Thinking Sideways: Black Knight Satellite

we solved mysteries. We tend to try to solve mysteries. Show lies about us solving mysteries. He does occasionally. Well, we have another mystery this week that we're going to talk about, which is the Black Knights satellite. This story got suggested to us a long time ago, and I really apologize to whoever was the first person to suggest it to us, because I sort of lost your email and didn't write it down and I don't have your name. Yeah, Benjamin Uh suggested it a couple of months ago. I

have that written down, so he gets the prize. But to whoever the other person was, thank you. Maybe maybe it was Benjamin. I know this. We've this one's been in the hopper for all long time. We're trying to get better about writing that stuff down. Yeah, we've been doing pretty good, but in the beginning we're pretty sloppy. Yeah,

but let's talk about the Black Knights satellite. This. I'm just gonna preface this right now, which this is one of those stories that has been told and rehashed and re told so many times that it is so hard to get to the roots story that I'm just gonna give. Uh, I'm just gonna tell kind of the commingled version, which is what you see on a lot of the places

that you read about it. Come to think of it, that's kind of seems to be the version of the story that we tell a lot version, Yeah, the ones that are all just full of all kinds of fun stuff. Ye An, yep. So we're we're gonna we're just gonna go with every little bit that is on here to tell this story today. According to the lore, the Black Knights satellite was first discovered by none other Nicola Tesla. That doesn't surprise me, yep, the one of the Granddaddy's

a science The Granddaddy is he the granddaddy. Ink. Okay, I think they were. There's older granddaddies. But Tesla did some amazing He did some amazing stuff. The granddaddy. I'm not even gonna go there. In eighteen nine nine, Tesla was using a high voltage radio receiver is what you would be using, uh, And it was a two hundred foot tower he was I think he was in Colorado. He'd gotten funding by one of his major backers to

build this thing. But he was picking up unusual transmissions, which he believed had to be intelligent because they were very consistent, they were repeating patterns, and he evidently thought that they were likely to be extraterrestrial. I know that he thought that they were intelligent, but I've also seen that it was said that he believed they were extraterrestrials. It was coming from space. It was coming from space. May actually later when we moved in this story, is

gonna do this a bunch. We're gonna do a bunch of skips in time. We're gonna skip forward to the nine twenties. Unusual transmissions began being picked up by Ham radio operators, and they were they were obviously earthly in origin. Because they were transmissions coming from Earth, but they were weird and they shouldn't have been picked up where and when they were picked up. These are something that at the time no one understood and today we don't really

know what they are or what causes them. But there what are referred to as l d s, which stands for long delay echoes, and people have attributed this to the Black Night satellite. We talked about thought a little bit during Lost Boil Area skipping skipping, it's it's it's

a similar phenomena to skipping. Yeah, so yeah, essentially that's what they're saying, then, is that the Black Knight satellite picked up these transmissions and then bounced them back to didn't just echo off the off the satellite, but it actually absorber it recorded it, retransmitted back down at different intervals and a delay. Yes, the delay was not consistent, though I understand correct. It is not a consistent delay

can anywhere. I think it's anywhere from six to thirty to thirty seconds to sometimes up to a minute or so. It's it's really inconsistent. It's really weird, that a little weird. We're gonna move forward again to nine to Nino, and according to the story, the US government released information that

they had detected two satellites that we're gonna polar orbit. First, you need to understand that we, and by we I mean the human race, not us specifically Team Side yes, not Team Sideways, but the actual human race had not yet developed a capability to put a satellite into orbit. That wouldn't happen until October four, nine seven, when sput Nick was put into orbit, So we hadn't launched a satellite at all. I guess we should clarify also that

satellite can mean anything that's orbiting, right. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's of the satellite. Yes, anything that is intentionally orbiting the Earth, So it doesn't necessarily mean it was mechanical or anything like that. Very true. The other thing to keep in mind is that this, well, actually it's it says that there were two satellites at the time in a polar orbit. And I want to talk about a polar orbit real quick so that people know

what this is, because this is important. Most satellites are in an equatorial or semi equatorial orbit. That means they're going around the equator, and most people do satellites even today that way because it's easier because when a rocket is launched, you use the the inertia of the Earth to propel it in that direction. Not the inertia, but the speed. The rotation. Rotation is what I was after. But it helps with it. Yeah, so it gets it going. Yeah, that's why most most of them are west to east.

There's only a few of the east to west. But but the thing is is going in the opposite direction, or even more so, going in a polar orbit is hard because you kind of negate all of that speed that you've picked up on launch and then get something to rotate over each of the poles. So instead of going around the equator, we're rotated at ninety degrees. Now you're going over both the poles of going east west or west east, they're going north, south or southa correctly.

And that's a very good way to put it. And that's what you do for that is you just launched from a more northerly um launch point. That also helps a lot. But yeah, it's not tremendously unusual. A lot of survey and spice satellites have polar orbits because that's a great way to cover the entire surface of the

plane didn't very short at the time. That's the upside of the polar orbit is you're circling around the poles while the Earth is circling around underneath you, so you can take images of the whole thing, right, Yeah, So yeah, lots of lots of survey satellites and stuff like that use use the polar that's that's yeah. I mean obviously, our our earliest launches were just west to ease. Yeah. And and the first the first satellite, and I use

that that satellite, what man made satellite? Yes, the first man made sate, thank you, uh that we put into a polar orbit of any kind didn't happen until nineteen sixty. And this report is from nineteen fifty four, so there's some strange this there. The other thing is that, according to these reports, that satellite was transmitting radio signals that could be detected, but it couldn't be picked up the satellites from both of them, yes, or at least one

of them. Again, this is where the story gets a little fudgy. And I don't know, but signals are being sent, they're being picked up. We don't know what they are, and then the satellites just kind of disappear, or maybe we lost track of them. I'm not positive, but there's no more reporting on it at that time. I'm not sure what our tracking abilities were back in those days, because I mean, these days we have radars because obviously we want to track all the satellites that are up there.

