I'm Richard Southern happy Friday what's lurking up there in the sky in 1998 during the first space shuttle mission to the International Space Station the first thing we try to do is to take pictures of what we see so that we have photographic evidence NASA accidentally captured an image of a mysterious black object orbiting Earth other footage from the ISS has reinforced the idea that strange things are happening up in orbit at the time they had no idea what it was and neither did anyone else for a long while the object remained unexplained and there
are still discussions about whether it's still in space mysterious close encounter this object you see here was caught on camera flying past the SpaceX rocket just minutes after liftoff last week moving silently along Earth's orbit the only thing we know about the object is its name the Black Knight satellite the origin of that name is also a mystery adding to the Intrigue of this unusual object over the years various theories and stories have tried to explain it but the most prominent ones seem to trace back to Nicola Tesla in 1899 Tesla was conducting radio experiments
in his lab in Colorado Springs during one of these tests he noticed something odd he was picking up radio signals from from space this was in 1899 long before any satellites existed so Tesla was left with one possibility even though it sounded unbelievable he was convinced that he had made contact with aliens in a 1901 article for coler's weekly Tesla wrote about his experiences 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 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 Tesla believed he had made the first Contact between Earth and beings from another planet some speculate that this was when the Black Knight sent its first signal in a way similar to the plot of the three body problem this Theory gained traction when in 1927 a civil engineer and ham radio user named jorgan House Began noticing strange Echoes In His Radio signals while transmitting from his home in Oslo House's signals would bounce back to him seconds later like
an echo from space house thought this could be proof of something extraterrestrial further supporting Tesla's idea in 2013 nearly 50 years after House's death an article in analog science fiction and fact Revisited The Mystery of the radio signals that's when Duncan lunan came into the picture Lunen suggested that the delayed Echoes could have come from an object orbiting the moon potentially one that originated 13,000 years ago the 13,000 year figure was based on the position of the North Pole star Polaris Lunen explained I tried plotting the delay times against the order in which the Echoes
were received and at only the second attempt I found what looked like a star map the signals house was receiving were actually something called long delay Echoes these are radio signals that come back to the sender a few seconds after the original transmission it's kind of like when you watch a live football match on TV and on the internet but the TV broadcast is slightly faster this delay happens because of the time it takes for the signal to travel in some cases the delay is so small you wouldn't notice but sometimes it's longer any delay
longer than 2.7 seconds is considered an lde and it can be a pretty complex topic what's important is that back then people didn't fully understand this which made it confusing for many in 1954 newspapers like the St Louis Post Dispatch and the San Francisco Examiner reported that the US US Air Force had found two satellites orbiting the Earth the strange part at that time no country had the technology to launch satellites the Black Knight satellite was mentioned by several sources and even though the US denied it there were credible reports from other countries confirming its
existence this object was first referenced by Nicola Tesla in 1899 then by house and a group of scientists in 1927 Again by the US Air Force in 1954 and later in 1998 by NASA so what was this mysterious black object that seemed to be orbiting Earth for decades by 1960 both the US and the USSR were launching spacecraft into orbit competing in the Space Race but on February 11th of that year news spread that something else was orbiting Earth it had been picked up by a radar made by the US Navy to detect enemy spy
satellites instead of finding spy planes the radar detected a dark tumbling object that didn't belong to either the Americans or Soviets the next day more details came out it was orbiting about 79° from the equator not 90 de as would be expected for a true polar orbit its orbit was also very unusual visual with its highest point apog V 1,728 km from earth and its lowest point Pary only 216 km this object completed one orbit every 104.5 minutes at the same time the US Navy was tracking an old casing from a Discoverer rocket launch this
casing just under 6 M long was part of a test launch from November M 1959 the mission aimed to eject a capsule but the capsule got lost in orbit similar to the Black Knight and was later declared missing the Navy tracked a casing that orbited every 103 minutes with a very different orbit its apog was 950 km and its perige was 187 km while this casing passed near the Black Knight it wasn't the same object there were two objects one was a human-made satellite and the other remained a mystery in September 1960 after radar first
