Black Knight Decoded- Strange Pepsi production

[Zionbrion]

So for some reason Pepsi produced this video, that feels and plays like soft disclosure. It appears to have been just released. It is about an alien sattelite that has been orbiting earth for 13,000 and they are trying to decode the message, it ends with This is only the beginning...what do you guys think about this?

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=3RmSKT-9u_A

[Zionbrion]

Heres what wikipedia has to say on the Black Knight...I didn't realize it was a real Thing people have researched.

Black Knight satellite

The Black Knight satellite is claimed by some conspiracy theorists to be an object approximately 13,000 years old of extraterrestrial origin orbiting Earth in near-polar orbit. Some critics and mainstream academics have called it a conspiracy theory and "one rambling and inconsistent dollop of myth".[1][2]

The story has its origins in 1954 when newspapers including the St. Louis Post Dispatch and the San Francisco Examiner ran stories attributed to retired naval aviation major and UFO researcher Donald Keyhoe saying that the US Air Force had reported that two satellites orbiting Earth had been detected. At this time no one had the technology to launch a satellite.[3]

In February 1960 there was a further claim by TIME that the US Navy had detected a dark object thought to be a Soviet spy satellite in an orbit inclined at 79° from the equator with an orbital period of 104.5 minutes. Its orbit was also highly eccentric with an apogee of 1,728 km (1,074 mi) and a perigee of only 216 km (134 mi). At the time the Navy was tracking a fragment of casing from the Discoverer VIII satellite launch which has the same orbit, and it is believed to be a derelict US satellite that had gone astray.[3][4]

An object photographed in 1998 during the STS-88 mission has been widely claimed to be this "alien artifact". According to Martina Redpath of Armagh Planetarium and James Oberg,[5] it is more probable that the photographs are of a thermal blanket that was confirmed as lost during an EVA.[1] Redpath wrote:

Black Knight is a jumble of completely unrelated stories; reports of unusual science observations, authors promoting fringe ideas, classified spy satellites and people over-interpreting photos. These ingredients have chopped up, stirred together and stewed on the internet to one rambling and inconsistent dollop of myth.[1]

[Zionbrion]

• According to monitoring agencies around the world, The Black knight satellite has been transmitting radio signals for over 50 years now.
• The US and Soviet Union have shown particular interest in this “unidentified space object”
• Rumors are that it was Nikola Tesla the first man to “intercept” a signal from the black knight satellite in 1899 after building a high-voltage radio device in Colorado Springs.
• Since the 1930′s Astronomers worldwide have been reporting strange radio signals which allegedly come from the “Black Knight”.
• In 1957, Dr. Luis Corralos of the Communications Ministry in Venezuela photographed it while taking pictures of Sputnik II as it passed over Caracas.
• The story of the Black Knight made its media debut in the 1940′s when the St. Louis Dispatch and The San Francisco Examiner wrote about the “Satellite” on May 14th 1954.
• The Time Magazine wrote about the Black Knight Satellite on the seventh of March, 1960.
• In 1957, an unknown “object” was seen “shadowing” the Sputnik 1 Spacecraft. According to reports, the “unidentified object” was in Polar orbit.
• In 1957. The United States nor the Russians possessed the technology to maintain a spacecraft in Polar Orbit.
• The first Polar orbiting satellite was launched in 1960.
• Polar orbits are often used for earth-mapping, earth observation, capturing the earth as time passes from one point and reconnaissance satellites. This would put the Black Knight in the category of an observational Satellite.
• In the 1960′s the Black Knight satellite was located once again in Polar Orbit. Astronomers and Scientists calculated the object’s weight to be over 10 tons which would be at that time the Heaviest Artificial Satellite to orbit our Planet.
• The Black Knight’s orbit was unlike any other object orbiting Earth.
• The Grumman Aircraft Corporation gave much importance to this mysterious “Satellite”, On September 3, 1960, seven months after the satellite was first detected by radar, a tracking camera at Grumman Aircraft Corporation’s Long Island factory took a photograph of the Black Knight satellite.
• The Grumman Aircraft Corporation formed a committee to study the data received from the observations made but nothing was made public.
• In 1963, Gordon Cooper was launched into space. On his last orbit, he reported seeing a glowing green object in front of his capsule in the distance moving towards his Spacecraft. The Muchea tracking station, in Australia, which Cooper reported the object to, picked up this Unidentified object on Radar travelling East to West.
• It was the Ham Radio operator who apparently decoded a series of signals received from the UFO Satellite and interpreted it as a star-chart centered on the Epsilon Bootes Star System.
• According to the decoded message, the Black Knight satellite originated from the Epsilon Bootes Star System 13.000 years ago.
• On August 23, 1954 the technology magazine Aviation Week and Space Technology released a story about the Black Knight Satellite that angered the Pentagon who were trying to keep the information secret.
• NASA has released official images which apparently show the Black Knight Satellite.