And yeah, at that time, I don't know how. I don't even know how they picked them up. That's the hard part is, I don't know how these things were discovered because it can't find it in in the lore. Again, I'm gonna use that phrase. All of the retellings and the stuff that I've found and digging through, and I can't find out how it was picked up, just that it was. Yeah, so it makes you wonder. Yeah, we're

gonna skip ahead a couple of years to nine seven. Uh. There are accounts that the Black Night satellite was photographed following sput Nick two by a guy named Dr Caralis Coralis. I'm not sure he's Venezuela. It happened in Venezuela, so I'm assuming that it's it's a name that's of some Spanish origin, But I'm terrible at pronunciations, as we all know by now. So what I'm just gonna go with that. Somehow the b KS managed to swing out of its

polar orbit and and and get behind Sputnik two. Yeah, yeah, evidently who was shadowing sput Nick two. Yeah, and he took he took this photo of it when he was in he was in Caracas. But again, this is this is another bit. It's so jumbled, it's so muddle. I can't get good details on this that's good enough to retell. So I'm just gonna kind of leave it at that as it was. Photographs shadowing spot Nick two. And no, no pho, no copies of the photograph exists anywhere I

take it. I can't find them. I haven't seen anything. Again, We're gonna skip forward in time a couple of years to nineteen sixty. At that time, the US and the Russians had put successfully quite a few satellites into orbit. But you got to remember those. Of course, now we're in the Cold War, and just freaks the US military out that, oh my god, there's satellites up there that could be, you know, recording us or taking pictures of us.

You gotta keep track of those signs you do. And so they put up a net, a kind of a radar net like what you were alluding to a little bit earlier, Joe, so that they could track what came across. There was one on the eastern coast, one on the western coast, so they could track the things that came by.

On February eleven of nineteen sixty, newspapers announced that an object was detected that was of unknown origins, and it was described as a dark, tumbling object that was at a seventy nine It's orbiting seventy nine degrees off the equator, so close to a polar orbit. Um. Yeah, kind of, it's not exactly a true polar orbit as it was described from the nineteen fifty four reports, but I don't know. But it's also said that it had an eccentric or erratic orbit, and it had an apogee of and this

is where I'm gonna need your help here, Joe. So it says the apogee was one thousand, seven hundred twenty eight kilometers. What is that going to be in miles? Okay? And it had a parody of two hundred and sixteen kilometers, So what is that? Well, what is that equate two in miles. So yeah, is the low point in a bit, appig is the high point in the orbit. And the easy way that I always think of it is a way and appog will start with an A, which puts

Paragy closer. Does that make sense? The A and the P. It's it's kind of a what's what's the word I'm looking for, Tom, thank you? It's not, but it's kind of It's the way I remembered is apps away that puts Paragy close. It's it's not the best thing, but that's how I keep it straight in my little headshare. Yeah,

but now that was nine sixty. Now that this particular orbit, that this is what the U. S. Military reported, because I thought they reported something with a little bit not quite such an an erratic or that's again that's the difficulty here is that with retellings, it's hard to pin down exactly what was talked about or reported. I gotta say with you, if if this isn't indeed an alien object that they put in a put an orbit around

the planet, they did kind of a crappy job. Well, the thing obviously that I don't like talking about because I don't want to ever think about it. But you know, the whole like lost cosmonaut thing is like nineteen fifty nine. Uh so, I mean, you know, to have some weird lost space stuff in accidental orbit of the Earth, isn't you know? It's not it's not. Here's here's something. I mean, we've been talking about the orbit and stuff being up there,

but here's something that's weird about the orbit. To me is things that are in a stable orbit have to be two d two miles or more above the Earth. This thing was what was the miles, which to me doesn't make sense because that seems like it would come too close gravity and atmosphere would drag it and slow it down and pull it back to Earth. So it's a weird orbit to It would take a long time for that orbit the k but it would eventually. Yeah. Yeah. It's also said that, and this is talking about the

size of the satellite. It's said that the object was calculated to be somewhere between ten to fifteen tons. How I have no idea how that calculation was done, but that is that is miles and miles heavier, much much heavier than anything we had been able to put into orbit at that time. For the aliens um and I can't get a clear bead on the size of it. And this is this is the part that really jumps

out to me. Based on that weight is I've seen to a couple of places say that it was two ft by three foot, which would put it at what three six twelve cubic feet objects, Yeah, that's over a ton a cubic foot. That's freaking heavy. I mean there are some there are some metal cials that could be like that, but it has to be totally solid. Yeah, some some asteroids are, they're made of heavy metals. But I don't think anything that down and yeah, I would

have to be right. And so then you run into the problem of if it is broadcasting anything there can't also be contained within the technology to broadcasts that we know how to welfare that we know how to we know how to make, but you know how to make everything, Steve. Have you seen Joe's spacement? He makes everything down I got little elves down there, one of these things down there.

But here's the thing about if it's only two by three feet, then how did doctor what's his name of karacoss wal to manage to snap a picture of it? Let's let's see it. Well, I don't think Sputnik was very big. I don't, Yeah, I guess, but Nick wasn't all that big either. Sputnik two would have been the same design, just the second one shot up into space. But I mean, the thing is is that what we're gonna find with this story is we go through the

orbit changes, the weight changes, and the size changes. All these things change as we go and and so that's why I wanted to call it out. But if we go back to this nineteen sixties stuff, the military, according to the story, got really interested and they put a lot of effort into researching this mystery satellite, and they commissioned a special committee to gather information on it. And those findings have never been released. Nobody's ever seen them.

