# An alien satellite called the Black Knight has silently orbited Earth for 13,000 years

**Verdict: Contradicted.** The 'proof' is a lost thermal blanket NASA itself catalogued and tracked back to Earth in 1998; everything else in the story is a different, unrelated event stitched on decades later.

Category: UFOs & Aliens · Era: Space age · First circulated: 1998 (as a single narrative); component threads date to 1899, the 1920s, and 1954 · Believed by: A recurring UFO-forum and social-media staple; no formal polling exists
URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/black-knight-satellite

## Summary
A viral claim that a dark, ancient, extraterrestrial satellite has tracked Earth from a near-polar orbit for thirteen millennia, 'proven' by a real 1998 NASA photo, real 1920s radio echoes, and Nikola Tesla's real 1899 signals. Every piece is genuine. None of them are the same story.

## The claim
That a mysterious dark object of non-human origin, dubbed the 'Black Knight,' has orbited Earth in a near-polar path for roughly 13,000 years, and that its existence is evidenced by a 1998 NASA photograph of a dark object, by 'long-delayed echoes' heard by radio operators in the 1920s, and by Nikola Tesla's 1899 report of receiving unexplained repeating radio signals.

## Origin and timeline
- 1899: At his Colorado Springs lab, Nikola Tesla records faint, rhythmic electrical disturbances on his receiving equipment and later speculates, in print, that they might be a signal from another world.
- 1928: Norwegian radio amateur Jørgen Hals, and colleagues in the Netherlands, document 'long-delayed echoes' (LDEs): transmitted signals returning several seconds later than physics of the day easily explained.
- 1954: Aviation Week and a wire report, drawing on UFO writer Donald Keyhoe, claim the U.S. Air Force is tracking two 'satellites' in polar orbit, three years before any nation had orbital launch capability. Astronomers attribute the objects to natural causes within months.
- 1973: Scottish writer Duncan Lunan reinterprets the 1920s LDE data as a star map pointing to Epsilon Boötis, and calculates the sender must have arrived roughly 13,000 years ago. He formally withdraws the analysis in 1976, calling parts of his method unscientific.
- Dec 1998: During STS-88, the first Space Station assembly mission, astronaut Jerry Ross loses a thermal cover during a spacewalk; the crew photographs the tumbling object, and NASA catalogues and tracks it as orbital debris.
- 2000s–present: Internet retellings splice the 1998 photo, the 1920s echoes, Tesla's 1899 remarks, and the 1954 scare into a single, continuous 'Black Knight' narrative, a story none of the original participants ever told.

## The evidence, claim by claim
- Claim: A 1998 NASA photograph shows a genuinely unidentified dark, angular object in orbit.
  Evidence: The photograph is real and NASA-taken, but it is not unidentified. NASA's own Johnson Space Center astronaut-photography record for the frame (STS088-724-65, 11 Dec 1998) logs the feature as space debris, and NASA's catalogue lists the object (a lost trunnion-pin thermal cover) as item 25570, tracked from release on 7 December to atmospheric reentry on 14 December 1998, a seven-day orbit.
- Claim: Radio engineers in the 1920s recorded echoes science still cannot explain, suggesting a distant reflecting object.
  Evidence: Long-delayed echoes are real and remain an active research topic, but 'unexplained' does not mean 'artificial satellite.' Peer-reviewed physics proposes several natural mechanisms (magnetospheric ducting, ionospheric reflection, and radio-to-plasma-wave mode conversion), none of which requires an object in orbit, let alone one 13,000 years old.
- Claim: Nikola Tesla himself reported receiving deliberate, patterned signals in 1899 and suspected an extraterrestrial source.
  Evidence: Tesla's own account, published in Collier's Weekly in 1901, describes counted, rhythmic disturbances and his speculation about Mars, but he never mentioned a satellite, an ancient object, or an orbit, and his signals are separated from the 'Black Knight' story by more than a century and by every intervening thread that later got attached to it.

## Why people believe it
- Each individual thread is a genuine historical curiosity (a real photo, a real radio anomaly, a real inventor's real speculation), which lends the composite story an unusual amount of true material to point to.
- The pieces span a century and were assembled after the fact into a tidy narrative, which feels like uncovering a pattern rather than building one; conspiratorial reasoning often mistakes coincidence-hunting for detective work.
- A recurring 'ancient watcher' trope taps the same hope and unease that drives ancient-astronaut theories generally: the idea that we are not the first, and are not unobserved.

## Open questions
- The 'long-delayed echoes' first logged in the 1920s are real, and the precise physical mechanism behind them is still debated among ionospheric and magnetospheric physicists today; proposed explanations include signals ducted along magnetic field lines, repeated round-the-world reflection, and conversion between radio waves and plasma waves, with no single mechanism universally confirmed a century on. That is a genuine open question in radio physics. It is not, on any credible account, evidence of a satellite: an unresolved propagation mechanism doesn't imply an orbiting object of any origin, ancient or otherwise, and the specific '13,000-year' interpretation of the data was retracted by the person who proposed it.

## Sources
- Astronaut Photography of Earth: STS088-724-65 (mission record, frame identified as space debris), NASA Johnson Space Center, Earth Observations Laboratory (1998): https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/SearchPhotos/photo.pl?mission=STS088&roll=724&frame=65
- STS-88 Black Knight photograph, catalogued object 25570 (thermal/trunnion-pin cover, released 7 Dec 1998, decayed 14 Dec 1998), NASA image archive / Wikimedia Commons (NASA-credited) (1998): https://archive.org/details/black-knight-satellite_202309
- The Five Most Likely Explanations for Long Delayed Echoes, Sverre Holm, Department of Physics, University of Oslo: https://www.mn.uio.no/fysikk/english/people/aca/sverre/articles/lde.html
- Talking With The Planets, Nikola Tesla, Collier's Weekly (original 1901 text, archived) (1901): https://earlyradiohistory.us/1901talk.htm
- Phantom Satellite? What IS It? What ISN'T It? Why the Confusion?, James Oberg, space historian and former NASA STS-88 trajectory engineer: https://www.jamesoberg.com/sts88_and-black-knight.pdf
- Black Knight satellite conspiracy theory, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Knight_satellite_conspiracy_theory
- Science: Space Watch's First Catch, Time (1960): https://time.com/archive/6829749/science-space-watchs-first-catch/
- The Truth About the Black Knight Satellite Mystery, Martina Redpath, Armagh Observatory and Planetarium (2013): https://armaghplanet.com/the-truth-about-the-black-knight-satellite-mystery.html
- Donald Keyhoe, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Keyhoe

Rated by The Conspiratory, a neutral, sourced encyclopedia of conspiracy theories. Full page: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/black-knight-satellite