in 1957 the soviet union launched sputnik 1. it was the first satellite in earth's orbit or was it for over 100 years an unidentified object orbiting the earth has been seen heard and photographed by people all around the world this object became known as the black knight satellite the signals from the black knight satellite have been decoded and if the translation is correct it's been watching us for 13 000 years let's find out why [Music] at his lab in colorado springs nikola tesla built a large tower to study atmospheric electricity and wireless power but one evening in 1899 tesla got a surprise his tower started receiving a transmission a transmission that tesla believed to be artificial his antenna was receiving numbers at a regular interval at first tesla thought it was a signal coming from high in the atmosphere it turned out the signal was coming from higher than that it was coming from space tesla believed that this was evidence of life on another planet he's quoted in a local newspaper as saying i believe numbers are being used for communication because numbers are universal the scientific community certainly acknowledged tesla's genius but they also thought of him as a bit of a mad scientist but a few years later guillermo marconi inventor of the wireless radio also intercepted those same signals then jorgen halls a norwegian radio engineer noticed transmissions being sent on a certain wavelength were being sent back a few seconds later now radio echoes themselves are not unusual radio waves especially shortwave can bounce between the ground and stratosphere several times this is called propagation but typical radio echoes usually occur one-seventh of a second after the original transmission consistently these echoes were happening at different intervals up to 15 seconds after the transmission and weren't consistent with signals that bounce around the earth these signals are now known as long delayed echoes or ldes and for years after their discovery shortwave and ham radio operators have observed ldes but how and why they occur remains a mystery or does it on may 14 1954 two american newspapers reported a story that might explain these radio echoes the story got scientists very excited it also caused the pentagon to panic [Music] on may 14 1954 three years before sputnik became the first satellite in orbit a strange news story appeared the report claimed that according to an expert one or two artificial satellites are circling the earth the expert in question was marine corps major donald kehoe major kehoe was a naval aviator who later became a ufo researcher and founded the national investigations committee on aerial phenomena or nycap he claimed that u. s government scientists working out of white sands new mexico had found one or two artificial satellites and we're trying to track them a few weeks later we got some more details it was reported that two satellites had been found at 400 miles and 600 miles above the earth these satellites were emitting a strange radio signal at periodic intervals much like tesla discovered years earlier dr lincoln lapaz an astronomer out of the university of new mexico was in charge of a team trying to locate and id the objects the pentagon was upset that this information leaked but when you receive broadcast from a satellite before satellites are invented it's hard to keep that a secret a few weeks after that nasa detected signals from what it called an unknown orbiting object and those signals were confirmed by astronomers in france and elsewhere the american military was concerned these were russian spy satellites launched in secret they weren't in 1957 a researcher for the venezuelan government was observing sputnik 2 as it passed over caracas he noticed a mysterious object at first he thought it was sputnik but it couldn't be sputnik moves in pro-grade orbit meaning from west to east along with the rotation of the earth the object he saw was moving in retrograde orbit moving east to west opposite the rotation of the earth so well this technology didn't exist throughout the late 1950s there were multiple observations of what was called a dark satellite and by 1960 the defense department finally acknowledged it on february 11 1960 the new york times ran an article which said washington february 10 an unidentified silent satellite has been discovered circling the earth in a near polar orbit by united states tracking stations the defense department said today the identity and origin of the mystery satellite which has been dubbed the dark satellite are not known despite nearly two weeks of tracking this report renewed interest in the satellite and astronomers around the world reported seeing it and what was strange about it was it didn't have a regular schedule it appears some nights but not others they didn't know when to watch for it now this was the height of the cold war and the pentagon was absolutely terrified that this was some kind of new russian spy satellite that could appear and disappear at any time that year time magazine even wrote about the black knight satellite and how the navy was trying to track it and grumman aircraft a military contractor was tasked with tracking and photographing the satellite which they did in august 1960 but that report and those photographs have never been released in may 1961 the smithsonian observatory at harvard spotted the object they even reported this in the press with a statement the satellite was first spotted over florida an unsuspecting unpredicted bright satellite stations around the world have been asked to help drackett and this is exactly what happened from his paris lab jacques valet observed tracked and even