After that's a good question. After tracking this, what they are people are saying was the Black Night satellite in nineteen sixty for three weeks it again disappeared. But during that time, the strange transmissions, the l DSE, the long, the way echoes were being picked up. We're gonna move just slightly forward. In nineteen sixty to September three, there

is a tracking camera at Grooming Aircraft Corporation. It was at their Long Island factory or facility, and it said that it took a photo of the Black Night satellite. This is where things get a little kinky to me, is people on the ground said they had been seeing it for about two weeks. They could make it out. It was red and glowing and moving east to west. Uh. The speed was about it was described as being about

three times as normal. And it's shape like I talked about a minute ago, it's it's changed again in this It is now about nineteen ft long and ways thirty two thousand pounds. I don't I guess my question on that, right, is that just uh, how at what point do you just say, well, obviously it's something different, you know. I think at some point you say that doesn't sound anything like this. I don't know what your basis for claiming

it's the Black Knight satellite is. It doesn't have any of the any kind of basic that's never been reported to glow red has been reported movies to west. Right. So I think at some point on a lot of stuff like this, and I know we are inclined to do that and I want to do it again, is just say, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. That's

clearly not I'm I'm on board. I'm trying to throw that one out, absolutely because going from a near polar orbit to suddenly being in an equatorial orbit that's amazing. But not only that, but to have changed size and color so drastically and speed. It's a transformer clearly not

actually that it's not an autobotic, it's a decepticon. Maybe if you're moving three's it's a fast that must mean that means also you're a lot lower in there, a lot lower down, because that's why that's how you keep from dropping into the gravity well of the planet is to to speed up. The closer you get the more the faster you have to go, and move farther out you can go slower. So you know, this thing apparently can move itself around pretty good. Maybe it's just something

totally different. Yeah, it could be. We're gonna go to some more strange things that are attributed to the Black Knight satellite. Uh, do either of you know who Gordon Cooper is? Who is he Joe Mercury, Memricury ast or not? Yes, he was, he was on Mercury nine for anybody who doesn't know. The Mercury program was putting men in capsules and shooting them into space, and they were circling the globe and then splashing back down into the ocean to

figure out how to survive in space. By the way, if you want to read a good book on the subject, The Right Stuff by Tom Wolf. It's a great book. I haven't I don't remember watching the movie as a kid, but I never read the book. You gotta read the book. The book. The book is much better, I can only I wouldn't be shocked by that. But if you want to know everything you wanted to know about the Mercury program and then read this book, it's awesome, awesome, Okay, uh, well,

you know it's funny. Who was the first man in space? Um? It was Alan Shepherd? Yeah, yeah, So one of the things Cooper's first attempted launch, they scrubbed it. He was, he was in the cockpit, he's ready to go, and then they had described it for some technical reason. But like every single launched NASA has attempted in the last four years. Yeah, but who was it was? Shepherd? Shepherd? Believe I think you're right. I can't remember, but uh yeah, Cooper got into the cockpit and he found I a

plunger from Shepherd. That's because when he had gone up, evidently there was an issue with the plumbing of his toilet system, and so as a joke, he had given him a plunger to take with him into space. But that didn't actually end up going into space because that mission got scrubbed. But when Cooper finally did get into space, he orbited the Earth twenty two times before he came back down on trip fifteen around the globe. That's where

the strangeness comes in. Cooper reported a greenish UFO to NASA, and the people at the tracking station of NASA also saw this on his readouts and displays. And it's it's important to point out Cooper wasn't afraid to report UFOs. He evidently reported a couple of UFO in sightings because he was a test pilot and he would see things and he would call it a UFO because he didn't know what it was, and because it was by definition and flying, it's not what we would consider today to

be a space aliene. Yeah no, but he he would report those things, so it's credible that he would have reported this, and according to the story, it's corroborated by this these I think it's up to a hundred people that were in the NASA tracking station in Australia that saw it on their screens. So, in other words, the blacke Knights satellite and once again changed the store. But now it's going west to east again. Oh, because it

was because of the Shepherd instance, well, because Cooper incident. Well, I don't know that. I don't know, at least in this writing. It doesn't necessarily mean that it was orbiting together. It just means that he saw go past them him, right, Yeah, that's that's entirely possible. It was still orbiting north south, but it had never been described as having this greenish glow that he described what he had been that close to it before. Yeah, was it coming towards him or

moving past him behind him? I don't know. Again, it's one of those things where the accounting of this is just so brief and it's just splashed and then that's it. You get you get the flash, but you don't in any of the follow up details. Now, some of this stuff we will be going into in more detail in the theory section. So before anybody, you know, screaming at us what's going on, just be aware. We're gonna come

back to some of this stuff. But I just want to We're gonna have to circle back to a couple of times from Yeah. Another newspaper article that we have from nineteen nine said that the Apollo ten astronauts and those would be young Sernin and Stafford, were the first to actually fill a extraterrestrial beacon, which was called the Monolith. It's it's a small version of what you saw in the movie or read about in the book two one of Space Odyssey. Yeah, okay, sorry, yep, no, but yeah,

so it's it's from two thousand one. Like I said, the Apollo ten crew evidently filmed it from all angles. But I'm sorry I did. I did a quick Google search, um, and that footage doesn't exist on the internet somewhere I know, or depending on your perspective, not surprisingly yeah, depending yep. The first cosmonaut in space. Uh, let's see, that was Eerie Garon. Is that how you would say that? I

believe that's how it's pronounced. He cited the Monolith in sixty one, and then Alan Shepard who were talking about earlier. Evidently he is supposedly supposedly his report had reported it as well. But I I say that with a lot of hesitance. I don't know. Again, this is just the way the story is told. And you see it. If we move then to ninety three again, we're that's a little farther skipping time. A researcher, his name is Duncan Lunin.

He decided that he wanted to try to figure out what the l D transmissions that were being picked up meant, what the deal was. And he did an amazing job. He did. He went to the records of the transmissions and he analyzed him and what he determined was that they were from another race. And they included a star chart too. And I know I'm gonna butcher this pronunciations thet s a salon butts, but I know booties is incorrect.

