THE BLACK KNIGHT SATELLITE STAGES A COMEBACK, BUT WHY NOW?
During the 1950s, as the space race between the USSR and USA was heating up, a mythology began to appear: there was, it was alleged, an object - some versions of the story put it at an approximate weight of fifteen tons, well beyond the publicly known launch capabilities either of the Soviet Union or the United States - was in polar orbit around planet Earth. This object was clearly artificial, and moreover, there were two problems: (1) fifteen tons well exceeded the launch capabilities of either the USSR(which at that time clearly led the USA in public and visible space technologies), and (2) the object was in a polar orbit, which exceeded the technological capabilities of either nation to achieve. Indeed, at its first discovery, the object exceeded the launch capabilities of either nation to put into any kind of orbit, much less a polar one. This, of course, presented a conundrum, for if the story was true, then this left but two real possibilities: someone else from or on Earth had launched it (leaving the questions of who, when, and how hovering disturbingly over the story), or the object was not from Earth at all. Either way, one had a "hidden player" on the space scene. Dubbed "The Black Knight" satellite, the story became part of the fringe lore of the space age, informing to some extent the science fiction work of well-known and engaging sci-fi author Philip K. Dick. Then the story more or less faded, kept alive on the edges of the science fiction and space-age "alternative research" communities, but by and large forgotten even to many of them.
Until now, when, curiously, the story has made something of a come-back, prompting once again the question "why now"?
Black Knight Satellite Interest Mysteriously Increasing
As this article makes clear, there is a mystery here, and it won't go away:
"In 1899, Nikola Tesla picked up unusual signals from an unknown source on his high-voltage receiver in Colorado Springs which he speculated were “intelligently controlled signals” that originated “from another world.” Astronomers have reported picking up similar radio signals since the 1930s and Dr. Lincoln La Paz of the University of New Mexico sighted the possible source in Earth orbit in1953. The U.S. Department of Defense commissioned astronomer Clyde Tombaugh to look for it. A famous article about the Black Knight was published in both the St. Louis Dispatch and The San Francisco Examiner on May 14th 1954. At that time, there were no man-made objects in Earth orbit … that we know of.And there's more curiosity about the object, including its strange association to sci-fi author Philip K. Dick:
"That changed in 1957 when the USSR launched Sputnik 1. It was reported that an object believed to be the Black Knight Satellite was “shadowing” Sputnik 1. When Sputnik 2 was launched a month later, Dr. Luis Corralos of the Communications Ministry in Venezuela photographed it again shadowing the satellite. In 1960, a Grumman Aircraft Corporation tracking camera took a picture of it but the company kept its findings secret. In 1963, U.S. astronaut Gordon Cooper reported seeing a UFO like the Black Knight in front of his capsule. A photo taken during a space shuttle mission in 1998 (seen in the videos) shows an object many believe is the Black Knight and a 2014 video feed from the ISS shows a similar object."
The Black Knight Satellite, Bracewell Probes, and Philip K. Dick
As the second article makes even more clear, there was an abundance of strange stuff associated with the satellite:
"On September 3, 1960, a camera at the Grumman Aircraft Corp. Long Island factory managed to capture an image of the object. It was said to be a redish-pink glowing object moving in an east-to-west orbit, which is, apparently, the opposite of most other man-made satellites, and which doesn’t fit the polar orbit reported by Time. Subsequent to this, astronaut Gordon Cooper Jr. allegedly caught a first-hand glimpse of the object during his 22-orbit Mercury-Atlas 9 flight, which was the final of the Mercury Program missions. Cooper claimed that it was an object much larger than any other man-made satellite of the time, and that it glowed a neon green.What is to be noted here is that both Venezuelan and American scientists (and one can only presume, the Russians as well), took photographs of the satellite, which are to this day been kept secret, or at least, never surfaced.
"Cooper, who passed away in 2004, had long been sympathetic to the UFOlogy movement and had been vocal about not only the reality of extraterrestrial life, but also the idea that the US government had been and continues to be complicit in a cover-up of contact with such.
"Then in 1998, during NASA mission STS-88 to the ISS, flown by the Space Shuttle Endeavour, images were captured of an unidentified object in orbit; an object that a great many people believe is the ever elusive Black Knight satellite.
"Following Time’s publication, John Keel detailed the discovery in his book Disneyland of the Gods (1988), wherein he noted that around the same time that Dark Fence detected this mysterious object, ground based HAM operators were reporting having received strange radio signals. According to Keel, one such HAM operator received and decoded a signal and claimed that the message corresponded to a star chart, plotted from Earth 13,000 years ago, and focused on a star system called Epsilon Boötis…and this is where things get really interesting."
