Tales of the Black Knight

New from the One Thing Leads To Another department, yesterday's post about crazy stories growing by accretion prompted an email from a loyal reader of Skeptophilia asking me if I'd heard about the "Black Knight satellite."

At first, I thought it was some kind of obscure Monty Python reference, and asked if I was going to end up getting my arms and legs chopped off.  He said no, it had nothing to do with Monty Python, and expressed surprise that I hadn't heard of it, and provided me with several relevant links to explore.  Once again proving that trying to sound the bottom of the ocean of wacky bullshit ideas out there is an exercise in futility.  No matter how much nutty stuff I write about on a daily basis, there is always more out there.

So pop some popcorn, sit back in your recliner, and let me tell you about what I learned today in school.

Ham radio buffs know about the phenomenon called a long-delayed echo, which is when a radio transmission is bounced back to its origin a significant amount of time after it is sent.  There is, of course, a completely natural explanation; that the signal becomes trapped between two layers of the ionosphere, and travels around the Earth many times until it finally "falls out" through a gap in the bottom layer, to be picked up by receivers on the Earth's surface.  This idea isn't proven -- and there are some examples of LDEs that don't seem to be explainable through this mechanism -- but it's thought that this probably accounts for the majority of them.

Okay, so that's the first piece of the puzzle.  Add to that the radio signals that Nikola Tesla picked up, that I wrote about only last week.  As I pointed out in that post, there's something about Tesla's name that ups the woo-woo quotient significantly, so we'll just leave that there.

Next, put in a report from February 1960 from the United States Navy, of a "dark, tumbling object" that was showing up on radar.  It had an odd and highly eccentric orbit -- inclined at 79° from the equator, with a period of 104.5 minutes, an apogee of 1,728 kilometers, and a perigee of 216 kilometers.  Mysterious -- until the Navy stated that it was a casing from the Discoverer VIII satellite, which had been lost while following a similar strange orbit.

Of course, that's what they would say.  *cue scary music*

That brings us to 1973, when Scottish science fiction writer Duncan Lunan revealed that he had been looking through old radio transmission logs from Norway and the Netherlands from the 1920s, and had come across a radio message in a LDE that could be translated as follows:

Start here. Our home is Upsilon Boötes, which is a double star.  We live on the sixth planet of seven, coming from the sun, which is the larger of the two.  Our sixth planet has one moon.  Our fourth planet has three.  Our first and third planets each have one.  Our probe is in the position of Arcturus, known in our maps.

The report evidently carried enough weight that it was published in Spaceflight, the journal of the British Interplanetary Society, and eventually in Time magazine and on the CBS Evening News.   Lunan later withdrew his support for the claim, stating three years later that the evidence didn't support it -- once again making the conspiracy theorists wiggle their eyebrows significantly.  How could a message have been translated, resulting in such precise information, and then later the man who broke the story simply backs off from it?

Someone must have... gotten to him.  *music gets even scarier*

Of course, there's the problem that Lunan is still alive and kicking, and still periodically churns out weird claims (such as his stating that the "Green Children of Woolpit" were alien children who were transported to Earth by a malfunction in a Star Trek-style matter transporter.  But that's a story for another post).  So if They got to Lunan, they didn't do a very thorough job of silencing him.

But even that's not all.  We have an incident in 1998, where an object photographed during the STS-88 space shuttle mission was alleged to be the same object that the Navy had seen on radar in 1960, even though NASA said that it was just a piece of a thermal blanket that had been lost during an EVA "spacewalk."

But that was it.  By this time, the accretion had reached a critical mass.  All of this stuff, people said, must be connected.  You can't just have random echo messages, lost satellite casings and thermal blankets, allegations of alien messages, and the name "Nikola Tesla," and not have it mean something.

So what does it mean, you're probably asking?  Here we go.  You ready?

It's a 13,000 year old extraterrestrial Mayan spacecraft called the "Black Knight satellite" that is still up there and relaying messages back to its home base on Upsilon Boötes.

At this point in my research for this post, I gave a quizzical head-tilt look at my computer, rather the way my dog looks at me when I try to explain a complex concept to her, such as why she can't bring the squirrel she just killed inside.  "Extraterrestrial Mayans?" I said to my computer.  "The Mayans aren't extraterrestrials.  They're just... people."

