nor, it transpired, did the Norwegian discovery of LDEs. As scientists have since learned, shortwave radio signals echo back about eight seconds after they’re sent, and although the reasons are not fully understood, they have to do with effects from the Earth’s ionosphere. LDE signals are not dependent upon, or correlated with, the existence or positions of any artificial satellites.
The object reported in 1960 to be circling the Earth on a semi-polar orbit was soon identified by the Air Force as the second of two casings from the Discoverer VIII launch. (Today, we know the Discoverer program was a cover for the Corona program, which launched spy satellites into polar orbits.)
And as much as Black Knight satellite proponents like to claim Duncan Lunan’s LDE analysis as evidence for their apocryphal alien craft, he himself never expressed any such thing. He thought the LDE reflections came from the Earth’s L5 Lagrangian point, a location 60° behind the Earth on its orbit around the sun. This clearly has no relation to an object in an eccentric semi-polar orbit around the Earth. Lunan himself later retracted his work, in fact, after finding errors in it. With that retraction went the support for the 12,600-year age of Black Knight and its connection with any specific star of origin.
Gordon Cooper’s testimony is a bit different. He did report various UFOs during his long career, but he was always adamant that his Mercury-Atlas 9 sighting of a greenish object in 1963 was a total fabrication by UFOlogists. He claims he saw nothing at all, and indeed no official records confirm a radar sighting by 100 people at the Australian tracking station (we do know, however, that nowhere near 100 people could have physically fit in front of the tiny radar screen, so that part of the story is certainly false).
And all of this brings us to the final piece of evidence, those photographs of Black Knight taken by the crew of the Endeavour. These photos were indeed taken by the shuttle crew, but there is nothing mysterious about them. During the space walk, a piece of thermal blanket came detached from the inside of the cargo bay and floated out of reach. The astronauts documented it with their cameras. We can also say with certainty that the photos are not of anything on a semi-polar orbit. The shuttle orbited on a semi-equatorial orbit, so the shuttle and the debris would have passed each other at about 36,000 kmh if the debris had been on a semi-polar orbit—far too fast to be seen, and much too fast for anyone (let alone a spacesuit-clad astronaut) to take a picture. The fact that multiple pictures were taken is incontrovertible proof that the object was nearby and following the shuttle on its exact same orbit.
All in all, it’s an intriguing story, but unfortunately, no useful evidence can be found to support the existence of any Black Knight satellite, nor of a conspiracy by NASA to cover it up.