The Black Knight Satellite

It all started with a scare that turned more real than the United States government could have imagined.

On August 23, 1954, Aviation Week and Space Technology released this story:

“Pentagon scare over the observance of two previously unobserved satellites orbiting the earth has dissipated with the identification of the objects as natural, not artificial satellites. Dr. Lincoln LaPaz, expert on extraterrestrial bodies from the University of New Mexico, headed the identification project.

“One satellite is orbiting about 400 miles out, while the other track is 600 miles from the earth. Pentagon thought momentarily the Russians had beaten the U.S. to space explorations.”

For several years prior, there was something or “some things” in orbit around Earth that the United States government couldn’t quite pinpoint, and couldn’t quite explain. Was it an orbiting rock or rocks, or was it a manmade object?

After years of continued study on the anomaly, the United States switched their story.

On February 11th, 1960, Time Magazine published this clipping, which I will summarize just in case you can't see the clipping below:

“The Pentagon has discovered a dark satellite orbiting from pole to pole, or ‘polar orbit’. They have not ruled out that it may be a Soviet Union spy satellite, however, British scientists observing Soviet satellite launches have not detected any satellites launched by the Soviet Union recently, and especially had no information about any satellite at the poles. The Pentagon was at a buzz as to ‘what is it?’ speculation.”

Robert L. Johnson, director of the Adler Planetarium – who had been observing the satellite in the 1960’s, after buzz for the story had been going around for years – stated that “the object doesn’t have the decency to maintain a regular schedule, like any other heavenly or man-made object…we don’t know when to watch for it.”

I’m a Science Fiction writer, and I write stories that are out of this world, including all things alien, alien technology, and future human advances in propulsion, space crafts, and yes, satellites.

Yet, sometimes the real world pops up with something so fantastical that it should only be in Science Fiction books.

And the “Dark Satellite” or the “Black Knight Satellite”, is one of those alien, far-fetched stories and technologies that Science Fiction usually has a grasp on.

With this story, it may be the other way around. With this story, truth may be stranger than fiction.

Yet, we don’t hear this “stuff” in the media nowadays. We aren’t reading articles from popular, well respected magazines and newspapers on rogue satellites roaming Earth’s outer exosphere before and during the time of our first satellite inventions and productions.

We used to.

But let’s say, for a minute, that this satellite is for real. If so, then several questions beg to be asked: Why don’t we see this or these satellites or speak of them in the press today? Why aren’t science magazines and space magazines grabbing Black Knight Satellite pictures from NASA and posting it online or in their papers, because if it was real, wouldn’t it be plastered in our history books, all over the mass media, and plopped into TV shows and movies?

If it is true that a satellite from unknown origin has been orbiting our planet in a north to south direction long before our 20th and 21st century mind ever designed a satellite, then where is it now?

But let’s put you outside the human body for a moment, and place you somewhere else in the cosmos where you are part of an advanced civilization that happened – via a wormhole – to come along a-not-so-advanced-civilization on Earth. You don’t want to bother the warring tribes below, so you watch the comings and goings of human cultures and advancements from above.

And you get tired of sitting in a space craft and viewing the human species all day and all night, so you think up something more convenient.

A satellite.

It would be a perfect tool to do something like this – spying, watching, studying. I mean, we send out satellites to view other planets in our own solar system, so why wouldn’t another civilization do the same?

Well, that’s if you believe in Extraterrestrials. If you don’t, then this is just a fun, fake story that I’m trying to present to you.

And it very much could be.

Regardless, just keep going down the make-believe – or real – rabbit hole with me.

And hold on for the short, but bumpy ride...

Several years ago, Pepsi made a ten minute commercial on the Black Knight Satellite. In the commercial they claim that “...In 1899, Nikola Tesla discovered a satellite orbiting Earth. Its origin can be traced back 13,000 years. This is not Science Fiction. This is real.”

In truth, Nikola Tesla did encounter a heavenly body via radio waves that he eventually claimed to be a satellite, and in fact, wrote about it.

Here is one of his writings on the subject:

“I can never forget the first sensations I experienced when it dawned upon me that I had observed something possibly of incalculable consequences to mankind. I felt as though I were present at the birth of a new knowledge or the revelation of a great truth. Even now, at times, I can vividly recall the incident, and see my apparatus as though it were actually before me. My first observations positively terrified me, as there was present in them something mysterious, not to say supernatural, and I was alone in my laboratory at night; but at that time the idea of these disturbances being intelligently controlled signals did not yet present itself to me.

“The changes I noted were taking place periodically, and with such a clear suggestion of number and order that they were not traceable to any cause then known to me. I was familiar, of course, with such electrical disturbances as are produced by the sun, Aurora Borealis and earth currents, and I was as sure as I could be of any fact that these variations were due to none of these causes.

"The nature of my experiments precluded the possibility of the changes being produced by atmospheric disturbances, as has been rashly asserted by some. It was some time afterward when the thought flashed upon my mind that the disturbances I had observed might be due to an intelligent control. Although I could not decipher their meaning, it was impossible for me to think of them as having been entirely accidental. The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another. I was not merely beholding a vision, but had caught sight of a great and profound truth.”

His first thought was that it was a planet communicating with Earth. His later thoughts were that it was a satellite orbiting our world, and then he changed his opinion that it was a civilization on Mars.

He simply couldn't figure out where it was coming from.

After years of speculation and the subject dying in the wind, Duncan Lunan, a Scottish astronomer, in the 1970’s, decided to decipher old HAM radio communications that were said to be coming from a particular object in space. The communications were odd, to say the least.

So, Duncan plotted a vertical axis of the transmitted pulse sequence with a horizontal axis of echo delay time. What did he find? An image of the constellation Boötis.

As more communications came in, he translated more and more. To his surprise, the transmission was so bizarre and so out of this world, that if this Black Knight Satellite wasn’t just Science Fiction mumbo jumbo given to us by some bored scientists, then we are looking at a satellite, according to Duncan, to be of ET origin.

The translation:

START HERE. OUR HOME IS EPSILON BOOTIS. WHICH IS A DOUBLE STAR. WE LIVE ON THE 6th PLANET OF 7 – CHECK THAT, 6th OF 7 – COUNTING OUTWARDS FROM THE SUN WHICH IS THE LARGER OF THE TWO. OUR 6th PLANET HAS ONE MOON, OUR 4th PLANET HAS THREE, OUR FIRST AND THIRD PLANETS EACH HAVE ONE. OUR PROBE IS IN THE ORBIT OF YOUR MOON THIS UPDATES THE POSITION OF ARCTURUS SHOWN ON OUR MAPS.

From whatever it is and from where ever it came from, or even if it exists at all, let’s get one thing straight — Tesla, the pentagon, Time Magazine, Aviation Week and Space Technology were so intrigued by an object in the sky, they sure as hell studied it for years and years because they thought it was of incredible importance.

This is something to just roll your eyes at.