So I began to investigate this, and I found out how wrong I was.  There was this Mayan dude, K'inich Janaab' Pakal, who had his own spaceship, if you can imagine.  Here's a picture of him flying in it, a drawing of the design from the lid of his sarcophagus:

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But who says that this is a guy in a spacecraft?  Who says it's not just a Mayan dude leaning back in some kind of Mesoamerican easy chair?

Erich von Däniken, that's who.

Yes, the whole thing leads us to none other than the venerable Swiss author of Chariots of the Gods?, a book that reads like a bible of Ancient Alien Wingnuttery.  The guy who Giorgio Tsoukalos and the rest of the raving wackmobiles on the This Really Has Nothing To Do With History Channel consider to be nearly a god himself.

So here we have another good example of crackpot idea accretion, not to mention an illustration of the fact that if you could get Erich von Däniken, Alex Jones, and The Weekly World News to shut the hell up, the world would be a significantly less interesting but a significantly saner place.

Anyhow, there it is: another nutball claim that I hadn't heard of.  Once again, a hat tip to the reader who sent it along -- it was a fun bunch of threads to follow, although I must say that the headdesk I did when I found out that von Däniken was involved is going to leave significant bruise.

Nikola Tesla vs. the Martians

I'd like to go on record as saying that claiming that a scientist said or did something crazy, which (s)he almost certainly did not say or do, is dirty pool.  Especially when said scientist is dead and cannot mount an effective counter-attack.

It's bad enough when (s)he's alive, as theoretical physicist and prominent science writer Lawrence Krauss found out, when some wackos who believe that the Earth is the center of the universe cherry-picked quotes from his talks to make it sound like he agreed with them.  (For Krauss's blistering response to the perpetrators, take a look at his article in Slate.)

But of course, one does not have that kind of recourse when one is dead.  Which explains why Einstein's quotes show up hither and yon to support all sorts of stuff, from theism to atheism to quantum-consciousness-frequency lunacy.  All of which makes me kind of hope that there's no afterlife, because it pains me to think of poor Einstein, watching his name being taken in vain by unscientific wingnuts, and not being able to do a damn thing about it.

But lately, Einstein has been supplanted as the Most Misleadingly Quoted Scientist by a different man, whose work is cited by a different group of wackos for different reasons.  This scientist is mostly cherry-picked to prop up claims like Infinite Free Energy (and the conspiracy theories regarding government coverups thereof), UFO antigravity propulsion systems, and superpowerful directed energy weapons.  He allegedly had all of this stuff figured out, but depending on whom you believe, (1) his research was actively suppressed during his lifetime, (2) all of his relevant papers were mysteriously destroyed after he died in 1943, or (3) he forgot to write it down.  All of this explains his current surge in popularity (forgive the pun) -- because of course, I am referring to the brilliant electrical engineer, Nikola Tesla.

Tesla was certainly a genius, even if you only consider the things he actually did.  There's the Tesla coil that bears his name, not to mention his well-known work with alternating current, the induction motor, radio-controlled machines, wireless telegraphy, and a bladeless turbine.  He spoke eight languages fluently, had an eidetic ("photographic") memory, and was gifted with flashes of insight that would often result in his drawing diagrams from memory that would then guide his further pursuits.  He died in possession of 278 patents -- but died in debt and impoverished, which (of course) further adds to his mystique.

So it's no wonder that Tesla is a favorite amongst the woo-woos.  Which is why just yesterday, there was an article on the fantastically wacky website Exopolitics by our pal, Skeptophilia frequent flier Alfred Lambremont Webre, called, "Nikola Tesla Re-started Earth's Exopolitical Communication with an Intelligent Civilization on Mars in 1901."

Just the title makes so many ad hoc claims that it might be sufficient simply to analyze it, but we would be remiss in not looking at the text.  And it does not disappoint.  Webre doesn't beat around the bush:

There is substantial documentation of Nikola Tesla's role as an early pioneer in re-establishing in 1901 public exopolitical communications between our Earthling human civilization and an intelligent civilization on Mars, most probably our human cousins known as homo martis terris. Public Earth-Mars exopolitical communications had most probably been severed since the solar system catastrophe of 9500 BC that greatly damaged Mars atmosphere and its surface ecology, and destroyed Earth's great maritime civilization. 