It's a double star in the bot S constellation. It's got that what is the little double dot over the east the out on the second oh, which makes it so hard to pronounce. But what here's how he figures this out is he figured this out by plotting the delay time of the signal against the order in which the echoes were received. That's what he said he did. Now what that means, I don't I don't have the

scientific backing to to explain. But based on that research, he said the signals were twelve thousand, six hundred years old. Well they would have had. I mean, it would be not so hard to do the math on that, right, I mean, realistically, if if you can say, yeah, it's coming from that star, the science behind saying it's coming from there not, but to figure out how long it would have taken from something to get there from here?

How how he figured out the star chart, because he says it it included you know, I don't know if it's coordinates or star chart, but that's how he figured out what consolation would language. Yeah, and I don't know how many how many light years from us long ways?

I'd love to hear the are there are there recordings of l d s on the internet, of these specific l E d s. Well these I don't think these ones would be out there, the ones that Lunin was looking at, because this is in but l d s still happen, and I imagine that they're on the internet. I didn't think to look to listen to them, because from what I understand, l d s are repeats of signals from Earth. They're just echoes. So that's why it's a little weird to me that he found this extraterrestrial

location called out. But yeah, I don't know, I was, you know, I was pondering that too. It seems a little fantastic, but it's uh, you know. My one thing is that if if you're a satellite and you just don't have the gumption to just broadcast a message directly at planet Earth, but you want to, you want to send a message, what a clever way to do it is to is to receive a radio signal and then

retrans at it back. But they're the interval by which you traveled to transmit a mess and that and so the interval that the variation in the interval contains information.

Actually it's not bad. You know, if we're gonna theorize for a second, I'm don't hop ahead to theories, but to just quickly theorial if we're if we are, if we were to say that the Black Knight satellite were, for instance, an alien spaceship that was stranded or something of that nature, right, that they were not powerful enough to exit our orbit, but also didn't want to die on their entry in or whatever trying to send a

distress signal. If they're basically a dormant ship, that would be a really good, easy, like energy conserving way is to just hold one back, you know, to not You wouldn't have to actually broadcast a new message or anything like that. You just can delay it a little bit.

I don't know, well, it's still broadcasting there. It makes me think, what was that movie that that came out last year, the Matthew McConaughey movie about space, Interstellar, And one of the things that they do is he transmitted messages in like binary code and stuff like that. I mean that to me is in line with what you're talking about, not exact, but it makes me think about that. I didn't see it. It's actually pretty good. But you can control the volume, because the volume on that movie

is terrible. I will not in a movie about people in space, Steve, you know my thing about people in space. So here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna give Devon a DVD that says it's the movie Heathers and then she and I'm gonna actually print on it, so it says the Heathers. She'd be like, yeah, I'm gonna watch Heathers and then she's gonna pop it in. It's gonna be interstellar to you. And you got it. You gotta program so it disabled the off button. That's important. I

will turn it off. Sorry, and we're at we're a little off. Let's get back to the story years old. Yeah, well that's that's yeah. No, we're not gonna do that right now. Let's move to the last big thing about the Black Knights satellite, which is again skipping head in time. The astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavor, which was gonna go meet up with the International Space Station the I S S S. Sorry I added an extra s. It's

the ICE think that's some other weird group. But they were going to go there because I don't remember what they were doing. At one point, they suddenly saw this strange black object out their window and they took a bunch of high quality photos of this black object traveling away from them. And if you go out on Google

you can find these images. Yeah, any website that's about the Black satellite has at least one of these at least one, if not all and there, and they always crop them up just so you can just see it. Not everything around it, but you see a lot of it. And now everybody's favorite time theories. Let's go into the theories. And we've we've talked about the first theory a little bit, which is, Okay, it truly is something extraterrestrial. And I think that I've got a little guf for this in

the past. It's not that I don't disbelieve in aliens. I just don't believe in aliens. Like no, I I believe in aliens. It's just a lot of things that are automatically attributed to aliens strike me wrong because it doesn't make sense. And and but but I'm going to suspend that, and we're going to talk about this. I don't understand why something like this would be circling the globe for so long basically doing nothing. Well, but we don't really know that's been circling the globe that long. Okay,

that's your right. We don't know how long it's been there. According to what we evidently in the fifties is when we figured out something was up sixty years Okay, And then you can just go ahead and assume it's possible that a lifespan isn't the same, right, their time scale isn't the same. Also, there's something to be said for gathering data. Then you want a big cample source for

that data. There might not be It might be a robotic probe, but not actually people by aliens, and and and and The thing that that I had, this is the way I had to deal with it in my head is okay, Well, we we keep hearing stuff about it disappearing and it changing its course a little bit. So maybe it's a little shy and it's happily rotating or circling the globe, and then oh, look, a couple of rockets pop up because I need to get out of the neighborhood. So it's got to have some kind

of control, pushes itself farther away from the planet. Look the rockets are gone. Yeah, comes back in. Oh, now, we're us humans in space all the time, so it has to stay farther out to keep from being detected. So I can see if it is an information gathering thing and it doesn't want to be discovered, I can see why that would be. But it's still weird. To

me that the orbit has changed so much. I guess I don't have that problem because I choose to disbelieve the reports of the orbit changing that much that I mean, there are consistent reports throughout time, right that it's been essentially the same orbit essentially right, versus like a few outliers where it's just people who are clearly describing something else exactly who are saying it's the Black Knight style. So it's not a problem to me that it would

just be in the same orbit. Okay, I can run with that. And we've we've we've already gone into what the the reason for the d Yeah, so I don't think we need to hash that up and not really and the but you're right, it could it could well be that the whole point of that thing was just to wait until we started popping our rockets and then

his job is done. Now would just notifies the home that we've achieved a level of technological advancement to where we can actually put things in orbit, and then it's it tells home and then Dodge either runs away or as far as this retro doesn't jump, plunges into our atmosphere and burns up the dormant. Who knows. I mean, it could have been what burned up in the atmosphere over Russia at the other Yeah, yeah, last year. You don't know it was really right, I don't know that.

