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The Black Knight Satellite: A Perplexing Alien Visitor in Orbit - Part 1

January 27, 2025

 

The Black Knight Satellite: A Perplexing Alien Visitor in Orbit - Part 1



The Black Knight satellite, a peculiar object that has allegedly been orbiting Earth for thousands of years, has sparked great speculation, debate, and fascination among conspiracy theorists and astronomers alike for well over a century since it was first detected.

Is it a classified United States military project, a derelict Cold War-era Russian spy satellite lost in the vastness of space, or an extraterrestrial probe monitoring Earth?

The Black Knight Emerges

When Russian Cosmonaut, Sergei Krikalev, who was a part of the six-member crew of the NASA STS-88 Endeavour mission looked out of the shuttle window to take photographs of an unknown object following NASA’s protocol for UFO sightings, little could he have imagined the incredible excitement and controversy his actions would cause back on Earth.

Although Krikalev was not the first to capture the strange-looking object on camera, his effort arguably produced the clearest pictures of the purported Black Knight Satellite in a hundred years. Intriguingly, those sensational photographs were published by NASA on their official website.



Russian Cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev, who was a part of the six-member crew of the NASA STS-88 Endeavour mission in December 1998. (NASA).

Ufologists relished the opportunity to scrutinize the pictures, declaring they proved the Black Knight Satellite was no figment of imagination; and, that as they had contended all along, it was an object of alien origin, sent to surveil Earth from afar for undetermined purposes.

The “Dark Satellite” or “Black Knight Satellite” grabbed the attention of scientists in the early days of space exploration during the 1950s, when puzzling signals were detected in near-polar orbit of the Earth.

It was a time of heightened tensions between the United States of America and the Soviet Union. Inexplicable occurrences, whose sequence appears to have been orchestrated by some unseen hand, happened on the back of a series of events involving the United States.




An aerial photograph of the Trinity crater shortly after the atomic bomb test in 1945. White Sands, New Mexico. (Public Domain).

These unprecedented episodes broadly include: The Battle of Los Angeles during the Second World War in February 1942; the detonation of the first atomic bomb in White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico, in July 1945; the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of the same year; sightings of odd, aerial objects by pilot Kenneth Arnold in Washington State in June 1947, which were termed “flying saucers” in the Press; the alleged crash of an extraterrestrial disc and the subsequent retrieval of alien bodies in Roswell, New Mexico in July 1947, and finally the UFO sightings over Washington, D.C. on two consecutive Saturday nights in July 1952 that caused widespread fear in the Nation’s Capital.

A noteworthy addition to this list is the considerable panic that ensued during an October 1938 Halloween radio broadcast. Directed and chillingly narrated by Orson Welles, a radio dramatization of ‘The War of the Worlds,’ the classic sci-fi novel penned by H. G. Wells, left terrified listeners thinking a Martian invasion was underway.

All these events were still fresh in people’s minds and sightings of UFOs or unidentified flying objects became a regular feature, what with the paranoid citizenry having their eyes glued to the skies.

The 1950s were also an era when the possibility of life on other planets and alien visitations began to enter public consciousness more than it ever had over the past half-a-century. Newspaper reports and magazine articles, science fiction novels and Hollywood movies, and, of course, Ufology societies kept everyone informed and on the edge of their seats.




A reprint of ‘The War of the Worlds’ was featured on the cover of the July 1951 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries. (Public Domain).

Clear Signs in the 1950s

On May 14, 1954, bang in the middle of the Cold War, the Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine reported that the United States Air Force had detected “at least one and possibly two artificial satellites circling the Earth” and that they were being kept under close observation.

In the normal course, such news would have constituted run-of-the-mill reportage, hardly raising eyebrows among the public. Though it would doubtless have caused alarm in the defense department and echelons of political power, if these objects were assumed to be spy satellites.

But the Aviation Week article sent chills down everyone’s spines, because at the time it was published humans had still not achieved the capability to launch satellites in orbit.



Cover of the 1950 book 'The Flying Saucers Are Real' by Donald Keyhoe, one of the world’s first true ufologists. (Public Domain).

The shocking information about the mysterious satellites was revealed by Donald Edward Keyhoe, a Marine Corps Major-turned-UFO researcher and founder of The National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena or NICAP, who claimed government scientists working at White Sands, New Mexico, had made the discovery.

The Air Force issued a vehement denial to Keyhoe’s statement, maintaining they were, “… not watching any satellites — artificial or otherwise.” Skeptics on the other hand accused Keyhoe of making outlandish statements to promote his latest book on UFOs.