http://www.ancient-code.com/20-facts...ght-satellite/

[Shannon]

Makes me thirsty for the truth real bad...

[Flash]

Posted by Saint Theresa (here)
Makes me thirsty for the truth real bad...

LOLLLLLLL

Sweet discovery!

Black Knight for a black drink or dring the black agenda, whichever

Yeah, sounds like soft disclosure

Also they are telling us that the ETs will be invited to come - coming ET false flag maybe? As foreseen by many.

Gosh, if it is the existing cabal who send the invitation to real ET, we are in a real bad situation. If it is the cabal who will make us believe they, human black projects, are the ET, well, we may be able to handle it.

[onawah]

The video is a trailer for an upcoming "short film".
See:
http://blogs.indiewire.com/shadowand...coded-20151117

Trailer: David Oyelowo, Freida Pinto Star in Epic New Short Film, 'Black Knight Decoded'
November 17, 2015
David Oyelowo, Freida Pinto, Jabbar Raisani, James Frey, Usher and a host of other creative talents have come together to create "Black Knight Decoded," an action-packed, first-of-its-kind short film produced by Levity Entertainment Group (LEG) and Pepsi. "Black Knight Decoded" imagines a rich fictional narrative around what some people believe is a very real entity, the Black Knight satellite. The film, which features an original track, "Miracles," from Usher, tells a story of a father (Oyelowo), his daughter (played by Layla Crawford) and his co-conspirator (Pinto) on their quest to decode radio signals transmitted from the Black Knight satellite. As they struggle to respond before the government shuts down their mission, the group relies on support from communities around the world to come together to communicate universal messages of hope, unity and peace. Those communities across Australia, China, the Czech Republic, India, Mexico, Poland, Romania, Russia, United Arab Emirates, the United States and Vietnam were filmed from cameras on the ground as well as UrtheCast's cameras (a ultra High-Definition video system) aboard the International Space Station.

"'Black Knight Decoded' is an ambitious project that marries an all-star cast, innovative use of the UrtheCast technology and unprecedented consumer participation," said Kristin Patrick, senior vice president of Global Brand Development, PepsiCo Global Beverage Group. "The result is an inspiring, one-of-a-kind film that was truly co-created with top notch creative film talent and consumers from around the world."

"Black Knight Decoded" will be available November 17, 2015 on YouTube.com/Pepsi.

One thing we know for sure is that Pepsi pays millions to lobby for GMOS, so it's surely safe to say they are a NWO corporation.

The Grocery Manufacturers Association -- one of the DARK Act’s most vocal supporters – disclosed $5.8 million in lobbying expenditures tied to GMO labeling last year, up sharply from $60,000 in 2013. The association’s member organizations separately disclosed another $25.4 million in lobbying expenditures tied to GMO labeling last year. Of that, almost half -- $13.3 million -- came from beverage giants Coca-Cola and PepsiCo.

http://www.ewg.org/research/anti-label-lobby

[betoobig]

Soft disclousure by the "wild side"??? They´ve been poisoning us for long with their drinks, and they´ve been allowed to do so. One more time they are giving us what we want.
I don´t take this pill, thank you.
Love

[Nick Matkin]

Posted by Zionbrion (here)

