popularmechanics.co.za MAY / JUNE 2022 19PH
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author, Duncan Lunan, posited that a 13 000-year-old
object orbiting the Moon could have led to the long-delayed
echoes (the 13 000 figure having to do with the positioning
of the North Pole star, Polaris). ‘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,’ Lunan said in 1998. However, we now
recognise those signals as ‘long-delayed echoes’ that
you can hear about 2.7 seconds or more after a radio
transmission. And Lunan has since distanced himself
from the Black Knight theory.
One more bit of disjointed speculation: In 1960, TIME
published a story noting that the US Navy had detected
an unidentified satellite that may have been a piece
of Soviet spy technology. It turned out to be a broken-
off piece of the Discoverer 5 – an early US photo
reconnaissance (spy) satellite – but believers still point
to this as definitive proof.
Like any good conspiracy theory, the Black Knight has
a few fun hooks, plus some high-profile boosts that add a
sheen of credibility to the story. In 1963, for instance,
Project Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper supposedly
reported seeing a UFO during his 15th orbit while aboard
the Faith 7 spacecraft, according to the UK’s Armagh
Observatory and Planetarium. Never mind that Cooper
has since produced transcripts to the contrary, stating that
he never saw an alien spacecraft during that particular
mission – Black Knight devotees still include this history
in the conspiracy theory origin story.
But the Black Knight is almost certainly the series
of discrete events that explain it away: Tesla hearing
pulsars or some other natural signal, Hals receiving an
echo, TIME reporting on a secret US government satellite
in good faith, and the astronauts of the ISS seeing a lost
blanket in orbit.
From a psychological perspective, it makes sense that
people want to believe in the Black Knight, says Alice
Gorman, PhD, an associate professor at Flinders University
in Adelaide, Australia, who studies space archaeology.
‘It’s astonishing that there aren’t more conspiracy
theories about stuff in space,’ she says. ‘It’s really difficult
to see details on stuff in Earth’s orbit, even through really
high-powered telescopes. So when you can’t see it, then
you can imagine anything about it.’
While NASA and other space organisations keep
catalogues of the space debris that they encounter, these
lists are still incomplete and dependent on nations sharing
sometimes sensitive data.‘There’s stuff that might have a catalogue number, but
we don’t actually know what it is,’ she says. ‘That makes it
a bit easier to say, “Well, here’s this mysterious object that
comes from somewhere else.”’
As for the photo that supposedly depicts the Black
Knight? Gorman says that because the image shows a large
cross-section of the thermal blanket in orbit, it looks to
the human eye like a large, solid object. That means the
image could be nothing more than an optical illusion,
which isn’t too shocking when you consider that people
also commonly mistake birds and aeroplanes for UFOs,
she says.
And there’s still this glaring hole in the Black Knight
conspiracy theory: How exactly does an object stay in orbit
for 13 000 years? ‘You have to use fuel and have rocket
engines and stuff to just stay up there... Is this some
amazing new propulsion system that we don’t know
anything about yet on Earth?’ Gorman wonders.How the Black Knight could exist
Let’s pretend for a moment
that the Black Knight really
does exist. How could it slip
by unnoticed for 13 000 years?
Gorman has a few ideas.
The first: mimic one of the
small pieces of space junk that
are no larger than 10 cm in size- space organisations exercise
more scrutiny over larger objects.
‘We’re going to assume that aliens
have much more advanced tech-
nology than us, so something [that
size] could be just as advanced as
something the size of a house.’
To avoid collisions with other
scraps of space junk, aliens could
develop miniaturised force-field
technology to keep their probe
from getting hit, Gorman says.
And thinking long-term, there’s
the possibility that Earth could
eventually have its own ring
system – made up entirely of
space junk in the ‘graveyard
orbit’, about 300 km above most
working satellites. If and when that
day comes, the Black Knight will
have a decision to make, Gorman
says: ‘Will it join this ring and risk
detection, or run away and hide?’- Courtney Linder