detected the satellite a camera at Grumman aircraft corporation's Long Island Factory captured a picture of it by that time people on the ground had already spotted it for about 2 weeks they described it as a red glowing object moving from east to west most satellites at the time moved from west to east but this one went the other way plus it moved three times faster than usual a committee was quickly set up to investigate but the results were never made public for a while everything went quiet then in 1963 astronaut Gordon Cooper claimed he saw
a greenish UFO during his 15th flight on Mercury 9 but here's the interesting part not only did Cooper see it but about 100 people at NASA's tracking station in Perth Australia also spotted it on their radar the government later claimed Cooper's equipment malfunctioned and that he was seeing things due to too much carbon dioxide this explanation seemed odd considering Cooper was a key astronaut for NASA he was the youngest person to fly the pilot of the last Mercury space flight the first American to spend an entire day in space and and the first to sleep
in space if he was seeing things why would NASA let him keep flying despite the official explanation it became harder to deny the existence of the Black Knight satellite fast forward to 1927 when Scottish researchers led by Duncan lunan Revisited what a Norwegian scientist named house had heard lunan studied the data and discovered it was a star map pointing to Epsilon buas a double star in the boties constellation it appeared the Black Knight was sending a message from the people of Epsilon bhas and according to Lunen they had been sending this signal for around 12,600
years Epsilon buus is a double star system located in the northern constellation of boutes it's visible to the naked eye but seeing both Stars clearly requires a telescope with an aperture of at least 3 in when Lunen shared his findings he was ridiculed and dismissed as crazy however in 1998 the space shuttle Endeavors mission to the International Space Station brought new attention astronauts aboard Endeavor took photos of a strange object that looked strikingly similar to the Black Knight these photos were shared publicly on NASA's website reigniting interest in the object while it's unlikely the same
object could have lasted from 1899 to 1998 the more people researched the more it seemed like it could be the same one here's the strange part after the photos were posted they mysteriously disappeared from NASA's website only to reappear later under different URLs and with new descriptions labeling the object as space junk given that Earth is surrounded by space junk calling it that seemed like an easy way to dismiss the object there are more than 100,000 pieces of space debris just floating around Earth waiting to fall back down these pieces are broken parts of old
equipment and rock fragments that have ended up in orbit around us but here's a question if they were space junk in the first place why were the original pictures removed and then re-uploaded that seems pretty suspicious to me it turns out this is something NASA does quite a bit several people have come forward claiming that NASA often Alters its photos to remove what I call interesting photobombs or UFO sightings before releasing them to the public back in the day all the editing was done manually but today software like Photoshop handles a lot of that work
and as I mentioned the fact that these photos were taken down and re-uploaded with the label space junk makes it hard to trust the story here's something not everyone knows about NASA the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 which created NASA allows the agency to keep certain information secret for national security reasons I can see why the Air Force might do that or even Instagram for business reasons but what could NASA possibly need to keep secret about space for security purposes I'm not sure but maybe you have an idea feel free to share your
thoughts in the comments the strange part is that people who lived through the 50s and 60s can tell you that no one knew what the mysterious satellite or object was back then it was a fact no one had answers but suddenly if you search for the Black Knight now the story is tied to a 1998 NASA Mission as if that was the first time the object was discovered it's so well done that it makes people question what they remember even thinking did I really see that it went from being a complete mystery to oh it's
just a spare part we all knew it was there but we didn't know what it was or why it was in Space the only reasonable explanation people had at the time was that it could be of alien origin in 1973 Duncan Lunen wrote an article for spaceflight magazine suggesting that people studying long delayed Echoes hadn't considered the possibility that the Black Knight could have come from an Alien Probe however Lunen made it clear that his research had nothing to do with the Black Knight and wasn't connecting his theory to it later Lunen admitted his method
wasn't scientific and retracted his statement even saying you lied the problem isn't necessarily with what he said but the way it was presented made people believe he might have retracted his claims due to pressure or threats I don't know if that's true but I do know that NASA still has a lot to answer for as I mentioned earlier NASA has a lot to explain and they certainly provided a lot of details to clear up the confusion they shared testimonies and evidence that many of these Mysteries were just misunderstandings one of the most intriguing parts of