• According to monitoring agencies around the world, The Black knight satellite has been transmitting radio signals for over 50 years now.
• The US and Soviet Union have shown particular interest in this “unidentified space object”
• Rumors are that it was Nikola Tesla the first man to “intercept” a signal from the black knight satellite in 1899 after building a high-voltage radio device in Colorado Springs.
• Since the 1930′s Astronomers worldwide have been reporting strange radio signals which allegedly come from the “Black Knight”.
• In 1957, Dr. Luis Corralos of the Communications Ministry in Venezuela photographed it while taking pictures of Sputnik II as it passed over Caracas.
• The story of the Black Knight made its media debut in the 1940′s when the St. Louis Dispatch and The San Francisco Examiner wrote about the “Satellite” on May 14th 1954.
• The Time Magazine wrote about the Black Knight Satellite on the seventh of March, 1960.
• In 1957, an unknown “object” was seen “shadowing” the Sputnik 1 Spacecraft. According to reports, the “unidentified object” was in Polar orbit.
• In 1957. The United States nor the Russians possessed the technology to maintain a spacecraft in Polar Orbit.
• The first Polar orbiting satellite was launched in 1960.
• Polar orbits are often used for earth-mapping, earth observation, capturing the earth as time passes from one point and reconnaissance satellites. This would put the Black Knight in the category of an observational Satellite.
• In the 1960′s the Black Knight satellite was located once again in Polar Orbit. Astronomers and Scientists calculated the object’s weight to be over 10 tons which would be at that time the Heaviest Artificial Satellite to orbit our Planet.
• The Black Knight’s orbit was unlike any other object orbiting Earth.
• The Grumman Aircraft Corporation gave much importance to this mysterious “Satellite”, On September 3, 1960, seven months after the satellite was first detected by radar, a tracking camera at Grumman Aircraft Corporation’s Long Island factory took a photograph of the Black Knight satellite.
• The Grumman Aircraft Corporation formed a committee to study the data received from the observations made but nothing was made public.
• In 1963, Gordon Cooper was launched into space. On his last orbit, he reported seeing a glowing green object in front of his capsule in the distance moving towards his Spacecraft. The Muchea tracking station, in Australia, which Cooper reported the object to, picked up this Unidentified object on Radar travelling East to West.
• It was the Ham Radio operator who apparently decoded a series of signals received from the UFO Satellite and interpreted it as a star-chart centered on the Epsilon Bootes Star System.
• According to the decoded message, the Black Knight satellite originated from the Epsilon Bootes Star System 13.000 years ago.
• On August 23, 1954 the technology magazine Aviation Week and Space Technology released a story about the Black Knight Satellite that angered the Pentagon who were trying to keep the information secret.
• NASA has released official images which apparently show the Black Knight Satellite.

http://www.ancient-code.com/20-facts...ght-satellite/

Just a jumble of stories, wishful thinking, half truths and errors. This is almost as good at continuous reappearances as Roswell.

Short 5 min Black Knight podcast here by an astronomer who got linked to the story.

Following my own research these are just some of the issues that need addressing:

For example, no info about what frequencies it's been transmitting on, or any recordings.
Lots of 'strange recordings' have been made - look up whistlers and dawn chorus VLF radio signals. Natural but unknown a century ago.
How could it 'shadow' Sputnik 1 in polar orbit when that first man-made satellite wasn't in a polar orbit?
It wasn't a 'ham radio operator' who decoded the signal. Ask a Ham radio Forum. The story is quite well known.
The 'signal' was 'decoded' from Long Delay Echo observations using a Dutch Coast radio station and not directly from the satellite.
NASA has not (obviously) released official images of the Black Knight.

No references, names, recordings, just vague assumptions all stitched together to sound good. It does sound good. It hits all my buttons, but when this subject is researched, it all melts away. Pity, a great pity, as the whole concept of Bracewell Probes is fascinating.

If you still think there may be something in this story, have a listen/read the this 10-minute Skeptoid Episode (no. 365) and counter-argue all their points.

PS: I like the film.

[Althena]

Interesting. I've always wondered about this "thermal blanket"...