Nikola Tesla's early work in re-establishing interactive communication with an intelligent Martian laid the foundation for the U.S. government's secret DARPA time travel and teleportation program 1968-73 that employed Tesla-based technologies, and ironically perhaps for the secret CIA Mars "jump room" program that was initiated in the early 1980s that reportedly employed grey extraterrestrial technologies.

The "great maritime civilization" is, of course, Atlantis, and the "jump room" is the teleportation chamber via which the CIA has been transporting people to Mars, beam-me-up-Scotty style.  These individuals apparently include President Obama, who Webre says was seen on Mars by Seattle lawyer and noted wackmobile Andrew Basiago.   But this is just the outer skin of the onion, because apparently there are intelligent creatures on Mars -- not just lots of dust and rocks, which is pretty much all the Mars Explorer has found, despite numerous claims to the contrary.

Now, apparently it's true that Tesla once made a claim that he'd received a radio signal from Mars.  The signal, Tesla said, contained the following message: "1...2...3...4."  Which doesn't seem like a very intelligent thing to say, considering all the other things that one could say.  I mean, if I was on Mars, and I realized that someone on Earth was listening, I'd probably say, "It is really dry and cold and dusty up here, please send a rescue ship RIGHT NOW."  But Tesla thought it might be from the Martians, and proceeded to send messages back, none of which were ever answered.  We now think that he'd picked up signals from the magnetic field fluctuations of Jupiter, and eventually even Tesla moved on to other stuff.

As proof of Tesla's involvement, and his communications with Martians, Webre has large quantities of quotes from Tesla that really don't prove much of anything except that Tesla seems to have wanted to communicate with Martians.  He also has the following advertisement:

So that cinches it, then.

And all of that is apparently enough for Webre et al.  After quoting Tesla ad nauseam, he goes on into even more rarefied air.  He devotes a large section of his article to the research of Gregory Hodowanec, who has received radio transmissions that were either from somewhere in the constellation Andromeda or else from a Martian named "AAAAAATTT."  I'm not making this up.  Hodowanec told Webre all about his communications, and ended by saying, "I would appreciate that you keep this info somewhat confidential now.  The Earth may not be ready for what I will have to say eventually.  Nothing dire, just fantastic and thus perhaps unbelievable!"

So Webre put the whole thing online, including Hodowanec's request, which I find kind of funny.

The problem is, of course, that Tesla may have been a visionary, but he wasn't insane (the jury is still out on Hodowanec).  So I have no doubt that he would have been swayed by the evidence, as any good scientist is.  Or in this case, the lack of it.  Mars is significantly uninhabited, and I don't think the situation was any different 113 years ago.  Quote-mining Tesla's papers to support some crackpot theory doesn't make it true, and it's really hardly fair, given that Tesla himself is not around to defend himself.

I hate to say it, but it's getting to the point that whenever I read anything online that has Tesla's name attached to it, I immediately put on my suspicious face.  Which is unfortunate because I know he did some really forward-thinking research, much of which I have yet to investigate, and it'd suck if I missed out on learning about something Tesla actually did because of loons like Webre.

So that's today's voyage through the stratosphere.  How Nikola Tesla definitely didn't talk to someone on Mars.  There's no one up there on the Red Planet, more's the pity.  If there was, NASA would know about it by now, and scientists would be trampling each other to death trying to get first dibs on studying the Martians, because how cool would that be?

I mean, really.

And just for the record: I would certainly need more than an early 20th century advertisement for soap to convince me otherwise.

What the frack?

Diane Tessman is at it again.  Yes, the woman who believes that clouds are camouflage for UFOs, who believes that organisms evolve, Pokémon-like, to obtain advanced powers, has now weighed in on another topic:

Hydrofracking.

If you're thinking, "Oh, this is gonna be good," you don't even know the half of it.  (Source)

Because it isn't, she said, Diane Tessman speaking; it's a superpowerful alien entity named Tibus who is speaking through her.  And boy, is Tibus annoyed with the way we've been treating Mother Earth.  He starts out, though, with a news bulletin meant to put us at ease:

 Star people, this is Tibus. I come to you in love and light.

