For some time now, the legend of The Black Knight Satellite has floated through the literature on UFOs and other Forteana. The myth that has arisen over the years is of an object of unknown origin that circumnavigates a polar orbit–and has been doing so for 13,000 years.
Others believe the story is mere
ly an aggregate of half-truths and fantasy.
Legend has it that in 1899 Nikola Tesla received a strange, repeating radio signal that he believed originated from beyond Earth.
In 1954, before humans had ever launched a satellite, UFOlogist Donald Keyhoe was reported as saying the Air Force had detected two orbiting the planet.
A few years later, the Navy (according to some vague sources) detected a dark object in a strange orbit, but determined it was merely a piece of the damaged Discoverer VIII satellite casing.
Scottish writer Duncan Lunan concluded in 1973 that radio data collected by Norwegian researchers rendered a star chart to Epsilon Bootis in the Bootes constellation. Lunan believed a 12,600 year old object orbiting Earth was transmitting these aberrant signals. Eventually Lunan reconsidered his interpretation of the data and retracted his hypothesis, but not before it became ingrained in UFO literature.
In 1988, the first shuttle mission to the International Space Station (STS-88) snagged an image of what some considered an alien artifact (possibly Erich von Daniken’s “Pakal Spacecraft” ), but was likely a thermal blanket inadvertently jettisoned during an extravehicular walkabout.
Over the years, these stories have coalesced into or otherwise bolstered the idea of an alien probe that orbits our planet daily.