filmed the black knight satellite the first thing that stood out was that it was in polar orbit now there were no earth-based satellites in polar orbit yet what's interesting about this is satellites in polar orbit are very well positioned to observe all points of the earth's surface when a country wants to see everything they choose polar another fact about the object that stood out it was huge about the size of an oil truck and weighed about 15 tons there was no rocket on earth that had the ability to launch something this size now valet and his team were thrilled at the discovery he compiled all the research the photos the film put them in a large file and delivered it to a supervisor the materials were immediately confiscated the photos were destroyed and the film was erased the official reason for destroying the film was that the observatory was embarrassed that it couldn't identify the object now that's a bunch of ps i agree so did valet by the way valet is still alive and this is something that bothers him to this day and he wasn't a ufo guy before spotting the black knight satellite but he became one after he's written 15 books and tons of papers challenging mainstream science and supporting the existence of ufos this guy sounds all right for a frenchman it does sound pretty cool up until now the only sighting of the black knight satellite came from astronomers and observatories on the ground to really prove the existence of the black knight we need an eyewitness to go to orbit and see it with their own eyes and just 18 months later that's exactly what happened gordon cooper was the stereotypical 1960s american astronaut short hair fast car cocky attitude he learned to fly when he was just a child and then he became a fighter pilot a test pilot and one of the first astronauts in 1963 he piloted mercury 9 which was the longest american space mission ever at that time and gordon cooper was like somebody out of a movie when his landing module experienced total systems failure he did what a movie hero would do he switched everything off and brought his ship down manually he splashed down safely just four miles off target and this experience didn't scare him at all he kept going to space and kept breaking endurance records here's how tough cooper was to this day he's the only person to ever fall asleep during liftoff he fell asleep while his rocket was launching yep i guess he'd done it so many times he was bored and decided and i'll just take a nap now we all know the names neil armstrong and alan shepard but those astronauts stood on the shoulders of men like colonel gordon cooper anyway during mercury 9 cooper reported seeing a green glowing object ahead of his module his ground crew also confirmed this and a tracking station saw it moving east to west prograde nbc news immediately picked up the story but when cooper got back from the mission the press was not allowed to ask about the sighting the official explanation was there was an electronic malfunction on cooper's craft this caused high levels of carbon dioxide which induced hallucinations yep the guy who's so cool under pressure that he falls asleep during takeoff was seeing things while he was at nasa and active military gordon cooper felt duty-bound to follow orders about what he saw and denied the sighting but after he retired that's a different story cooper claimed that while he was a test pilot at edwards air force base he saw strange saucer-shaped craft and the saucers made no sound as they landed on retractable gear and cooper said that even the most fearless test pilots were shaken by the things they saw at edwards and right up until his death cooper claimed that the u.
s government was definitely covering up information about ufos and you said you saw literally hundreds of unidentifiable flying objects yes they were flying quite high how high we couldn't tell because we couldn't get anywhere near their altitude but they were either very large craft way up or smaller crafts still well above what we can get to he can recall hundreds of reports made by fellow pilots that were confirmed by radar cooper even testified before the united nations about this now sightings of the black knight satellite piled up over the years it became increasingly difficult to deny that something was up there so the bigger questions are what is it why is it here and what does it want we would get that answer in 1973. duncan london a researcher from scotland went back and analyzed all the lde data compiled from the norwegian scientists london found a pattern and in that pattern a message and in that message a map [Music] in a 1973 article in spaceflight magazine duncan london said he had identified a hidden radio message sent by the black knight satellite london had gone back to the lde data and noticed variations that might indicate a code so he put the data on a graph on one axis was the time delay between echoes on the other axis the position of each echo in the sequence and plotting these points didn't create any recognizable pattern so london reversed the axes the result a collection of dots that appeared to be a sky map specifically the constellation botus what it looks like the only star in the constellation that was out of place was epsilon boates london felt this could indicate the black knight satellite's origin now he admitted this evidence was shaky so he found more radio echoes reported by french astronomers in 1929 those graphs confirmed it was the same constellation there was one big problem though arcturus the brightest star in the constellation was slightly off-center london couldn't explain this so he changed his thinking maybe the satellite didn't arrive