[tnkayaker]

as much as I would like to believe in this so called satellite, there would be pics from some observatory by now one would think, and I am with one of the other comments, this use of artificial sweeteners which most everyone knows starts converting to methanol alcohol or a formaldehyde kind of thing at 83 or 86 degrees, then hangs up and stores in the body, is difficult to metabolize then too much gives a person what looks like the on-slaught of multiple sclerosis , then sees a doctor and is prescribed an anti MS drug which in itself may kill you and has others already, when all the person needed to do was stop drinking the stuff, talk about pulling my hair out, this info commercial / soft disclosure type sales pitch is just another way to interest young people and anyone slightly susceptible to new strange and not talked about sudo sy-fi things, just a new way to sell a questionable product(s), have a good weekend though, peace,d

[Flash]

For pepsi, aspartame converts into methanol alcohol and formaldehyde on the shelves when over 83 degrees F, but the molecule splits right in your stomack, before reaching the intestine, and is consumed by the body as a split molecule, such as described in your comment. So it is worst than the heat, just consuming it makes it being transformed (from my sister who is a Professional nutritionist by training)

Posted by tnkayaker (here)
as much as I would like to believe in this so called satellite, there would be pics from some observatory by now one would think, and I am with one of the other comments, this use of artificial sweeteners which most everyone knows starts converting to methanol alcohol or a formaldehyde kind of thing at 83 or 86 degrees, then hangs up and stores in the body, is difficult to metabolize then too much gives a person what looks like the on-slaught of multiple sclerosis , then sees a doctor and is prescribed an anti MS drug which in itself may kill you and has others already, when all the person needed to do was stop drinking the stuff, talk about pulling my hair out, this info commercial / soft disclosure type sales pitch is just another way to interest young people and anyone slightly susceptible to new strange and not talked about sudo sy-fi things, just a new way to sell a questionable product(s), have a good weekend though, peace,d

[amor]

I may have posted this information before but will add more. Common sense would indicate that the Black Knight was placed where it is for one or all of the following purposes: 1. As a communications device; if Bootes is involved, this is the pathway or direction from which the Planet X system would arrive. 2. The advanced civilizations in the Inner Earth would need to communicate with the Annunaki with whom they are connected. 3. The Inner Earth civilization would require to monitor what was happening on the outer surface of the earth for their own protection.
4. The satellite may contain the genetic seeds of all earth life, and other important information, placed there either by the previous civilization which perished on earth or by the Annunaki as the cold of space would preserve it for future use.

[Nick Matkin]

Posted by amor (here)
I may have posted this information before but will add more. Common sense would indicate that the Black Knight was placed where it is for one or all of the following purposes: 1. As a communications device; if Bootes is involved, this is the pathway or direction from which the Planet X system would arrive. 2. The advanced civilizations in the Inner Earth would need to communicate with the Annunaki with whom they are connected. 3. The Inner Earth civilization would require to monitor what was happening on the outer surface of the earth for their own protection.
4. The satellite may contain the genetic seeds of all earth life, and other important information, placed there either by the previous civilization which perished on earth or by the Annunaki as the cold of space would preserve it for future use.

5. A Bracewell probe.

[MorningFox]

Posted by Nick Matkin (here)
NASA has not (obviously) released official images of the Black Knight.

Yes, it has.

http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/SearchPhotos...l=724&frame=65

http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/SearchPhotos...l=724&frame=66

http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/SearchPhotos...l=724&frame=68

http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/SearchPhotos...l=724&frame=69

http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/SearchPhotos...l=724&frame=70

[Nick Matkin]

It's just a photo of a 'thing' and a reverse image search suggests it's a bit of thermal blanket NASA lost - although they would say that wouldn't they?

Lost thermal blanket, or mysterious Black Knight satellite - the story of which crumbles upon close technical examination?

I know where my money is.

[MorningFox]

Well that's me told

[Mutchie]

The Black knight satellite is a fascinating subject .. If Nasa has pictures posted of it & Pepsi is promoting the subject they are obviously prepared for the subject to be heavily scrutinised .. The suggestion by AMOR was excellent stating it could be for an inner earth civilization .. Yet again we are left to PONDER another mystery

[Nick Matkin]

Yes, as has been said it's an interesting story. When I first heard of it in the 1970s from my physics teacher (who showed me the newspaper article) I was fascinated. Then decades later I heard about it again, and by this time I was trained and employed in radio frequency engineering, satellite use and had much more discerning and analytical of weird stories like this. We all should be more discerning or we'll drown in all the crap.

