The Black Knight Satellite is an metallic object in a polar orbit with Earth. There has been a lot of fairly fantastical speculation over the origins and purpose of this 100 meter long (328 feet) satellite. The satellite was discovered in the 1920’s by means of radio transmissions. Scientists, including the brilliant Nikola Telsa were believed to receiving radio transitions from the spinning hunk of metal. This was one of the first recorded cases of Long Delay Echoes (LDE), a phenomena in which the sender of a radio transmission receives an echo of the transmission after a minimum of 2.7 seconds.

The orbit of the object is highly eccentric. It is in a polar orbit, meaning that its flight path passes over both magnetic poles of the planet. Humans launched the first satellite that had an intentional polar orbit in 1960. The Black Knight is the only non terrestrial object to have this flight pattern. It circles the Earth at 79 degrees off the equator, not the 90 degrees that is considered a standard polar orbit. The Black Knight is moving quickly, completing it’s orbit every 104.5 minutes. No country has claimed the object.

This ends the factual list for the Black Knight Satellite. The rest of the available information is mainly speculation. The United States and Russian government have shown marked interest in the device but not shared much of it’s information.

 ‘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,’ said senior education support officer, Martina Redpath, of Armagh Planetarium.

There is the theory that it is a bungled spacecraft part or a broken satellite. This is the most easily dismissed theory, as the discovery of the object predates the first satellite launch. Its massive size also eliminates the remaining probability of it being a forgotten human construct.

The more popular theories say the Black Knight is an alien probe, spy device, or part of a larger alien communication network. This is due to a number of people recording radio transmissions seeming to originate to the satellite. Tesla said the frequency and elements of the transmission were unlike any he had seen before. There are many natural phenomena that Tesla could have been receiving that science as a whole had not yet to identify. While we can not validate the theory that he was listening to the Knight it is an interesting theory.

In 1973, Duncan Lunan, a science fiction author and graduate of the famous University of Glasgow, experimented with the transmissions emanating from the Black Knight. The strength and intervals of the transmissions led him to believe that the signals were coming from Epsilon Bootis, a star near the Moon. Translating the messages led him to believe the transmissions had been going on for 13,00 years. The Black Knight was send star charts and information to find other intelligent life!

The lack of information creates appropriate space for varied interpretations of available fact. People desperate for conformation of alien life are willing to view elements in a certain light to create hope. As space travel becomes more sophisticated, hopefully we will be able to extract the device for study. It is bizarre that such a mystery has been spinning around our planet for at least decades, and organizations aren’t more interested in it.