I think it would have done the job earlier than that. But because we know it would, it would have detected all the radar waves, so it used to track things in orbit. But it might have waited long enough to make sure we didn't destroy ourselves. How's it going to stop us from destroying her? So wait to make sure we didn't before reporting home. We still could, We still could easily. Yeah, but well, as part as extraterrestrial origins,

it actually could. And this is entirely credible. It could be extraterrestrial because extraterrestrial is just anything that's not on planet Earth and not of planet Earth. So imagine it's just a small asteroid or a meteor or something like meteoroid that just happened to, like, you know, come along and get caught for a while in orbit around that's got lassoed in the orbit around our planet, and you're highly irregular orbit. You would expect that it's something that

like nabbed things don't just naturally go into perfect orbits. No, they don't. They're not going to go in a certain They're gonna go into a very erratic orbit like this one. And so it's entirely possible there's something came along and wound up an orbit around us for a while, and then just eventually it's orbit deteriorated and it plunged into our atmosphere and finally got a sling shot in a way,

that's possible too. That sounds like this thing was in a fairly stable orbit from the way people are talking about it. The way people are talking about I think is an apt description makes it hard saying that that's a concrete fact. So, but it sounds like it was a stable laun term more. But and then it's not going to suddenly slingshot itself away, but it will eventually probably the sortab will decay and they'll go into the atmosphere. Yeah, so it could really be extra extra tre it could

just be a bit of space debree, you're right, space rock. Yeah. Let's then. Now let's move into the next theory. I'm gonna make some people mad, and I'm okay with that when I say that the next theory is that it was made up for fun or to stir people up. And bear with me. Is I go through this because I've you two know, but our listeners don't know where I'm heading with this in the images that I've shown you.

For the reason why, because believe it or not, people do go on the Internet and they make things up or on a more mundane scale, they totally misinterpret something and then they shouted to everybody they know, and then that gets repeated as well. We do that all the time.

There's an example I've seen it. There's an image out there that I've seen that is supposedly from Apollo ten showing the Black Night satellites, and I wasted so much time going through the Apollo ten photos and not finding it, and then I started just going through all of the photos that were available from NASA, and lo and behold, I actually found the photo itself in its raw format. Yeah, I got but has a NASA has a ton of photographs. I know. I couldn't believe I found it. I couldn't

believe I found it. But here's the thing. I then wasted even more time brewing around with that image in photos shot because here's the thing. The website that I have seen this on. There's a couple of them say, look at this alien spacecraft. That is the Black Knights satellite that was found in this Apollo ten image. The image has no date, it has no location that it was shot from. The image is not good quality, And I'm gonna walk through some of these facts because these

are the things that make our jobs so hard. So when I find a very blatant one, I have to call it out so people can kind of think what's going on when they're seeing some of this. So the exposure is really bad. But there's also stuff all over this image's water spots and I found hairs on it, which tell me that it was a print and not a negative that was scanned in. And you got this off the NASA website or something else's website. Huge three D p I res huge image. It was, I mean,

it's like a hundred eggs or something. It was god awful huge. But if it had been scanned in from a negative, a hair would have been gigantic, but that wasn't the case. They were really small on the image, which means it has to be a print. And the same thing with the water spots negative even on a large format negative, which I haven't heard of those being used in those early programs. That would be a really really fine hair to be picked up like this. It

just it looks like cat hair. But when I put it in Photoshop and I adjusted it multiple times in multiple ways to correct the exposure so that the background, which is space, is the right color, which is black, this thing disappears. So I'm pretty positive that this thing was dust or more likely lint or something. Plus, never mind the fact that this photo it hadn't been it can somewhere between the Earth and the Moon. For the size of the Earth and the photograph, they must have

been at least a third of the way to the Moon. Yeahs, which means that probably as big as that thing was, it should have crashed and killed us all or unleashed the alien horde. Yeah, I mean it would have been. And obviously it would have been enormous to be a scale it wasn't that photograph would be. It would have been an altitude of thousands of miles, not just and

so yeah, the whole thing is just absurd. So what I want people to do is I want them to keep this in mind and keep an objective view on this, so that when they're looking at it and they kind of pull the details out and not just take the bait and and just swallow it all at once, but really trying to figure out what you're looking at, which I told you'd have to be pretty damn guillable to look at that photograph and think it has anything to

do with the Black Knight satellite. Well, if you know, in the original image that I showed you guys, looks kind of metallic space shippy because it's zoomed and it's fuzz and I can see how somebody without taking context into it, would be like, WHOA, what the heck is that? Yeah? I mean, you know, in the original photo, if if you're just looking at within the confines of a website or something like that, you're not going to see the hair. You're not going to see all of the other stuff there.

It's all cropped and it does you know. I've seen that picture before and it's hard to kind of step away from that and say, oh, there, there could totally be something else going on there. It's easy to take it as face value, and we do that a lot. Next theory on the docket, what's that this is really just a bunch of stories that have been jammed together with hot glue to make it the Black Knight satellite. Do you do you get why I make the hot

glue reference. Do you remember when you were a kid and you were an art class and you would hot glue stuff together and it would just come out to be this gnarly gross mass of like stuff. Did you ever do that? Because I as an artist. I'm an artist too, but I was still a kid. Now class

we use wealthing equipment. No, I was just thinking. I was trying to figure out if you were talking about a bunch of different stories jammed together or a bunch of different things jammed together like in that episode of Futuruma. Oh no, this is this is not not the future a bunch of stories jammed together. Which I know that the pair of you do this, and we've just been kind of harping on. This is when we start looking at these things, each individual piece in context, Suddenly it

becomes much easier to see what's going on. And what we're gonna do is we've already walked through this entire story. We're now going to walk through a number of pieces of the story in sequence again, kind of shine some light on some things that were going on. Sounds good, There was a lot of that stuff. Yeah, well, let's let's start with Nikola Tesla because he's where we started in the beginning. Today, we do know that Tesla us picking up a repeating signal, but what he was picking

up was a pulsar. We didn't know about pulsars in We didn't really figure out what they were officially or or classify them until nineteen. Pulsars put out radio waves in a very specific pattern that's repeating. He didn't know that, so he just he took his best guests. I totally understand that. I don't fault Tesla for that, but that's what that was, so I can't say that's the Black

