20 years ago, NASA referenced space debris in low orbit that was just thermal blanket lost by an astronaut. And yet, ufologists and other followers of conspiracy theories have estimated that it was an object of extraterrestrial origin approximately 13,000 years old.
In 1998 during mission STS-88 – 13th mission of NASA's space shuttle Endeavor – an astronaut dropped a thermal blanket during a spacewalk. This object was to equip part of the device. Before this blanket ends up burning in the Earth's atmosphere, the astronauts immortalize it in image. In its space debris database, NASA lists the object as STS088-724-66. Nevertheless, a community of ufologists and conspiracy theorists renamed the object Black Knight Satellite (or satellite of the Black Knight). According to them, it is a technological object of extraterrestrial origin dating back 13,000 years and in near-polar orbit around the Earth.
However, this Black Knight Satellite story dates back to much further. Conspiracy theorists believe that the first evidence of the object's extraterrestrial nature originated with Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), famous for his leading role in the development and adoption of alternating current for the transmission and distribution of electricity. electricity. It must be said that several times, the inventor had claimed to have received communications of a regular and mathematical nature from Mars. These receptions date from 1899, during experiments on radio waves. Today scientists think it was a pulsar or waves that orbiting objects emit naturally . For the conspirators, Tesla probably made contact with the extraterrestrials.
Later in 1927, the Norwegian engineer Jørgen Hals noticed a curious phenomenon. The radio messages he sent returned to him moments later . This kind of echo had an extraterrestrial origin, according to the person concerned. Much later, a certain Duncan Lunan claimed that the Black Knight Satellite was the source of this echo.
In 1954, various newspapers reported various testimonies, in particular that of a retired soldier converted into a UFO hunter. According to him, the US Air Force had detected two satellites in Earth orbit whereas at the time, no one had the corresponding technology. In 1960, another testimony evoked this time the US Navy, which would have detected a dark object in the sky. This one was on an inclined orbit of 79° with respect to the equator and observed a movement of revolution of 104.5 minutes. However, the United States Navy was tracking the fragment of the launch envelope of the Discoverer VIII satellite at the same time. , whose orbit was similar.
Since then, all these stories have obviously been debunked. But this type of belief persists over time. Indeed, everything that humans cannot (yet) explain is the subject of the wildest beliefs and fantasies.