But as has already been explained in this thread, the more the story is examined (which turn out to be a muddling of different stories by non-technical writers), the less there is. There are many inconsistencies and vague assertions here, just look at post #3.

The very first point should raise questions for Truth Seekers:

According to monitoring agencies around the world, The Black knight satellite has been transmitting radio signals for over 50 years now.

Transmitting for over 50 years - really? Received by whom? When? Where? On what frequencies, using what type of transmission mode? In 50 years has anyone determined what format the signal takes? Can we see a spectrum display of it? An audio recording? What - these aren't available? Not even been detected by well equipped amateurs? In 50 over years?

Come on...

This isn't to say such a probe would be impossible, but given the information presented as evidence for the Black Knight - I believe there is no such thing.

Let's know what radio frequencies it operates on, it's orbital period and perhaps we can make a start.

Congratulations BTW to whoever came up with that name. It certainly captures the imagination and is probably one reason why the story hasn't died out!

[Bill Ryan]

Posted by Nick Matkin (here)

If you still think there may be something in this story, have a listen/read the this 10-minute Skeptoid Episode (no. 365) and counter-argue all their points.

PS: I like the fi.

I like the film, too!

In support of Nick, here's the article in full that he referenced... it's a very interesting read.

http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4365

Stories say it's up there in the blackness right now, just outside the Earth's glow. It tumbles slowly and deliberately through the darkness, sweeping smoothly along its unrelenting orbit. The Earth spins below, largely unaware of its unauthorized parasitic visitor. It is the Black Knight satellite, a mysterious object cirling the Earth, of unknown (and possibly alien) origin — the story says it's up there right now, and has been for 13,000 years.

Like so many stories of weird phenomena, the Black Knight satellite legend starts with Nicola Tesla. It's said that he picked up a repeating radio signal in 1899, that he believed was coming from space, and said so publicly at a conference. In the 1920s, amateur HAM radio operators were able to receive this same signal. Next, scientists in Oslo, Norway experimenting with short wave transmissions into space in 1928, began picking up Long Delay Echoes (LDEs), a not fully understood phenomenon in which they received echoes several seconds after transmission. The apparent explanation finally came in 1954 when newspapers (including the St. Louis Post Dispatch and the San Francisco Examiner) reported an announcement from the US Air Force that two satellites were found to be orbiting the Earth, at a time when no nation yet had the ability to launch them. It appeared that Black Knight had been detected by multiple lines of evidence, and was confirmed by the US Air Force.

By 1960, both the United States and the Soviet Union had hardware in orbit. But on February 11, 1960, newspapers everywhere reported some alarming news: that somebody else also had something in orbit. A radar screen, designed by the US Navy to detect enemy spy satellites, had picked something up. It was described as a dark, tumbling object. It wasn't ours, and it wasn't the Soviets' either.

The next day, newspapers reported a bit more information. The mysterious object was orbiting at about 79 degrees off from the equator, not the 90 degrees of a proper polar orbit. Its orbit was also highly eccentric, with an apogee of 1,728 km but a perigee of only 216 km. The object made a complete orbit every 104.5 minutes.

At the time, the Navy was tracking one known casing from an old Discoverer launch, a half shell a bit less than 6 meters long. Discoverer VIII had launched on November 20, 1959, a stepping stone toward launching a man into space and then recovering him in a parachuting capsule. The launch went as planned, but its mission to eject its 136 kg capsule didn't go so well. The capsule's casings came off as planned, but the capsule itself went astray into an orbit somewhat similar to that of the mystery object, and was eventually declared lost. The Navy tracked one of the casings, which was then orbiting every 103 minutes at 80 degrees, with an apogee of 950 km and a perigee of 187 km. Black Knight's object was similar, but not exactly the same.