Knight satellite. We'll move forward to l D ease. We don't really know exactly what ld s are today, but there's a there's over a dozen theories out there, but basically what we think is going on is that a couple of the theories are is that it's possible that radio waves are being picked up and caught in Aurora activity cau is by solar storms, which is holding onto them before they get spun down Earth. There was just a really interesting article released about Aurora energy and how

it affects the Earth. Who will post it on Facebook eventually, but just saying, like literally today there was a new very interesting Let's see what do we got. The next one up is it's reflections in the ionosphere that are caused by the magnet sphere. Yeah, like radio skipping. Yeah, it's radio skipping, is exactly what it is. And and actually the thing about the reflection the radio skipping is it's actually refraction. It's actually not things not bouncing off

the atosphere. And I talked about the snailb lost boilery lbl Um is that they are actually refracted debt back downward by the ionosphere. And a similar phenomenon happens under the ocean submarine. Somebody's sonar as a PASTI sonars will pick up the same signal at two different times because they travel basically different pathways to get to you. You're listening with your with your hydrophone, and you hear the same noise twice because it goes it takes two different

paths to get there. It's being refracted up and down one way, bouncing off the bottom of the ocean and the top of the ocean. Essentially, it's a similar kind of thing like a sound layer is a similar kind of thing. Is what the ionosphere does, and that is and that is it will bounce off the bottom of the ocean, then it goes up to a sound to like a layer where they say a sharp difference in temperature, and there are temperature gradients like that in the ocean.

And it doesn't it it's some people look at it is bouncing up, but really what happens is it goes up into that and it's refracted bent back downwards, so it's refracted, not really reflected. And no, no, no, I'm not correcting you. What I was saying is that what i'd say is that what the experience that that what what the Navy's experienced with sonar is a similar thing where where something will follow two different tracks to get to the same place and it gets there at different times.

The noise does it's the same thing can happen. Yeah, but it's not. That's not really unexplainable. No, and and and yeah it's it's but it's weird. But here here's the last one that we've got for l D ease, which is it maybe that the radio signals are getting trapped between ionized layers in the atmosphere, because that we do know that happens. There's ionization up there and it's kind of bouncing around and then it quote unquote falls out a hole or bounces out a hole it's in

the bottom. Now it's quite as likely that some of them they get trapped in there, are bouncing out of holes in the top and shooting into space. But once we're picking up or falling out of the bottom, that's what's causing the delays. They're skipping around until they finally find a hole to to bounce out of. That. The other thing about the l D ease is actually a lot of this is that if it's an ALIAS satellite, then why is it messing around with this whole l

D crap. It's either gonna be totally its stealth mode or it's gonna be sending us direct transmiss and saying, hey, there, how's it going, you know, Garfield, and come see me kind because we really want to eat you. Yeah, our English isn't good yet. Yeah we didn't mean we didn't mean that at all, but yeah, and so I don't. I don't think it's going to be doing weird stuff like like re broadcasting our radio ways to us. That's I will, I'll get on board with that. Let's move forward.

Remember we talked about the newspaper reporting of the two satellites that were in a polar orbit. Yeah, yeah, it turns out that's not real reporting. It's a couple of reporters and a couple of papers evidently ripping off the Dutch jacket of a UFO book. Oh, some guy was trying to sell his book about UFOs and they were having a little fun and they took some stuff directly out of it and published it and people went picked it up and believed it. And really it was just

kind of a joke. I think it was an inside joke that gained more life than they ever thought it would. It was the day was April one, It was April first. But yeah, so that's what's going on there. Let's move forward again. We're gonna talk about nineteen sixty and what the U. S. Air Force or the U S and the U S government found. Here's what's going on in nineteen six. Do you remember there was that unknown dark tumbling object that was picked up, and everybody kind of

wigged out because we're in Cold War times. Yeah, no, it wasn't at the time. So we're talking ninth late fifty nine, all of sixty part of sixty one. We're putting rockets up and it's part of the Discoverer program where the Discover program is going to put satellites out so that we can figure out what's in space, what's on Earth. We're gonna figure out all this stuff. Yeah, okay, that's that's figured it out already, right, that we did. Space is done. But it's not a mystery at all.

It turns out the CIA um I think it was through the Freedom of Information Act because it was no longer classified. We found out the CIA was involved in the Discovery program and they were putting up is it Corona Corona satellites And it sounds like, Joe, you you actually have a pretty good idea of what the Corona satellites were or did you just kind of gone through them. Yeah. So Corona was really the earliest spy satellite at least

that we had. And what Corona did is said it would be in a polar orbit, as we talked about before, for surveying and spying polar lower low altitude orbits to

the best. And it had a number of high definitions, like really big cameras in it that took a lot of photographs and then thousand per yeah, just it would just use up as an entire roll, and then the camera would be ejected by the satellite and it would fall into the atmosphere and it would would deploy a parachute and then this this airplane would come along and snag it in midair. And it was really an elaborate operation. And luckily these days we've we've got electronic we can

just broadcast digital images. Back yeah, we didn't have that. Back in those days. We didn't have digital imaging. So they actually had to take film and ejected and imagine how beautifully time that had to be. That plane had to be just in the perfect right spot. They lost a number of those satellites when they the bucket, they

called it the bucket when it dropped its bucket. They lost a number of buckets in the first one that they lost eventually was found in Venezuela, and once it was found, they realized that what they needed to do was stop stenciling top secret on it. Yeah, they put they put some reward information in twenty two languages all over it so people would turn it in. That is the most amazing. Yeah, don't look at this tough secret, don't touch it. Yeah. Well, so here's the thing is

