The Black Knight Satellite

[Ninurta]

Is or was it Really 13000 years old,,,,, Out there Monitoring Earth,,,,, us!!??
How do they know it's been around for 13000 years,,,,,, did someone leave instructions or a carving of it.

I think I may have a partial answer to that.

Back in the early 90's, when I was studying physics and astronomy, I was working with star catalogs and star mapping, trying to map nearby stars in 3 dimensions for interstellar navigational purposes. During that time, and because of that endeavor, I ran across a report on what I believe is now called "the Black Knight Satellite", although I don't recall any mention of that name back then.

Ever since the invention of radio, people have intercepted strange radio signals that no one knows the source of. One of those signals was allegedly deciphered by a guy whose name as I recall was Duncan Lunan. He claimed the signal came from a satellite in Earth orbit, and that the signal it was sending deciphered into a star map. The stars as plotted in that signal, according to Lunan, were in the positions they held (from the perspective of Earth) 13,000 years ago. So that's where they came up with the 13,000 year ago figure. The theory put forth is that another civilization sent out satellites thousands of years ago to likely inhabitable systems, and ours entered Earth orbit, took a snapshot of the stars at that time, and then went into hibernation until it detected radio signals coming from Earth, indicating that we had developed far enough to communicate with. Then it started sending out it's signal with the time stamp mentioned.

It was a fascinating story to me at the time, but to be honest, it seems a terrible waste of resources to send a satellite that far just to tell folks something they could calculate for themselves - i.e. where the stars were 13,000 years ago.

The WOW signal picked up at Ohio State in, I believe, 1977, is another fascinating story - but we didn't get the actual transmission, just a radio spike which has never been repeated, so there's no telling what, if anything, that fleeting signal was trying to tell us. It was, however, powerful enough to spike the detectors off the charts (which is why the guy said "WOW!" the next morning when he saw the record of the spike), and they did get it's location narrowed down to two specific areas of sky... but, even after months of listening for a repeat, it never showed up again so that we could get the actual transmission.

Things that make you go "hmmm..."...