The Black Knight satellite is claimed by some conspiracy theorists to be an object approximately 13,000 years old of extraterrestrial origin orbiting the earth in near-polar orbit. Some critics and mainstream academics have called it a conspiracy theory and ‘one rambling and inconsistent dollop of myth.’

The story has its origins in 1954 when newspapers, including the St. Louis Post Dispatch and the San Francisco Examiner ran stories attributed to retired naval aviation major and UFO researcher Donald Keyhoe saying that the US Air Force had reported that two satellites orbiting the Earth had been detected. At this time no one had the technology to launch a satellite.

In February 1960, there was a further claim by TIME that the US Navy had detected a dark object thought to be a Soviet spy satellite in an orbit inclined at 79° from the equator with an orbital period of 104.5 minutes. Its orbit was also highly eccentric with an apogee of 1,728 km (1,074 mi) and a perigee of only 216 km (134 mi). At the time the Navy was tracking a fragment of casing from the Discoverer VIII satellite launch which has the same orbit, and it is believed to be a derelict US satellite that had gone astray.
Plenty has been said on the subject and the frustrating thing is, that with all the sophisticated tech and all the gadgets that we now have at disposal – we still can’t get the real answer to this. Bit like crop circles, UFOs, Big Foot and even the Loch Ness Monster. We can put man on the moon but we can’t solve half of these mysteries. The space station must be able to track this or may be it flies past the station all the time but where are the images?

Interestingly on August 23, 1954, the technology magazine Aviation Week and Space Technology released a story about the Black Knight Satellite that angered the Pentagon who were trying to keep the information secret.

However, some of the more interesting discoveries about space in the series revolved not around what humanity has done, but what potential visitors have done. In 1950s, a telescope picked up a satellite called the Black Knight, a strange, unexplained satellite which orbits the Earth.

In  1950s, climate where people were expecting visitors from the sky at any moment, the public were whipped into frenzy about this strange satellite. According to monitoring agencies around the world, The Black knight has been transmitting radio signals for over 50 years now. The USA and Russia have shown particular interest in this ‘unidentified space object’ (maybe it is one of theirs?) Rumors are that it was Nikola Tesla the first man to ‘intercept’ a signal from this otherworldly satellite in 1899 after building a high-voltage radio device in Colorado Springs and we all know what happened to Tesla.


Today, many explanations for the existence of this satellite have been suggested; from a piece of debris, to a hallucination, to a visitor from another planet. It could just be debris. However, what is certain is that to date the satellite still causes controversy whenever it is mentioned. The frustration continues – perhaps it belongs to the man on the moon.
Source: The Vintage News