The Why Files: Operation Podcast - 66: The Black Knight Satellite - Watching us from orbit for 13,000 years

Episode Date: July 19, 2022

THE BLACK KNIGHT SATELLITE In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1. It was the first satellite in Earth's orbit. Or was it? For over a hundred years, an object has been seen, heard and *photographed* by people all around the world. This object became known as the Black Knight Satellite. The signals coming from the Black Knight Satellite have been decoded. And if the translation is correct, it's been watching us for 13,000 years. The existence of the Black Knight Satellite has been confirmed by astronauts, but covered up by governments. It's been filmed by astronomers, but the film erased. Supporters of the Black Knight Satellite have been shunned and ridiculed, but now they're speaking up.  Let's find out why. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/thewhyfiles/support

You searched for your informant, who disappeared without a trace. You knew there were witnesses, but lips were sealed. You swept the city, driving closer to the truth. While curled up on the couch with your cat. There's more to imagine when you listen. Discover heart-pounding thrillers on Audible. Hey, it's your buddy AJ from the Y-Files. And Hecklefish.

Right, and Hecklefish. We just wanted to tell you that if you want to start a podcast, Spotify makes it easy. It'd have to be easy for humans to understand it. Will you stop that? I'm just saying. Spotify for Podcasters lets you record and edit podcasts from your computer. I don't have a computer. Do you have a phone? Of course

I have a phone. I'm not a savage. Well, with Spotify, you can record podcasts from your phone, too. Spotify makes it easy to distribute your podcast to every platform and you can even earn money. I do need money. What do you need money for? You kidding? I'm getting killed on guppy support payments. These 3X wives are expensive. You don't want to support your kids? What are you need money for? You kidding? I'm getting killed on guppy support payments. These 3X wives are expensive.

You don't want to support your kids? What are you, my wife's lawyer now? Never mind. And I don't know if you noticed, but all Y-Files episodes are video, too. And there's a ton of other features, but you... But we can't be here all day. Will you settle down? I need you to hurry up with this stupid commercial.

I got a packed calendar today. I'm sorry about him. Anyway, check out Spotify for Podcasters. It's free, no catch, and a packed calendar today. I'm sorry about him. Anyway, check out Spotify for podcasters. It's free, no catch, and you could start today. Are we done? We're done, but you need to check your attitude. Excuse me, but I don't have all day to sit here and talk about Spotify. This would go a lot faster if you would just let me get through it. 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 S have been decoded. And if the translation is correct, it's been watching us for 13,000 years. Let's find out why. 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.

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 NICAP. He claimed that U.S. government scientists working out of White Sands, New Mexico, had found one or two artificial satellites and were 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 broadcasts 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 prograde 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 said, 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.

In 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 unsuspected, unpredicted bright satellite. Stations around the world have been asked to help track it. And this is exactly what happened. From his Paris lab, Jacques Vallée observed, tracked, and even filmed the Black Knight satellite. And the first thing that stood out was that it was in polar orbit.

Now, there were no Earth-based satellites in polar orbit yet. But 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, Vallée 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 his 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. Oh, that's a bunch of BS. I agree. So did Vallée. By the way, Vallée 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. Yeah, this guy sounds alright for a Frenchman. He 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. You sailed beyond the horizon in search of an island scrubbed from every map. You battled krakens and navigated through storms. Your spade struck the lid of a long-lost treasure chest. While you cooked a lasagna. There's more to imagine when you listen. Discover best-selling adventure stories on Audible. 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 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, nah, 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. Oh, come on. 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 craft still well above what we could get there. 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, as 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 Lunnan, a researcher from Scotland, went back and analyzed all the LDE data compiled from the Norwegian scientists. Lunnan found a pattern. And in that pattern, a message. And in that message, a message. And in that message, a map. In a 1973 article in Spaceflight Magazine, Duncan Lunnan said he had identified a hidden radio message sent by the Black Knight satellite. Lunnan 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 Lunan reversed the axes. The result? A collection of dots that appeared to be a sky map. Specifically, the constellation Boötis. What? He looks like booties.

The only star in the constellation that was out of place was Epsilon Boötis. Lunan 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. Lunan 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 are 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. And this rotation of the sky map is called axial precession. What does this have to do with the Black Knight map? Well, Arcturus was slightly out of place for 1973. But when London adjusted the map further back in time, accounting for axial precession, the stars lined up.

The Black Knight satellite wasn't a new arrival. According to the map, it's been here for 13,000 years. Lunan 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 Wotus, 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. What's going on? Speechless. 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. You sailed beyond the horizon in search of an island scrubbed from every map. You battled krakens and navigated through storms.

Your spade struck the lid of a long-lost treasure chest. While you cooked a lasagna. There's more to imagine when you listen. Discover best-selling adventure stories on Audible. 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 100 years of speculation, we finally have proof of the mysterious Black Knight satellite. That leaves the question, why is it here? Well, 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's 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 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. 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 LDEs, 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 Lunnan's translation of the LDEs into star maps,

it doesn't hold up to 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 Boetus is special. 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.

The U.S. government said this was actually the Discoverer 5 capsule that got off course. Fine. Why was it moving in retrograde when satellites didn't do that? The government said that it malfunctioned and the thrusters sent it in the wrong direction. Okay, if that's true, and it was the Discoverer 5, which was entered into the database in 1960, how does that explain that even though the news report was from 1960, it was actually referring to a sighting earlier in 1959. Well, the government said that someone accidentally entered the wrong date into the system. Hey, I'm just telling you what happened.

What makes the story even more suspicious is that all of this was a lie anyway. The military was using Discoverer as a cover story for the Corona Project, a spy satellite program. It kept that information classified for years. So let's assume that sighting is debunked. What about all the other evidence? Sightings from around the world confirmed by governments and private citizens. Why were photographs and film mysteriously destroyed? Why are there astronauts claiming there is an active cover-up? There are a lot of questions left unanswered. Now, do I think Tesla heard the Black Knight satellite? No. Do I think the NASA photos are the Black Knight satellite? No. Do I believe eyewitness reports from astronauts and astronomers who put their reputations in jeopardy by speaking out?

Yes, I do. There is clearly more to the story that we're not being told. And because you're watching this right now, I know you care about the truth. So you have to keep asking questions. You have to keep the pressure on. And those in power will try to dismiss you. They will not take you seriously. But that too is a lie. Those in power take you very seriously. And they can silence one astronomer. And they can silence one astronaut. But they can't silence all of us.

You could feel the dominoes about to fall. I feel it too. It's going to take courage for someone to push that first domino. But once it finally falls, they all fall. And when that happens, there's no turning back. Thank you so much for hanging out with me today. My name is AJ. That's Hecklefish. This has been the Y-Files. If you had fun or learned anything, do me a favor and like, comment, and share this video. It really helps out a small channel. And if you're new here

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