Yet, behind the scenes, the Pentagon swiftly swung into action, even as a stunned U.S. citizenry grappled with the implications of the news.

Upon tracking two satellites emitting radio signals as they circled at 400 miles and 600 miles above our planet, Pentagon officials immediately suspected the Soviet Union. The Russians were not just blamed of espionage, but were presumed to have beaten the United States in the space race. The Russians categorically denied these charges, and in turn held the Americans responsible for the satellites.

If neither the U.S. nor Russia had secretly sent a satellite into space, whom did it belong to? Aliens, claim UFO hunters, convinced that it was the Black Knight Satellite. Nevertheless, the Air Force sought the help of Dr. Lincoln La Paz, the then head of the Extra-Terrestrial Bodies Institute at the University of New Mexico, to determine the nature of the anomalous objects.

Dr. La Paz was no ordinary scientist. He possessed vast experience in conducting UFO investigations for the U.S. Air Force — particularly the alleged Roswell non-terrestrial vehicle crash incident of 1947. La Paz teamed up with astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto in 1930, to confirm that the near-Earth orbiting objects were “natural”, meaning, they were no more than meteors.

However, another version of events states that it was La Paz and Tombaugh who had originally detected the two objects in the murky darkness of space while working on behalf of the Air Force, hinting they could be artificially-built satellites. And that the duo later stoutly denied ever having made such an erroneous identification, or even working together at White Sands Missile Range.

Since the earlier Aviation Week article received tremendous traction amongst the Press and public, the Pentagon once again rushed to allay growing fears about the unusual outer space objects. They stated in an August 23, 1954 Aviation Week report: “[the]… 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.”

Ufologists, though, assert this was the convenient, conventional explanation; one meant to distract and steer the public away from the truth. They point to the fact that the Soviet Union launched the beach ball-sized Sputnik 1, humankind’s first-ever artificial satellite, into space from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan only in October 1957 — a full three years after the detection of the so-called Black Knight Satellite. Yet, no one could have imagined that there was much more to come in this extraordinary saga.



Artist's impression of Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, in orbit. (Gregory R. Todd/CC BY-SA 3.0).

On February 11, 1960, a New York Times article reported that U.S. tracking stations had detected a mysterious “dark” and “silent” satellite wheeling overhead on a regular and roughly pole-to-pole or polar orbit. Such an orbit would endow the object with the exceptional capability to observe every part of the Earth’s surface.

The Navy had employed the latest component of the space watch program called Dark Fence, designed by the Naval Research Laboratory, to find and track this satellite. It was a kind of radar trip-wire that stretched across the width of the United States to help keep track of satellites whose radios had gone silent.

When the object showed up during two passes of the Dark Fence, the news was communicated to President Eisenhower and marked top secret.

However, though initially classified as a Soviet spy satellite, it was later revealed that the object constituted “…the remains of an Air Force Discoverer 5 — one of the first photographic reconnaissance satellites built by the United States — that had gone astray.”

Scientists Vouch for Space Anomalies

UFO hunters were not the only ones to believe that the strange objects detected in outer space were other-worldly; men of science jumped on the bandwagon too.

In 1960, Ronald Bracewell, Professor of Electrical Engineering of the Space, Telecommunications, and Radioscience Laboratory at Stanford University, published an article in the authoritative scientific journal, Nature, in which he advanced the possibility of the presence of an alien probe that was trying to establish contact with Earth. As proof of his theory, Bracewell cited the phenomenon of delays in radio signals observed since the beginning of the 20th century.



Noted Ufologist, astronomer and author, Jacques Vallée. (Christopher Michel, 2024).

In 1961 French astronomer, ufologist, and author Jacques Vallée divulged that while working on the staff of the French Space Committee, he had taken photos and filmed a bright oil tanker-sized satellite. While tracking its trajectory, Vallée realized it was in a retrograde orbit; meaning, in an East to West orbit, opposite to Earth’s rotation. However, when he showed the astounding scientific material he had gathered to his superiors, he claims it was not just confiscated, but destroyed.

Certain UFO researchers opine that amateur American astronomer, Steven Slayton, was the first to observe the mysterious object way back in 1958. While observing the Moon with a 20-inch telescope, Slayton is said to have witnessed a dark spherical object, moving at high speed on an unusual elliptical trajectory, before disappearing when it reached the edge of the lunar disk. Based on these characteristics, he concluded it was artificial.

But the U.S. military dismissed Slayton’s sighting as a meteorite flying near the Moon, as the object had not been recorded by any radar station.

The Black Knight Name

According to researchers, there are two possible origins of the name “Black Knight.”

