The Black Knight Satellite

From Disneyland Of The Gods, written by John Keel in 1988 :

"While both the United States and the Soviet Union were racing to launch relatively small satellites into orbit in the late 1950's, astronomers and military tracking stations were following the course of something huge. On January 4, 1960, scientists discovered two large objects in a polar orbit. To date neither the U.S. nor Russia had achieved a polar orbit. The objects were estimated to weigh at least fifteen tons. The largest U.S. satellite at that time weighed 450 pounds and the largest Soviet satellite 2,925 pounds.

Late in February 1960, the US Department of Defense formally announced that an unidentified satellite was circling the globe. It was tracked and studied by several different observatories and the National Space Surveillance Control Center at New Bedford, Massachusetts. Professor Alla Masevich, the Soviet scientist heading the Russian Sputnik tracking program, flatly denied suggestions that the mystery satellites belonged to the Soviet Union.

The press labeled the intruder "The Black Knight" and it was extensively discussed in the New York Times, Newsweek, Life, and other major periodicals.

It vanished as mysteriously as it had arrived. But it has queitly reappeared from time to time ever since and been buried in the fine print of NASA's weekly catalog of debris and objects orbiting the earth."


Link : Disneyland Of The Gods - John Keel


The Black Knight is also supposed to be inspiration for 4 of Philip K. Dick's books : Radio Free Albemuth, VALIS, The Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration Of Timothy Archer. From Radio Free Albemuth :


"Since my contact came in most strangely between 3:00 and 4:00 A.M., I realized that probably a booster satellite, of alien origin, orbited Earth, a slave communications satellite that had been sent here thousands of years ago."

There's a lot of other things connected to the story, but it's quite hard to find on the net. A lot of what is around can be found here though :

Black Knight Satellite - The Living Moon