The truth about the Black Knight conspiracy theory

NASA captured this image during the STS-88 Space Shuttle mission while 396 km above the coast of Namibia and looking north.

- CAROLINE DELBERT AND COURTNEY LINDER

TAKE A GOOD LOOK AT THE PHOTOGRAPH on this page. NASA captured this image of a mysterious black object orbiting the Earth in 1998, during the first Space Shuttle mission to the International Space Station (ISS).

The space agency refers to the strange entity as item STS088-724-66 in its catalogue of space junk floating in low-Earth orbit (within 2 000 km). Jerry Ross, an astronaut who took part in that mission, says that the object is a wayward thermal blanket that broke loose while his team tried to attach an American module to a Russian module on the ISS.

But for a small, devoted following, it's a 13 000-year-old, artificially made satellite known as the Black Knight. So, could this peculiar object really have come from ancient aliens? Or is it just an innocuous piece of space debris?

The facts surrounding the Black Knight are cobbled together from a number of tales. It begins with Nikola Tesla, who said that he had received radio signals from space during his 1899 radio experiments in Colorado Springs. Martians, he believed, were attempting to communicate with humans through numbers, since they're a universal language.

In a February 1901 Collier's Weekly article, Tesla recounted his experience: “The changes I noted were taking place periodically and with such a clear suggestion of number and order that they were not traceable to any cause then known to me... The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another.'