The first one maintains that it was derived from a 1972 science fiction novel “The Destruction of Faena” by Soviet author Alexander Kazantsev. In the story a civilization from the planet Phaeton, that was destroyed in a nuclear disaster, had launched the Black Prince satellite into Earth’s orbit to communicate with us.

When Kazantsev’s novel was translated into English, the phrase “Black Prince” was changed to Black Knight. It is believed that this fictitious satellite lent its name to the space object discovered by Slayton.

The second option is connected to United Kingdom’s research ballistic missile, called the Black Knight, that was launched at Woomera, Australia, on September 7, 1958.

Whatever the origin of the mysterious satellite’s moniker, it has stuck like glue!

Black Knight Chronology

To gain a proper understanding of the subject, it is important to study key instances of signals received from the Black Knight satellite in chronological order.

In 1899, Serbian-American inventor and electrical engineer Nikola Tesla erected a large tower at his laboratory in Colorado Springs to study atmospheric electricity and wireless power. While conducting experiments, he intercepted repeating signals from outer space.

At first, Tesla speculated the transmission had originated from a planet communicating with Earth, noting in a February 9th, 1901 Collier’s Weekly article titled ‘Talking with the Planets’: “The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another … 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.”



Nikola Tesla sitting in front of a spiral coil used in his wireless power experiments at his East Houston St. laboratory. (Public Domain).

Upon further study, Tesla believed the radio waves emanated from a satellite orbiting Earth. Until, finally, he formed the opinion that the signals came from an intelligent alien civilization based on Mars.

In a February 25th, 1923, article titled ‘A Giant Eye to See Round the World’ that appeared in the Albany Telegram, the genius scientist wrote: “I believe the Martians used numbers for communication because numbers are universal.”

The Global Mars Fixation

Radio waves, a type of electromagnetic radiation, have the lowest frequencies and longest wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum, and can be larger than our planet. Given that the very first source of non-terrestrial radio waves were detected from the constellation of Sagittarius in the center of the Milky Way galaxy by an American physicist and radio engineer, Karl Jansky, only in April 1933, the scientific community has explained away Tesla’s signals as nothing more than radio wave pulses from a pulsar.

But this interpretation is hotly contested by Ufologists because Guglielmo Marconi, the Italian inventor and electrical engineer, known for his creation of a practical radio wave–based wireless telegraph system in 1896, also detected the same signals.

But what convinced Tesla that the transmission had come from Mars?

By the time H. G. Wells published ‘The War of the Worlds,’ the Red Planet had been observed through telescopes for nearly 300 years. Beginning with Galileo Galilei’s studies of the phases of Mars in 1610; Giovanni Cassini’s identification of the planet’s polar ice caps in 1666; and Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli’s observations of geological features which he called “canali” or channels in 1877.

The mistranslation of Schiaparelli’s “canali” into English as “canals” led to the popular belief that Mars was inhabited by an extraterrestrial race capable of engineering and agriculture.



Giovanni Schiaparelli's 1877 surface map of Mars. (Public Domain).

American mathematician and astronomer Percival Lowell was tremendously inspired by the research on Mars that had preceded him. From his observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, he examined the Red Planet extensively for 15 years. These included studies conducted during the 1907 opposition, or the period when it was closer to Earth.

A prolific writer, Lowell postulated in his books "Mars" in 1895, "Mars and its Canals" in 1906, and "Mars as the Abode of Life" in 1908, that an advanced alien race indigenous to the planet had built canals to convey water from the polar caps to irrigate the remaining arable land in their arid, dying landscape.

As he confidently informed the editors of the journal Nature in London: “After the melting of the south polar cap had got well under way, canals began to make their appearance about it.”

“The planet is at present the abode of intelligent constructive life [and] I may say in this connection that the theory of such life upon Mars was... deduced from the outcome of observation [and] my observations since have fully confirmed it.”


Martian canals as depicted by Percival Lowell. (Public Domain).

Lowell accompanied his hypothesis with illustrations of imaginary geological features on Mars, just as Schiaparelli had done earlier.

But Lowell's grand pronouncements about Martian canals and their alleged-creators had been discredited by the time of his death in 1916. The Times trod delicately in a valedictory editorial, stating, “The present judgment of the scientific world is that he was too largely governed in his researches by a vivid imagination.”

Nevertheless, the determined efforts of Percival Lowell to unravel the mysteries of the Red Planet, and the way his scientific writings played a role in shaping Tesla’s thoughts, cannot be overlooked.

Part two of this article can be read here.

Top Image: The purported Black Knight Satellite, enhanced image produced by author.

Source: Anand N. Balaji.