I am smiling as I greet you, my star friends/co-workers! I am also smiling at a UFO report from North Carolina; a man was out looking for a good place to hunt (I hope we was sufficiently distracted by his UFO sighting and did not hunt), when he spotted a low flying rectangular craft with 4 amber lights. “Rectangular” is not aerodynamic but because of advanced propulsion (anti-gravity) methods, we can use rectangles, squares, tubes, and so forth. Usually, however, we like the grace and beauty of a saucer-shaped craft and have found we actually fly them more efficiently than the cumbersome-looking craft. I hasten to add that the craft this man saw belongs to a small group within Space/Time Intelligence, but not directly to any of those folk, nor their ethnic groups, who send messages to you through Diane.

Oh, good.  If they are operating within Space/Time Intelligence, I guess they're welcome to visit North Carolina.  If the craft was populated by gay aliens attempting to find a nice place to get married, however, they might want to try a different venue.

After assuring us that the UFOs we see are here on a peaceful scientific mission, and that their crews have no intention of strapping us to examining tables and implanting microchips in our skulls, Tibus/Diane goes on to the topic at hand: the natural gas industry.

Hydraulic fracking, a process which extracts natural gas, has added to the danger from the New Madrid Fault, to a huge degree. Old fashioned fracking was hurtful to Earth but not potentially catastrophic. However, modern hydraulic fracking creates a real earthquake danger and also gobbles up the water table over a vast area, right when earth needs every drop of her fresh water supply. What fresh water is not gobbled up, is left toxic and hopelessly contaminated.

So, Tibus, if we can't do natural gas extraction because hydrofracking is too dangerous, what do we do to find a source of energy?

Here is the answer: We offer Earth free energy, which was discovered by a human being, Nikola Tesla, so certainly humankind should benefit from it. Free energy was taken away from the human race very wrongly, by greedy (yes), humans who saw they could make lots of money through non-free forms of energy. We of Space/Time Intelligence now offer free energy again, freely.

Isn't that nice?  Free energy that's freely free!  Wouldn't that be freeing?  But how can we be sure that Tibus really knows what Tesla was up to, when he discovered free energy?

Tesla is with me and says that technically, alien races had discovered what he called free energy, eons before he did, but I respond to Tesla that he is being “too” conscientious, because we consider a new invention or creation to be brand new each time it is discovered by a different species on a different world. I remind him that there are wondrous ancient beings in the universe who have already discovered what we of Space/Time Intelligence have discovered, only eons before we did. Peel away the onion layers, and they are astoundingly endless. So, Tesla did discover free energy, which we use; it involves relatively simple anti-gravity techniques.

Oh.  Okay.  Simple anti-gravity techniques.  Since Tesla is right there with you, would you mind asking him how we're going to manage that?  The law of gravity, so far as I've noticed, seems to be strictly enforced in most jurisdictions.  But maybe that's just my perception because I'm stuck in the wrong layer of the Cosmic Onion.

The good news, though, is that we don't just have to rely on help from dead physicists in figuring all of this out: we also have the "God Cloud."  What, you might ask, is the God Cloud?

Some of you have asked about the God Cloud: It is a being, ancient and advanced, who offers to help. It is more ancient and advanced than any of us in Space/Time Intelligence. It is, for all intents and purposes, pure intelligence.

It traveled from a distant star cluster to help, and has “parked” near Earth. It is simply a stellar cloud of highly advanced particles of consciousness which/who function as ONE.

But how can the God Cloud, for all of its "advanced particles of consciousness," help us?

When the time is right (the micro-second when Earth reaches critical mass of enlightenment), it will throw its pure intelligence, pure enlightenment, into the electromagnetic field of Earth which will have just shifted (thus human minds will have just shifted upwards), and it will stabilize and enhance the new EM field on which human minds will function thereafter.

For those of you concerned if the God Cloud is committing “suicide” to do this, no it is not. It will remain a sovereign entity within the new EM field, and it will gather itself up as ONE, and leave when things settle down.

Whew.  I know I'm relieved.  I already had my hand on the Space/Time Intelligence Suicide Hotline.

So, anyway, that's today's hopeful message from the Land of Woo-Woo: we should stop hydrofracking because it pisses off Mother Earth, Nikola Tesla, and an alien named Tibus, but don't worry because free energy is just around the corner, not to mention an extraterrestrial super-intelligent cloud who is there to help us achieve a stable electromagnetic field of enlightened human consciousness.  I'm so glad we have Tibus around to advise us, aren't you? Maybe next time he could weigh in on such Universal Mysteries as why so many people these days seem to believe absurd, counterfactual nonsense.  I wonder what Tibus might have to say about that.