And then, in 1963, astronaut Gordon Cooper reported seeing a greenish UFO during his 15th orbit on board Mercury 9. It was witnessed on the radar screens by approximately 100 people at NASA's Muchea Tracking Station near Perth, Australia. An official explanation given later was that Cooper's electronics malfunctioned, and he breathed in too much CO2 which gave him hallucinations. Black Knight's reality seemed to be undeniable.

In 1973, Scottish researcher Duncan Lunan wanted to know for certain. He went back to the Norwegian scientists' LDE data and analyzed it. Lunan discovered that it was a star chart pointing the way to Epsilon Boötis, a double star in the constellation of Boötes. Whatever Black Knight was, it appeared to be transmitting an invitation from the people of Epsilon Boötis, an invitation that was 12,600 years old, according to Lunan's analysis.

The final piece of proof came in 1998, when the space shuttle Endeavor made its first flight to the International Space Station on flight STS-88. Astronauts aboard Endeavor took many photographs of a strange object, which were widely available to the public on the NASA website. But soon the photographs all disappeared. They reappeared some time later, with new URLs, and with various descriptions explaining them all away as pieces of debris or space junk. The photographs were of high quality and unmistakably showed some type of craft. Since then we've known just about all there is to know about Black Knight. We know what it looks like, where it came from, when it came, its purpose as an ambassador, and it's been endorsed by so many reliable witnesses in the space program.

So then, why does nobody know about it; and why does NASA fail to acknowledge its existence?

What a great story. The idea of a 13,000-year-old alien satellite orbiting the Earth is about as exciting as it can get. People often accuse me of debunking stories like this, but I don't see it that way at all. I simply want to know more. I want to open the box wider and learn what's really going on. I don't want to stop here and say "That sounds weird"; I want to learn the solution to the mystery. To those of you who dismiss this as debunking, I really have to say I don't understand why learning the whole story is seen as a negative process. I'm excited by it, and I was excited to learn what's behind the Black Knight satellite. Here's what I found.

It turns out that all the bits of history making up the story of Black Knight are unrelated. The phrase "black knight" is so common that I was unable to determine when that name first became a part of the story. It seems improbable that the name would have come from any spacefaring nations at the time, as it's such a common name and has probably been assigned to any number of real projects. From 1958 through 1965, the United Kingdom launched 22 rockets in a program named Black Knight, intended to test various re-entry vehicles. But Black Knight never put anything into orbit; indeed, its second stage fired on the way down, not the way up, to better stress the re-entry vehicle. Take that name out of the equation, and all the links of the chain fall apart. All the events said to be connected to the Black Knight satellite were well documented on their own, and none (at the time) made any mention of such a name.

Nicola Tesla did indeed pick up rhythmic radio signals in 1899, and he did believe they came from space. Today we believe he was correct, and that what he picked up were pulsars, giant deep space sources of pulsing radio signals that were formally discovered in 1968. As pulsars were unknown in Tesla's day, he did his best to explain what he thought they might be: intelligent but undeciphered signals.

The Norwegian scientists did indeed receive LDE radio reflections, and their cause remains nearly as much a mystery today as it did then. Today we have five probable explanations, any or all of which may be responsible for some LDEs, and they mostly pertain to strange effects in the Earth's ionosphere. They are among about 15 plausible explanations. None of these includes orbiting alien satellites; although if an alien satellite elected to enter our orbit, record our transmissions, and transmit them back to us 8 seconds later, it could well have the same effect.

When Duncan Lunan did his translation of the LDE data in 1973 and came up with the star map, he never had any thought of Black Knight or any other strange polar satellite. In fact his interpretation was that the LDEs were coming from the Earth's L5 Lagrangian point. L4 and L5 are two points along the moon's orbit, one 60° ahead of it and the other 60° behind, which are stable and where gravimetric effects from the Earth and Moon will hold an object in steady orbit. Moreover, Lunan later acknowledged that his method was not only unscientific but that he'd made outright errors, and retracted it. So despite today's pop-culture story, there never has been any reasonable interpretation of anything connecting Epsilon Boötis to either a mysterious satellite or to a date of 12,600 years ago.