But there's more, and it's here our own high octane speculations enter the picture. Consider the end of the second article:
"Here’s the thing about all of this. The above may seem like a lot of conjecture and supposition, and perhaps some of it is – surely it’s a stretch to say that Philip K. Dick was a harbinger of tidings from an alien species using a Bracewell probe – but many of the facts are confirmed. Black Knight does seem to exist, and while noting that certain governments do have a penchant for secret technology and clandestine operations, its origin and purpose seems to defy explanation. If we are able to accept the stories and theories held therein, and the, at times tenuous, connections between them, can we accept that there’s a 13,000 year old alien probe orbiting our planet, sending literary inspiration to select people via the gold necklaces of attractive delivery people?"There's two assumptions here that deserve attention, the first being that the Black Knight satellite - if real - has been around for 13,000 years, and that it is "from elsewhere," and the second is the implicit assumption that it's still up there. And underlying this, another story: why the attention back on to this bit of Cold War space mythology now, and precisely during a period over the last two months that have seen such strange space news stories? In other words, why is the Black Knight back now?
It is interesting to note that the American Space shuttle had payload to polar orbit launch capacity of about 14 tons, and payload recovery capability of about 16 tons(see Wikipedia Space Shuttle). In other words, depending on the physical volume of the Black Knight satellite, it is conceivable that the object might have been recovered and returned to Earth during one of the classified missions of the shuttle. This, of course, raises the stakes about the story considerably, for if this be the case, then rest assured that satellite - if indeed it ever existed (and I am inclined to believe it did) - then its origins are now probably well known, and whatever secrets it may have held might be unravelling, at least in secret.
So why is the Black Knight back now? I strongly suspect that it's back because it forms a part of whatever strategy the powers that be might be concocting concerning the dreaded "D" word: "disclosure." Here, permit me to remain skeptical, for the powers-that-be are well-known to be consummate liars, and whatever information they might disclose concerning this mysterious object - if they disclose at all - will have to be subject to the procedures of verification, including independent verification of its actual physical composition. And the real question hovering over the story is, of course, why it is back now?
The Black Knight Satellite, Bracewell Probes, and Philip K. Dick
- http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2014/02/the-black-knight-satellite-bracewell-probes-and-phillip-k-dick/
- February 21, 2014
- Martin J. Clemens
It begins in the beginning, sort of.
In March of 1960, Time Magazine published a story in their hallowed rag, detailing the discovery of what ultimately became known as the Black Knight satellite. As the story goes, three weeks prior to their publication, analysts working for the US ‘Dark Fence’ radar program detected an object orbiting above the continental United States. It was labelled a ‘dark satellite’, in that it seemed to be a man-made object in a near-Earth orbit, but wasn’t transmitting any detectable signals.
The Dark Fence program’s purpose was to monitor known satellite objects, whether American or Russian, or otherwise, and to identify new objects, so as to stay abreast of Soviet spy satellites and other space-military operations that might have been undertaken over US airspace. This, of course, was at the height of the Cold War, and the political climate around the world was focused on military secrecy and keeping up with the Russians. It was also at the very beginning of the global Space Race.
Mysterious unidentified flying satellite from STS-88. (Image credit: NASA.)
The Time article attributed this ‘dark satellite’ to mismanagement of the Dark Fence program, and it was suggested that the object they detected was actually the Discoverer 1 Corona Reconnaissance satellite that was launched in February of the previous year. Discover 1 was intended to have a low-Earth geocentric ‘polar’ orbit, but it failed to achieve such an orbital path and is believed to have crashed somewhere near the South Pole in short order.
Right from the start, Black Knight was an enigma, even though many accepted the idea that it was really just a misplaced American science project. Others, of course, felt there was more to this than was reported.
Astronaut Gordon Cooper Jr.
Cooper, who passed away in 2004, had long been sympathetic to the UFOlogy movement and had been vocal about not only the reality of extraterrestrial life, but also the idea that the US government had been and continues to be complicit in a cover-up of contact with such.
Then in 1998, during NASA mission STS-88 to the ISS, flown by the Space Shuttle Endeavour, images were captured of an unidentified object in orbit; an object that a great many people believe is the ever elusive Black Knight satellite.
Following Time’s publication, John Keel detailed the discovery in his book Disneyland of the Gods (1988), wherein he noted that around the same time that Dark Fence detected this mysterious object, ground based HAM operators were reporting having received strange radio signals. According to Keel, one such HAM operator received and decoded a signal and claimed that the message corresponded to a star chart, plotted from Earth 13,000 years ago, and focused on a star system called Epsilon Boötis…and this is where things get really interesting.
That HAM operator was Duncan Lunan, a Scottish author of science fiction, with a focus on astronomy and spaceflight. Lunan claimed, in an article in the British Interplanetary Society’s magazine, Spaceflight, that he had encountered and interpreted a signal from an alien probe somewhere in orbit around the Earth. He said that the same signal had previously been detected by researchers in the 1920’s who were studying the long delayed echo effect (or LDE), but that they had disregarded the encoded message as having been an echo of an Earth-originating signal bouncing off of either the moon or Earth’s upper atmosphere. In his article, Lunan relayed the decoded message as follows:
“Start here. Our home is Upsilon Bootes, which is a double star. We live on the sixth planet of seven, coming from the sun, which is the larger of the two. Our sixth planet has one moon. Our fourth planet has three. Our first and third planets each have one. Our probe is in the position of Arcturus, known in our maps.”Many believe, including Lunan, that this message came from a Bracewell probe in orbit around Earth. A Bracewell probe is a theoretical autonomous satellite built to remotely explore distant star systems with the expressed purpose of communicating with alien civilizations. An interesting coincidence in all this, is that the concept of a Bracewell probe was first proposed by telecommunication and radioscience engineer Ronald Bracewell, in a paper published in 1960, the same year Black Knight was discovered. A notable example of a Bracewell probe is the device that featured in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode ‘The Inner Light’ (season five, episode 25).
