Black Knight satellite conspiracy theories are so juicy you wanna believe them. From ancient civilizations to alien technology, the source material is too good to be denied. Nikola Tesla is even involved. Everything connected to Tesla is too good to be true, including David Bowie’s portrayal of him in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige. Wait, and didn't Nolan also direct The Dark Knight? Doesn't that sound a lot like Black Knight? There's another conspiracy for you right there.
The mythology of the Black Knight satellite is so dense and thorny critics dismissed it as a collection of unrelated tales. But if you look hard enough, it all fits together. So what is the Black Knight satellite? That's the easy bit to explain - it's an alien satellite that's supposedly been orbiting Earth for about 13,000 years. This list takes you through Black Knight satellite theories one by one, connecting the missing pieces.
In 1901, Tesla published an article in Collier's Weekly detailing his experiments with electrical currents. He claims he experienced unexplained disturbances in electrical signals, and concludes that the source may have been extraterrestrials trying to communicate. He wrote:
It was some time afterward when the thought flashed upon my mind that the disturbances I had observed might be due to an intelligent control. Although I could not decipher their meaning, it was impossible for me to think of them as having been entirely accidental. The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another.
A Norwegian Engineer Heard Its Signal Transmissions
In 1927, amateur Norwegian radio operator Jørgen Hals discovered long delayed echoes (LDEs), which are echoes of short-wave transmissions. He couldn't figure out what was causing the LDEs, and neither could anyone else; scientists still don't know what causes them.
One theory is that these echoes were the same signals Tesla heard - and they were coming from intelligent beings in space.
Tesla and Hals both heard radio signals they attributed to intelligent beings from space, but in 1960, Ronald Bracewell took things a step further by publishing a theory on how other life forms might try to communicate with us. According to Bracewell, they would fill a probe or satellite with all the information they wanted to communicate and launch it into space. The probe would then seek civilizations capable of interpreting its messages.
Such a probe is necessary because it can travel great distances, and would need to get close to whichever planet it was trying to communicate with in order to transmit its messages. Were the transmissions Tesla and Hals heard coming from such a satellite?
In 1954, reports emerged that Dr. Lincoln LaPaz of the University of New Mexico spotted two satellites orbiting the Earth. LaPaz denied the claims, but it's possible the government was trying to cover up the sighting.
Clyde Tombaugh, famed astronomer who discovered Pluto, was at UNM with Lincoln LaPaz during the supposed Black Satellite sighting. Tombaugh and LaPaz were doing secret research for the military on the existence of alien satellites and the origins of other unexplained phenomena.
The first satellite released into space, Sputnik 1, was launched by Russia in October 1957. In 1954, three years before Sputnik, retired Marine Corps Major Donald Keyhoe claimed that two satellites were orbiting Earth, and that Secretary of the Air Force Harold Talbott had personally seen one of them.
Talbott denied the claims. Keyhoe was a UFO expert who wrote several nonfiction books on the subject and was taken quite seriously as a journalist.
