Some believe it’s an extra-terrestrial spacecraft. NASA says it’s probably just space junk. Here are the facts.
Photo illustration by Alyse Markel using NASA photo
Take a good look at the photograph above. NASA captured this image of a mysterious black object orbiting the Earth in 1998, during the first Space Shuttle mission to the International Space Station (ISS).
The space agency refers to the strange entity as item STS088-724-66 in its catalogue of space junk floating in low-Earth orbit (within 1,200 miles). Jerry Ross, an astronaut who took part in that mission, says that the object is a wayward thermal blanket that broke loose while his team tried to attach an American module to a Russian module on the ISS. But for a small, devoted following, it’s a 13,000-year-old, artificially made satellite known as the Black Knight satellite. So, could this peculiar object really have come from ancient aliens? Or is it just an innocuous piece of space debris?
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Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), Serbian-American physicist, sitting in his Colorado Springs laboratory with his “Magnifying transmitter” in 1899.
The facts surrounding the Black Knight are cobbled together from a number of tales. It begins with Nikola Tesla, who said that he had received radio signals from space during his 1899 radio experiments in Colorado Springs. Martians, he believed, were attempting to communicate with humans through numbers, since they’re a universal language.
In a February 1901 Collier’s Weekly article, Tesla recounted his experience: “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… The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another.”
Black Knight truthers cite this as the first sign of their satellite, which sent the radio pulses. Scientists have since determined that those radio pulses were most likely naturally occurring signals that space objects emit while in orbit. The prevailing theory, while still unlikely, is that Tesla heard a pulsar, or a faraway celestial body that emits regular pulses of radio waves. Sure, the Black Knight could have emitted such pulses, but that still doesn’t make it alien in nature.
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Rocky debris (brown) surrounding a pulsar (center).
Still, the theory that aliens were communicating with Earth through radio pulses propagated even further in 1927 when civil engineer and ham radio operator Jørgen Hals stumbled upon an unusual quality to his radio signals. As he transmitted from his home in Oslo, the signals would unexpectedly return to him moments later. Hals perceived this as an alien phenomenon.
Read More – The Truth About the ‘Black Knight’ Satellite Conspiracy Theory
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