It’s also interesting to note that one of the theoretical causes of the mysterious long delay echo effect, which is a strange anomaly experienced by radio operators, wherein transmitted signals echo back to the transceiver several seconds after transmission, is that alien technology is retransmitting those signals back in the direction of the transmitter in an effort to communicate…possibly by a probe located in orbit.
Another image from STS-88
And now we’re about to dive into the real weirdness.
In 1980 Philip K. Dick published what many believe to be his magnum opus, VALIS. VALIS is an almost autobiographical novel, wherein he detailed many of the strange and paranormal experiences he had over his lifetime (up to that point, obviously). In that book he detailed an event that occurred on February 20, 1974 at his home in Chicago, Illinois. He received a delivery at the hands of a beautiful young woman who wore a gold necklace with an odd fish-shaped pendant. Dick recounted that the sun glinted off of the pendant, which caused what he called a ‘pink beam’ that penetrated his eye and imparted untold wisdom in the blink of an eye.
Dick claimed that this ‘pink beam’, which he claimed to have experienced on multiple occasions, was a transformative event in his life, and though most saw it as an hallucination, he used the experience, referred to as 2-3-74, as inspiration for the VALIS Trilogy.
There are a great many people who believe that the origin of that ‘pink beam’ was in fact, the Black Knight satellite, associating the ‘pink beam’ with the redish-pink colour of the satellite. It’s fairly well known that certain academics view VALIS, as a result of comments made by Dick in his exegesis, as a sort of cipher key, needed to decode the true meaning behind Dick’s ten most important works, which are known as the ‘meta-novel’. Those works are: Eye in the Sky, Time Out of Joint, The Man in the High Castle, The Game Players of Titan, Martian Time Slip, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, UBIK, and A Maze of Death.
The fact that Eye in the Sky was written just three years before Black Knight was discovered, suggests to some that Dick was the recipient of otherworldly communication, possibly from a civilization hailing from the Epsilon Boötis star system.
You might be thinking that it should now be a fairly simple endeavour to confirm the existence of such a thing in orbit around Earth, if it’s still there that is, but consider this…
Right now there are somewhere in the neighbourhood of 100,000 man-made objects orbiting Earth. Some are multi-billion dollar uber-sciencey military satellites, or telecomm satellites or even scientific instruments, but most are simple space junk, like parts off of old spacecraft or dead satellites etc. A good portion of that space junk is ‘dark’, in the same way Black Knight was thought to be, making it very difficult to differentiate between one bit and another. Black Knight may be lost among a cloud of garbage, which seems par for the course on our planet.
NASA and other space agencies around the world have put a great deal of thought into the issue of space junk, and the Chinese are currently in the process of developing a sort of net that will be used to collect space debris and safely bring it back to Earth for recycling or to otherwise be dealt with. But what if they bring Black Knight down?
Here’s the thing about all of this. The above may seem like a lot of conjecture and supposition, and perhaps some of it is – surely it’s a stretch to say that Philip K. Dick was a harbinger of tidings from an alien species using a Bracewell probe – but many of the facts are confirmed. Black Knight does seem to exist, and while noting that certain governments do have a penchant for secret technology and clandestine operations, its origin and purpose seems to defy explanation. If we are able to accept the stories and theories held therein, and the, at times tenuous, connections between them, can we accept that there’s a 13,000 year old alien probe orbiting our planet, sending literary inspiration to select people via the gold necklaces of attractive delivery people?
Black Knight Satellite Interest Mysteriously Increasing
- http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2015/02/black-knight-satellite-interest-mysteriously-increasing/
- February 18, 2015
- Paul Seaburn
The videos being uploaded this week don’t appear to be new but their sudden appearance and increased buzz on the Internet about the Black Knight Satellite is.
In 1899, Nikola Tesla picked up unusual signals from an unknown source on his high-voltage receiver in Colorado Springs which he speculated were “intelligently controlled signals” that originated “from another world.” Astronomers have reported picking up similar radio signals since the 1930s and Dr. Lincoln La Paz of the University of New Mexico sighted the possible source in Earth orbit in1953. The U.S. Department of Defense commissioned astronomer Clyde Tombaugh to look for it. A famous article about the Black Knight was published in both the St. Louis Dispatch and The San Francisco Examiner on May 14th 1954. At that time, there were no man-made objects in Earth orbit … that we know of.
Black Knight Satellite near the Space Shuttle in 1998
Of course, there’s much more about the Black Knight that we know and don’t know, including the link to Philip K. Dick. The military and space programs of both the US and Russia have acknowledged at least the possibility of its existence.
Why the sudden interest in videos about the Black Knight Satellite? Does it have anything to do with Russia’s Tesla Tower? The Roswell slides? Are we getting new signals? What else could it be?
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