18 MAY / JUNE 2022 popularmechanics.co.za
HOW YOUR WORLD WORKS
SPACE
/ BY CAROLINE DELBERT AND COURTNEY LINDER /The truth
about the
Black Knight
conspiracy
theory T
AKE A GOOD LOOK AT THE PHOTOGRAPH
on this page. NASA captured this image of a
mysterious black object orbiting the Earth in
1998, during the first Space Shuttle mission to
the International Space Station (ISS).
The space agency refers to the strange entity
as item STS088-724-66 in its catalogue of space
junk floating in low-Earth orbit (within 2 000 km). Jerry
Ross, an astronaut who took part in that mission, says that
the object is a wayward thermal blanket that broke loose
while his team tried to attach an American module to
a Russian module on the ISS.
But for a small, devoted following, it’s a 13 000-year-old,
artificially made satellite known as the Black Knight. So,
could this peculiar object really have come from ancient
aliens? Or is it just an innocuous piece of space debris?
The facts surrounding the Black Knight are cobbled
together from a number of tales. It begins with Nikola
Tesla, who said that he had received radio signals from
space during his 1899 radio experiments in Colorado
Springs. Martians, he believed, were attempting to
communicate with humans through numbers, since
they’re a universal language.
In a February 1901 Collier’s Weekly article, Tesla
recounted his experience: ‘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 then 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.’
Black Knight truthers cite this as the first sign of their
satellite, which sent the radio pulses. Scientists have since
determined that those radio pulses were most likely
naturally occurring signals that space objects emit while
in orbit. The prevailing theory, while still unlikely, is that
Tesla heard a pulsar, or a faraway celestial body that emits
regular pulses of radio waves. Sure, the Black Knight could
have emitted such pulses, but that still doesn’t make it
alien in nature.
Still, the theory that aliens were communicating with
Earth through radio pulses propagated even further in
1927 when civil engineer and ham radio operator Jørgen
Hals stumbled upon an unusual quality to his radio signals.
As he transmitted from his home in Oslo, the signals would
unexpectedly return to him moments later. Hals perceived
this as an alien phenomenon.
Nearly 50 years later, an article in Analog Science Fiction
and Fact tried to make sense of Hals’s radio echoes. TheNASA captured
this image
during the
STS-88 Space
Shuttle mission
while 396 km
above the coast
of Namibia and
looking north.