Thanks to Elon Musk, there is now an actual Tesla orbiting the earth. But the man for which Musk’s auto company was named — Nikola Tesla – may have once been contacted by something far more sinister circling our planet.

It is known as the “Black Knight Satellite,” an object that could be a 13,000-year-old alien artifact. Tesla himself may have made First Contact with the object, in 1899, though he did not know that at the time.

Nearing the turn of the Century, Tesla a pioneer in both electricity and radio technology, built a massive tower at his home/laboratory in Colorado Springs for the purpose of experimenting with the transmission of wireless power, but instead, he may have accidentally become the first human being to receive a message from the stars.

“I have a deep conviction that highly intelligent beings exist on Mars,” Tesla told a reporter from the Albany Telegram in 1923. “While experimenting in Colorado, I obtained extraordinary experimental evidence of the existence of life on Mars. I had perfected a wireless receiver of extraordinary sensitiveness, far beyond anything known, and I caught signals which I interpreted as meaning 1–2–3–4. I believe the Martians used numbers for communication because numbers are universal.”

We know now of course, that Tesla was wrong about the source of those signals, but if he did indeed receive them, and they did not come from Mars as he thought, then just where did they come from? Many believe it was the Black Knight Satellite.

What Is the Black Night Satellite?

The history of the Black Knight is actually a conglomerate of several independent stories, all of which involve a large, and as yet, unidentified object in orbit around Earth, that seemingly makes an appearance, and then disappears for years at a time.

After possibly making contact with Tesla, the next time the Black Knight made an appearance was in 1927. This time, the apparent recipient of the “call” was Jørgen Hals, an engineer from Norway who was carrying out radio signal experiments. Hals couldn’t explain why some of the signals he sent echoed back a few moments after the initial transmissions halted, it was if they were bouncing off of something in close earth orbit.M

More than four decades later, sci-fi writer Duncan Lunan penned an article that was published in Spaceflight Magazine, which tried to explain the strange signals picked up by Hals. While he did not name it as the Black Knight, Lunan, speculated that both Hals and Tesla, could have been receiving signals from an alien object circling the moon.
Since the publication of his article, Lunan has categorically denied being the “father” of the modern Black Knight Satellite conspiracy theory, as many believers refer to him. Yet, for some reason, many of those who support the Black Knight theories usually cite Lunan’s 13,000-year-old space probe as a potential manifestation of this mysterious satellite.

More Recent Buzz About the Black Knight Satellite

The next alleged “sighting” of the Black Knight was in the early 1960s, when TIME Magazine reported an unknown object was discovered to be in polar orbit around the Earth. The Department of Defense later said that the object was a piece of wreckage that had come loose from the Discover satellite. Given the supposed size of the object mentioned in the TIME article, many dismissed this explanation as a typical “Roswell-Like” government cover-up, and believed this to be confirmation of the existence of the Black Knight. It turns out they were right to be skeptical, but not for the reasons they believed.

Instead of an alien object or spacecraft, declassified documents revealed that it was, in fact, a part of the United States’ CORONA project, a mission that produced the world’s first successful space photo-reconnaissance flights in an effort to monitor Soviet missile facilities.

After that, through the 70s and 80s, tales of the Black Knight were pretty much relegated to urban myth and conspiracy theory territory. That is until this happened. During Space Shuttle flight STS-88, while on a mission involving the early construction of the International Space Station, the Space Shuttle Endeavor photographed a large amorphous black object hovering ominously above the Earth. Was this indeed photographic evidence of the Black Knight Satellite’s existence?

Unfortunately, not, at least according to the “official” NASA account. In an interview with space journalist James Oberg, Jerry Ross, one of NASA’s most experienced astronauts, identified the object as a “thermal blanket” that had come lose during an earlier spacewalk as part of the ISS construction and attempts to retrieve it, had proved too difficult. According to Ross, while he and fellow astronaut Jim Newman were on an EVA installing these thermal blankets, one of them came loose from its tether.

As the item spun majestically away from the astronauts, becoming unreachable in the vastness of space, following protocol, they had it photographed and documented. The piece was cataloged as space debris, and became officially known as “Item 25570,” yet there are still many out there who ascribe a much more ominous name to it — the infamous Black Knight Satellite.