Those 1954 newspaper reports of two satellites in orbit? It was merely tongue-in-cheek reporting of the wild claims of a UFO crank trying to sell a book. The Air Force officer cited was merely a guy who had seen a UFO once, but in no way corroborated the idea of unknown satellites orbiting Earth. Nothing to do with the alleged Black Knight.

The most interesting part of the story was in 1960, when the Discoverer satellites were being launched. Secretary of the Air Force Dudley Sharp told newspapers that this new mystery object was probably the second casing from Discoverer VIII, the twin of the known piece they were already tracking, as it was the right size and in about the right place. This was soon confirmed. TIME magazine even reported the identification, but since a mundane explanation is not as exciting as a mystery object, it was back page news.

And there's another interesting footnote about the Discoverer program. In 1992, a Central Intelligence Agency program called Corona was declassified, and revealed that the Discoverer rockets were not about launching guys into space at all, but were actually carrying Corona spy satellites. The reason to use a polar orbit is that the craft eventually flies over every part of the Earth, and it's possible to photograph everything; unlike conventional semi-equatorial orbits that can only cover within a certain range of latitude. Back in those days there was no such thing as transmitting digital images back to Earth, so film cameras had to be used, and the film had to be dropped back to Earth to be developed and studied. The Corona KH-1 camera would de-orbit, pop a parachute, and then the parachute would be captured mid-air by a JC-130 recovery aircraft.

So although the entire Discoverer program was a front, the launches and results reported in newspapers at the time were indeed correct according to what was later declassified. The Corona camera aboard Discoverer VIII was indeed lost exactly as reported in the 1960 newspapers, and its casings and their eccentric orbit were also correctly reported.

So what was it that Gordon Cooper saw from Mercury 9, and that was corroborated by all those radar operators? According to Cooper himself (who died in 2004), what he saw was nothing at all. But make no mistake, Gordon Cooper reported seeing many UFOs during his flight career. He remains adamant about a fleet of UFOs that he says flew overhead while he was stationed in Germany, though nobody else there reports having known anything about it. But Cooper is also adamant that the Mercury 9 UFO — his supposed sighting of a greenish Black Knight in 1963 — is a complete fabrication by UFO authors that never happened. He offered all the transcripts, including his own originals, as proof that no such thing was reported during his flight. The story appears in virtually every UFO book about the Black Knight case, but there's no record of any such thing from NASA, from the radar station personnel, or from any contemporary source. It's purely an invention of modern writers.

So that leaves us with Endeavor's STS-88 flight, and their startling photographs of a spacecraft. There are a lot of things wrong with this part of the story. First of all, the shuttle always flew in a semi-equatorial orbit, as does the International Space Station. An object passing in a polar orbit would have gone by at tens of thousands of kilometers per hour, far too fast to be visible, and certainly far too fast for so many high-quality photos to be taken. During one of the astronauts' EVAs, a thermal blanket was lost and drifted away — silver on one side and black on the other. It was photographed extensively. It was crumpled and formed an odd shape. If you didn't know what to expect, the average person would have no clue what it was. But, unfortunately for the legend and fortunately for the astronauts, it simply wasn't an alien satellite.

I had a lot of fun learning more about this story. I learned a lot of history and some astronomical facts I didn't know. I'm glad I took the trouble, because if I had simply accepted the story that there's an alien satellite orbiting the Earth, I'd be wrong and I wouldn't have learned anything new. Worse, I'd have made a logical error, in being forced to accept a whole galaxy of wrong assumptions in order to shoehorn an improbable alien satellite into my reality. Neither legend nor mere debunking lead anywhere useful; it's only by tracking down the true facts that we earn the real rewards.

• Correction: An earlier version of this incorrectly said that objects in perpendicular low Earth orbit would pass at "thousands of kilometers per second". In fact it's about 10 km/s, or about 36,000 km/h, if my math is right.
• Correction: An earlier version of this said that the thermal blanket was discovered during the STS-88 initial visual inspection following launch, but it was actually lost and photographed during a subsequent EVA.

[quinn345]

The production look absolutely great! I loved the work and the settings they have used. I had done a video for my business with the help of a video production company in Hamilton called MJM Media for marketing my business. The ad was a great success which made me realized the influence of video production in the field of marketing.