A photo taken during the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] mission claimed by some to show the Black Knight satellite is catalogued by NASA as a photo of space debris,[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and space journalist [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] considers it as probable debris of a thermal blanket confirmed as lost during the mission.[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.][You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]According to some [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] conspiracists, the Black Knight is an artificial satellite of extraterrestrial origin which has orbited Earth for approximately 13,000 years; the "satellite" story is most likely a conflation of several disconnected stories about various objects and their interpretations,[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] all of them well documented independently and none using the term "Black Knight" upon their first publication.[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] According to senior education support officer Martina Redpath of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] in Northern Ireland:
The origin of the Black Knight legend is often "retrospectively dated" back to [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] supposedly heard during the 1899 radio experiments of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.][You must be registered and logged in to see this link.][You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] first heard by [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] operator Jørgen Hals in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], Norway, in 1928.[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] of the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] podcast attributes Tesla's 1899 radio signals to [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], which were not identified until 1968.[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]Black Knight is a jumble of completely unrelated stories; reports of unusual science observations, authors promoting fringe ideas, classified spy satellites and people over-interpreting photos. These ingredients have been chopped up, stirred together and stewed on the internet to one rambling and inconsistent dollop of myth.[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
In 1954, [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] researcher [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] told newspapers that the United States Air Force had reported that two satellites orbiting Earth had been detected. At that time, no country had the technology to launch a satellite. [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] have noted that Keyhoe had been promoting a UFO book at the time, and the news stories were likely written "[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]" and not intended to be taken seriously.[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.][You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
A British rocket called the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] was used in conjunction with the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] program between 1958 and 1965, to test re-entry vehicles. A "Black Knight satellite launcher" project announced in 1964[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] was considered a priority by the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] The program never put anything into orbit,[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and it is unrelated to the Black Knight satellite legend.[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
In February 1960, [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] reported that the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] had detected a dark object thought to be a [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] spy satellite in orbit. A follow-up article confirmed that the object was "the remains of an Air Force [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] satellite that had gone astray."[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.][You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
In 1963, astronaut [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] supposedly reported a UFO sighting during his 15th orbit in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] that was confirmed by tracking stations, but there is no evidence that this happened.[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] Neither NASA's mission transcripts nor Cooper's personal copies show any such report being made during the orbit.[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
In 1973, Scottish author [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] analyzed the long delayed radio echoes received by Hals and others and speculated that they could possibly originate from a 13,000 year old alien probe located in an orbit around the Earth's Moon. He suggested that the probe may have originated from a planet located in the solar system of star [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]. Lunan later retracted his conclusions, saying that he had made "outright errors" and that his methods had been "unscientific".[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.][You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
Science fiction author [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]'s 1981 novel [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] or Vast Active Living Intelligence System mentions the Black Knight.[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] photographed in 1998 during the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] mission has been widely claimed to be the Black Knight satellite. Space journalist [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] considers it probable that the photographs are of a thermal blanket that was confirmed as lost during an [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] by [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.][You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]