Black Knight
The Black Knight is one of the best-known modern legends in UFO and conspiracy-theory literature: an allegedly roughly 13,000-year-old artificial object orbiting the Earth.
The Black Knight is the legend of a satellite of allegedly extraterrestrial origin orbiting the Earth. According to the story, the object has been circling the planet for roughly 13,000 years and occasionally transmits signals. No official body acknowledges its existence, and no scientific evidence supports it. The concept lives on in ufology and conspiracy-theory circles.
Elements of the legend
The story was assembled from various episodes that are independent of one another. Frequently mentioned are the radio "long-delayed echoes" observed in the late 1920s, Nikola Tesla's alleged strange radio signals, and newspaper reports from the mid-20th century about unknown orbiting objects. The 13,000-year age comes from a 1973 interpretation by Scottish writer Duncan Lunan. He attempted to decipher the delayed radio echoes as a message from an alien probe, but later retracted this interpretation himself. Later versions of the legend also cite photographs taken during the 1998 STS-88 Space Shuttle mission, which show a dark, irregularly shaped object. According to its believers, these are all manifestations of the same object.
Official and skeptical position
According to skeptics, the legend is a narrative woven from several unrelated phenomena. They explain the radio echoes by wave-propagation phenomena associated with the upper layers of the atmosphere, and the 13,000-year interpretation was rejected by its own author. According to NASA, the object seen in the 1998 photos was a thermal blanket that came loose during a spacewalk while the first components of the space station were being assembled.
The legend's popularity is largely due to the internet and UFO media, where it regularly surfaces as an example of an "ancient alien satellite."