that so we've we've talked about the Corona program. Well, what happened is Discover eight. There evidently was some kind of malfunction and when it went to drop its bucket, it's orbit was messed up and a big chunk of it came off in an unexpected way and it tumbled around the Earth. Gosh, when was it it? Uh? It came back and it re entered the atmosphere in March of nineteen sixty. And they're pretty sure the bucket came back down or probably around that time, because it didn't

dump the bucket as it was intended. But that was in a polar orbit and would have been in an erratic orbit because it was screwed up. So it's pretty positive that that's what was being picked up. Because the CIA isn't gonna tell the U s A Force what they've got up there because it's so secret, they're not gonna just spill. Oh sorry, ted this is what it is. Yeah, they're going to do that, particularly if it involves admitting

a huge mistake, especially a giant program. Because I think there was fifteen or no, there was more than fifteen. There was I can't remember how many of those. It's there was lots and lots of those cameras, and they they evolved quite quickly, but they put a lot of those up there, and at a cold war time, that would have probably caused some kind of clash. I mean, we've already had the the whole Bay of Pigs thing happened right around it wasn't the Bay of Pigs nine

sixty um, that was six. It was pretty close on the heels this this potential nuclear holocausts between two countries. So they didn't want to spill the beans and they weren't supposed to be doing this. And also it is again you know, you're not about to be like, oh, yeah, sorry, we have this classified program and we kind of messed it up and lost a half of something that cost more than you know, we've ever thought of spending anything on anything. You know, it's just you don't do that.

You don't say that, you don't say that at all. Now you want to keep quiet about it, but just uh, maybe a little bit of a correction. I thought that what happened with that particular launch, it wasn't so much the bucket dropping dropping wrongly, but it was that on launch, the rocket goes up and then eventually a couple of case things pop off and the satellite is released. And I thought, I thought that one of those casings, for one reason or another, like wound up in orbit instead

of going back into the atmosphere and burning up. I've seen that as well, and that and that was that that could would be. But I also know that there was an issue with the satellite itself and the bucket didn't come down right as well. So I don't know which it is. It could have been the casing, It could have been the bucket, it could have been the Corona satellite. The case thing, I think would would be a more likely candidate because it would have a much

bigger radar signature. Um yeah, but yeah, certainly, Spice satellites would come a long ways. They're much sneakier, much sneakier, much better. You don't buckets. Let's move to the next. One of the next things we talked about which is Gordon Cooper. Remember that Gordon Cooper saw the green glowing thing at Loop number fifteen around the globe. Yeah, he has adamant He adamantly denied that ever ever happened. Well,

of course he's denying it. He actually clearly got to He actually provided transcripts, his own transcripts from his end to prove that he didn't. Actually, I never said any of that I know, And so all those people in mission control they never never heard him say that. Even so I'm guessing they never actually saw it either. We're gonna then go to the nineties seventies when we had Duck Duncan Lunin. I almost called him Ducan Lunin, which

doesn't make any sense. Duncan Lunin. He never actually said that the transmissions that he was looking at came from the Black Knight satellite. He also seems to believe that they came from two points in space, one that was sixty degrees ahead and one that was sixty degrees behind the moon the course of the moon. And he actually later on he acknowledged that he made some major mistakes and what he came up with was wrong, and he recounted the whole thing he renounced the retracted Yeah, he

was like, I was wrong. Plus I don't know what I was smoking, but that was bad. Plus I believe Duncan Lunin wasn't actually a scientist. Wasn't he actually a science fiction writer? Bad was part of what he did, I believe. Yes. And the last one in the story that we talked about, which was the Endeavor photos. The Space Shuttle would always fly in a semi equatorial orbit, as does the Ice the International Space Station. Yeah that thing. Yeah, if there is an object moving in a polar orbit,

it would have gone by the Space Shuttle. That would have been zip eight to twenty thousand miles per hour, which would be really hard to get all of those really awesome high resolution photos. Oh, I know, I know. That's I know, it's ridiculous. And that's let's space at the combined speed of the two because don't forget, they're also broken. They're rocketing along. They see how many sunrises do they see in a day? Do you remember the number?

I don't remember. Something like that. Some crazy It would be fun. I'd love to go up there. Oh yeah, I just wish that I could afford the trip. I don't have that kind of money unless this podcast suddenly becomes a cash cow. Yeah. So, and also, you know, you know, it's it's pretty There's all these pictures that they took of this object, which you can't take when you're both moving, and if you had a really high speed camera you could get maybe one shot, but they

took a whole bunch of shot. It took a whole bunch of shots. Here's what's going on, though, is the mission logs and stuff. Turns out that during an e v A, what does e v A stand for, it's it's like extra extra vehicular activity activity. Yeah, they're outside of the space. They went outside the space in a space suit. The claiman stern of it. They floated around, they floated around, they did some stuff. Well, they accidentally knocked loose a thermal blanket and it flew away from

the space show. I'm guessing it was in the cargo compartment. I don't know how it tore loose, but it did. Those things are silver on one side and black on the other, and they're basically a giant chunk of insulated blankets. So if you ever think of the insulation in your house, if you've ever seen that and we had space blankets in our like in our Earth Quick survival kits. You know they come in like a little path that's fits in your pocket, something like that. Well it's a bulkier

version of that. But it broke loose and it drifted away. It's dark on one side, silver on the other. Or got knocked loose. Sorry, I'm just I'm checking my head because I'm just thinking about how easy it is to just knock something loose into space like a human. Well it happened to Tim Robbins. Don't stop, just stop, okay, Uh, Well it was the blanket was crumpled and folded and it looked odd and it had some funny shapes as it drifted away. But if we're gonna have to link

to this photo. But this is why I love the Internet is somebody actually took the time to take all of those photos, match up the cloud patterns and scale them appropriately, and you can actually see this thing kind of twisting and tumbling in space. And the only show, as we talked about earlier, one image cropped really close, and that one image does, in fairness look hole. It looks very much like it could have been a space Yeah, exactly, the right angle and the shiny bits are exactly where

you'd wanted. Yeah, I mean, but but when you see this where they're all put together, not to make a bad joke, but it it takes the wind at an alien ships sail. I know that was terrible joke. I'm sorry. Really, yeah, I really cannot make a joke in the last six months. It's sad. Yeah, I gotta get I gotta get joke act to me. Um. Okay, well, let's let's move forward.