here recently maybe it was showing a star map from a time in the past okay this is the part where i ask you what the hell you talking about okay so the earth rotates on its axis right yeah well over time gravity causes this axis to wobble like a top but it's consistent and predictable the orientation of the earth's axis makes a full cycle every 26 000 years so over long time spans the stars in the sky look slightly different in this rotation of the sky map is called axial procession what does this have to do with the black nightmare well arcturus was slightly out of place for 1973 but when london adjusted the map further back in time accounting for axial procession the stars lined up the black knight satellite wasn't a new arrival according to the map it's been here for thirteen thousand years london said that the diagrams were so clear that they could be interpreted as a message in standard english the black knight message says our home is epsilon 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 what's going on well that's a first even though these reports were in the new york times time magazine and other mainstream news outlets nobody at least officially took the subject of ufos or the black knight satellite seriously but in 1998 everything would change when space shuttle endeavour took this photo on december 4th 1998 the space shuttle endeavour embarked on mission sts-88 the first shuttle mission to the international space station the primary purpose of this mission was to deliver and install a piece of equipment called the unity node unity connects the russian and american segments together where the crew can share meals and hang out but that wasn't the most notable event of the mission on december 11th a series of photos were taken and released by nasa and they show what appears to be some type of craft in orbit around the earth and it seems that after a hundred years of speculation we finally have proof of the mysterious black knight satellite that leaves the question why is it here one theory is that it's an alien probe sent to monitor our species and our progress now this would make sense that if there is an advanced intelligent civilization somewhere in the galaxy they would send probes to every star that could possibly support life and when we reach this level of technology i have no doubt that we'll do the same thing and if the black knight satellite is an alien probe could the radio signals be reporting back to its home ship or its home planet or could the signals be for us could they be sending us a map as a sort of interstellar handshake or maybe it's not an alien probe at all but a piece of technology left by our ancestors thousands or millions of years ago there are multiple ancient texts that describe a dark object orbiting the earth some call it a dark arc that was put there thousands of years ago and that arc contains dna information of human-like species from long ago aware that some catastrophe was going to doom the civilization they put their dna somewhere safe a place that doesn't care about ice ages sea levels or even nuclear war what safer place than in orbit around the earth and by placing the ark in orbit you not only ensure the safety of its contents you ensure that the only way to become aware of it is by reaching a certain level of technology now we have the ability to visit the black knight satellite we could send a craft into its orbit right now and try to discover its secrets or we could bring it back to earth and share its secrets with the rest of the world why haven't we done this who knows maybe the reason the black knight satellite is kept secret from the world is because someone has already visited and maybe even opened it and maybe they didn't like what they found [Music] the black knight satellite is a fascinating story the modern version of the legend is a combination of a few stories rolled into one so let's unravel the truth throw away what's false and see what's left so tesla and marconi did hear radio pulses but they weren't aliens they were pulsars and pulsars weren't discovered officially until 1968 so they would have definitely sounded like an intelligent broadcast to tesla aliens could be using pulsars to communicate they could be that would be an efficient way to do it still they weren't coming from the black knight now the lds or long-delayed radio echoes are harder to explain they're actually still a mystery but most scientists think it's something in the atmosphere that's causing it another theory is that the signals are reflecting off plasma clouds from the sun and a fun theory is that the signals are being reflected back from the moon whatever's causing it we still don't know now duncan london's translation of the lds into star maps it doesn't hold up the scrutiny he later walked the claims back saying there wasn't scientific evidence he was just deducing what he thought the signals could mean but since then he's revised his opinion once again and thinks epsilon bowotis is special booties now the pictures from nasa are amazing the official explanation is that during a spacewalk an astronaut was installing a thermal cover the cover got away from him and ended up floating away the pictures were taken to document this a space blanket that's what they're going with well that's the official explanation and in some of the photos it does look like a flat shiny object but in other photos it looks pretty solid all right let's assume that the earliest evidence the radio signals and the latest evidence the photos are debunked let's just assume it still the evidence in between it's interesting for example there was a newspaper report of an object spotted in 1960.
