You've probably seen it. A jagged, ink-black shape silhouetted against the bright blue curve of the Earth. It looks like a stealth bomber from a fever dream, or maybe a piece of Gothic architecture that somehow drifted into low Earth orbit. These black knight satellite pictures are the ultimate internet rabbit hole. People claim this thing has been circling us for 13,000 years, beamed signals to Nikola Tesla, and is currently spying on us for an alien race from Epsilon Boötis.
Honestly? The real story is both more boring and much more fascinating because it reveals how we see what we want to see when we're looking at the void.
The 1998 Photo That Started the Fire
Most of the "evidence" people share today comes from a very specific set of high-resolution images. These were taken in December 1998 during the STS-88 mission. This was a big deal—the first Space Shuttle mission to start building the International Space Station (ISS). The crew of the Endeavour was busy mating the American "Unity" module with the Russian "Zarya" module.
During an Extravehicular Activity (EVA), or a spacewalk, things got a little messy.
Astronauts Jerry Ross and James Newman were working on the exterior when a thermal blanket—specifically a trunnion pin thermal cover—slipped away. It wasn't a small mistake, but it wasn't a disaster either. Commander Robert Cabana actually radioed Ross to tell him, "Jerry, one of the thermal covers got away from you."
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The "satellite" in those famous pictures is that blanket.
Because space has no atmosphere to scatter light and no trees or cars to give you a sense of scale, a crumpled piece of silver-and-black insulation looks like a massive, alien dreadnought. It's an optical trick. NASA even gave it an official object number: 025570. A few days after it floated off, the blanket's orbit decayed, and it burned up in the atmosphere. It's gone.
Why the Myth Refuses to Die
If the pictures are just a lost blanket, why is there a whole "history" of this thing? Basically, the Black Knight is a "Frankenstein" theory. It takes five or six completely unrelated events from the last 120 years and stitches them together into one story.
- 1899: Nikola Tesla hears rhythmic radio signals in Colorado Springs. He thinks it's Martians. Modern scientists think it was likely pulsars or natural signals from Jupiter.
- 1927: A Norwegian engineer named Jørgen Hals notices "Long Delayed Echoes" (LDEs). His radio signals would bounce back to him seconds after he sent them.
- 1954: UFO researcher Donald Keyhoe tells newspapers the Air Force found two satellites. This was three years before Sputnik. It turned out to be a publicity stunt for his book.
- 1960: Time magazine reports a "dark satellite" in polar orbit. People freaked out. It was eventually identified as a piece of debris from a Discoverer 8 satellite that had gone off course.
In 1973, a Scottish writer named Duncan Lunan tried to make sense of the 1927 radio echoes. He did some math and suggested they might be coming from an alien probe orbiting the Moon. He even guessed it was 13,000 years old.
Lunan eventually admitted he made "unscientific" errors and retracted the whole thing. But the internet doesn't care about retractions. Once you combine Tesla, 13,000 years, and those eerie 1998 photos, you have the perfect conspiracy.
Expert Nuance: The Problem with Space Vision
James Oberg, a former NASA mission control engineer and space historian, is sort of the "final boss" for debunking this. He's spent decades explaining that humans are terrible at judging what they see in orbit.
Our brains are wired for Earth. We expect things to have shadows that make sense, and we expect air to provide a sense of distance. In a vacuum, a piece of "space dandruff"—a paint chip, a frozen urine crystal, or a thermal blanket—can look like a giant ship miles away or a tiny speck inches from the lens.
Oberg points out that the "Black Knight" photos are actually some of the weirdest-looking 70mm shots ever taken. The way the blanket crumpled and caught the light made it look metallic and structural. If you look at the full sequence of photos (the STS-88-724 series), you can actually see the object tumbling and changing shape. It doesn't look like a craft; it looks like a flapping piece of fabric.
What You Can Actually Learn from This
While the "alien spy" part is bunk, the black knight satellite pictures teach us a lot about the reality of low Earth orbit.
First, space is incredibly messy. We have thousands of pieces of "space junk" up there, ranging from spent rocket stages to literal flecks of paint. Second, the history of radio astronomy is full of weird anomalies that we're still figuring out. Tesla wasn't crazy; he just didn't know about pulsars yet.
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If you want to dive deeper into what's actually up there, stop looking for ancient probes and start looking at the NORAD tracking catalogs. They track everything larger than a softball. If there was a multi-ton alien craft in a polar orbit, every amateur astronomer with a backyard telescope would have its coordinates pinned by dinner time.
The real mystery isn't an alien probe. It's why we’re so desperate to find one that we'll turn a lost thermal blanket into a legend.
Next Steps for Fact-Checkers
- Search the NASA Image Catalog: Look up mission STS-88 and the "724" photo series. Seeing the object in different frames shows its true, tumbling nature.
- Research "Long Delayed Echoes": This is a real scientific phenomenon involving the ionosphere that is still studied by radio hobbyists today.
- Check the Satellite Catalogs: Sites like Heavens-Above let you track real "dark" objects, like old spy satellites, that are actually in orbit right now.
The "Black Knight" might be a myth, but the garbage we've left in the stars is very, very real.