We're going to go to the last bit here, which is not really a theory, but it is a bit of an explanation of where maybe the name came from. The What Night. Didn't you ever see The Holy Grail? Yeah? My godnets classic? Remember that? Okay, Well, obviously it's British because Joe's making the Monty Python joke. Between nineteen fifty eight to nineteen sixty five, the Brits were launching and testing uh rockets and it was under the name the

Black Night. The whole thing was initially a ballistic missile program so they could throw nukes it like I'm not quite dead yet. Yeah, yeah, they were gonna they were gonna throw nukes at the Soviet Union. But of course the Soviet Union the US quickly outpaces um. They have

much better rocket technology. So what what they do is they just decided to salvage this program and it was using the Blue Streak missile was the actual missile that it was using, but they were gonna go ahead and use it to try hard to figure out how to get into space. I guess this next part is because

they were trying to save money. They they farmed out different bits of it to different countries, to France and Germany and all these guys, and they did several launches, and every one of the launches, it appears, failed because like they had bad components on every every one of them from different places. It wasn't like the Germans were always screwing it up or the French were always screwing up. It was like, oh, well they got it right, but you got it wrong this time. And so the whole

thing was kind of a fiasco. It was. It got retired in I want to say before nineteen seventy they quit doing it because the whole thing was just a waste of money and not quite bad yet. Yes, well it is now, yeah, yeah, they still still got something about still has a bit of a bit of a space program that though that that's kind of the end

of what I've got here for the Black Night. So I'm gonna go on record and saying I'm not saying that there isn't something that is orbiting the Earth that we didn't put there, that is of an intelligent origin that we haven't figured out. I'm not going to say that because I can't say that. But what I'm gonna say is that a lot of things that have been tacked onto this story shouldn't have been tacked on because they're they're not real. But that really part of the story.

That's just kind of the fun of the whole thing. Though, well it's the fun of the whole thing until there's seven hundred different things that have been the big glued to it this podcast, it is, indeed, And so that's I'm gonna say. I I think I do think that there may have been something up there that we didn't know what it was, whether it's still there or not, but it's not this giant, giant thing that the Black

Knight satellite story has grown to be in my opinion. Yeah, it's just you know, probably like I was saying, naturally occurring, just a meteoroid that was captured for a while before burning up on our atmosphere, or the real left over from our you know, from our space program, but that's where one of our bad spice had the rocket, any number of things, but not you know, an alien probe or anything. Probably I don't think so, But I know if you had a doubt in that, because actually, you know,

probably they would have been here by now. After surveying the planet and everything, and I'm figuring out there's lots of edible human beings down here, they would have been been here. Well, I think I know I've talked to you two about this, but I don't know if any

of our listeners have. Is it always that makes me think is there's this book out there called Infected by a guy named Scott Sigler, and one of the things is that there's this probe circling the Earth that's dropping microbe spore things that are doing weird thing to people to try and you know, get its race going again. But that's what I would think about it, is like, if it's been there that long and it figures out we're here, and hey, there's yummy humans with the squashy inside.

Let's do that. But none of that has happened that I knew you were going to do that. I'm just saying, you don't know. Other I don't they might have snagged some people, you know. I mean, actually, you know, if you if you think of human beings as a delicacy, and then obviously a smart thing to do is just to come down here and nab enough reading pairs to take back to your home world that you can just you know, just breed a whole lot of herds of humans that you can you know that you can just

turn the stakes. I mean, I was just going with the whole spore thing. I mean, there's nothing to say that the course that our revolution has taken has been the natural course that our evolution would have taken had we not been exposed to those spores. You don't know both of them. Although I do like Joe's theory a little bit better, because you guys don't like the idea. You don't like the idea of benevolent aliens like aliens. They're no, no, no, I want the I want the

Joe cattle line. You know, there's there's what is o Macron Percy I eight and they've they've got a whole host of clones of Joe that are just walking around talking about submarines before they get cut up into cuts how our human horn har Yeah, they ain't gonna take me alive, but before they walk into the human chopper. Yeah, yeah, I don't know. I think this one's lad to rest. Okay, I think that Yeah, it's uh, not alien. It's it's not as as at least it's not as it is

led to be. It's sad ye. By the way, I was speaking back back to the whole thing about about aliens. I really really want the aliens that we eventually meet if we do, to be good and to be benevolent. Maybe it's possible, but I don't eat us. Yeah, but I think that given given the fact that evolution applies, dartwinness of applies on all worlds, they're going to be aggressive and nasty and uh and they're probably gonna want what we have. We're probably gonna end up being space hillbillies.

That's really what it's gonna boil down. Yeah, but we're wait, we're going after nob track. So let's let's give our our our final bit of important information here, which is our website, which is Thinking Sideways podcast dot com. Of course, there you're gonna find the episode. In all of our episodes that we've done on any story in the past, you will find our research links to this particular one. You can leave a comment on the website. You can

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gonna be an email address. That's at Black Night Now, it's gonna be at Clinton the email dot by the way, top new new new piece of merchandise. We do have autographed personally autographs eight by ten glossies of ourselves. That's not true available, not true at all. Our email address is a Thinking Sideways podcast at gmail dot com. Comments, send us, story suggestions, you can send. It's just about anything you want if you want to talk about stuff.

We're always there. Will reply to everybody, maybe not within the first day, but we get to all of our emails, and I think that's just about all the details we need to share with folks. All Right, we're going to close this one up. Thanks, ladies and gentlemen. It's been fun and we will talk to you next week Bye Guys, Aliens,