the story happened when the discoverer satellites were launched in 1960 Dudley sharp Secretary of the Air Force at the time told the press that an unknown object spotted in space was likely the second case from Discoverer 8 he speculated it was probably a twin of another object they had been tracking because it matched the size and location This was later confirmed and the identification even made its way into Time Magazine though it was buried on the back page after all boring explanations don't capture as much attention as mysterious ones there's also an interesting side note
about the discoverer program the CIA was involved in a related program called Corona in 1992 the details of the program were Declassified revealing that the discoverer Rockets weren't designed to carry people into space instead they were intended to Launch Corona spy satellites these satellites used a polar orbit which allowed them to fly over the entire surface of the Earth unlike regular orbits that only cover specific latitudes back then there was no way to send digital pictures back so film cameras were used after taking pictures the film had to be dropped back to Earth to be
developed the corona kh1 camera would re-enter the atmosphere deploy a parachute and a rescue plane would catch it midair so even the supposed truth that NASA provided about the Black Knight satellite turned out to be a coverup for the cia's Spy satellites while the discoverer program itself had its hidden agenda the reported flights and results were accurate only the original purpose was misrepresented as for Gordon Cooper's claims about what he saw during the Mercury 9 Mission it turns out that while he did report seeing UFOs his story about seeing aliens in space was false he
clarified that the story of him seeing aliens was fabricated by UFO writers Cooper even showed the official transcripts including ones he wrote himself as proof that nothing of the sort happened during his flight the last piece of the puzzle involves the mysterious object seen in photos from Endeavors STS 88 mission according to NASA the object in the famous 1998 photo was just a thermal blanket that had come loose and drifted away the sts-88 mission was the first US mission to begin construction of the International Space Station linking the Russian Zaria module with the American Unity
module although the crew successfully completed their tasks there were some issues the modules didn't line up properly at first so when the shuttles robotic arm released them to try again a few things including the thermal blanket got loose the object in the photo was identified as a crumpled thermal blanket which had a silver side and a black side if you weren't familiar with it the shape it Formed might have seemed unusual most people wouldn't know what it was but luckily for the astronauts it wasn't an alien spacecraft it was space debris as for Tesla it's
true that he picked up radio signals from space in 1899 but what he actually detected were pulsars a type of star that astronomers didn't know about at the time they weren't identified until 1968 back then Tesla thought he was receiving intelligent messages that couldn't be understood but it was just the signals from a superdense rapidly spinning Star as for the Norwegian scientists they did receive lde radio Reflections but no one knows what caused them today we have a few ideas about what could be responsible and most of them involve unusual phenomena happening in the earth's
ionosphere but if an alien satellite were to enter our orbit record our transmissions and send them back to us after an 8C delay it could produce the same effect there are many possible explanations for ldes but alien satellites aren't considered a likely cause still it's possible that we haven't figured it out yet because our technology just hasn't Advanced enough kind of like Tesla's experience now regarding the name Black Knight it turns out it's been used for several real projects for example the Black Knight name was attached to Britain's first space rocket which was tested between
1958 and 1965 these tests were conducted to try out different types of re-entry vehicles but none of the Rockets ever put anything into orbit the theories surrounding the Black Knight satellite might be influenced by multiple Black Knight projects that were completely unrelated when you look at all the facts together it makes you wonder could it just be a thermal blanket maybe there's nothing up there or maybe we're overthinking it but I have one question how could the object be discovered when neither the Soviets nor the US had the technology to send spacecraft into Polar orbit
back then it wasn't until the 1960s that the Black Knight satellite was found again in a polar orbit experts say this object weighed over 10 tons which would have made it the heaviest man-made satellite to orbit Earth at that time but back then we didn't have the technology to launch something that heavy into space as for NASA's explanation of the object being a thermal blanket this part of the story doesn't hold up in some ways both the shuttle and the International Space Station have always flown in semi equatorial orbits meaning an object in a polar
orbit would have passed by incredibly fast at tens of thousands of kilomet per hour that's way too fast for the object to have been visible and certainly too fast for so many highquality photos to have been taken I'm not saying NASA lied but when you piece everything together it does make you question things maybe someone in the comments has a better answer so once again what do you think it was so leave your thoughts in the comments below and subscribe to our channel for more content like this
