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The Fringe Files
Ancient aliens, lost civilisations and the occult, checked against what the sources actually say.
A dark, artificial object called the 'Black Knight satellite' has silently orbited Earth for thousands of years, and NASA has covered up its extraterrestrial origin.
The object at the center of Billy Carson's 2019 documentary is a NASA thermal blanket that astronaut Jerry Ross lost on a 1998 spacewalk, tracked by NORAD under its own catalog number, and watched burn up in the atmosphere two weeks later.
In 2019 Carson co-directed and starred in "Black Knight Satellite: The Untold Story," a documentary built around the claim that a dark, irregular object photographed from the space shuttle is an ancient, possibly 13,000-year-old, extraterrestrial satellite that has silently monitored Earth while NASA covers up its existence. Per the film's own synopsis, it follows Carson "cracking unknown signals" and tracking "evidence of extraterrestrial communication in government documents." The image the theory hangs on was taken during the STS-88 shuttle mission in December 1998 and does, at a glance, look like a large solid craft.
The object has a fully documented, mundane origin. Astronaut Jerry Ross, who was on the STS-88 spacewalk, has stated publicly that it was a thermal insulation blanket that came loose while he and fellow astronaut James Newman were installing equipment on the nascent International Space Station. Space historian James Oberg (a former NASA Mission Control engineer who worked on STS-88's own trajectory design) has laid out the paper trail: the object was catalogued by NORAD as satellite number 25570, tracked in orbit, and recorded reentering the atmosphere on December 14, 1998, about two weeks after it was lost, a lifespan flatly incompatible with a millennia-old artifact. NASA's public affairs office has stated on record that there is "no evidence whatsoever" of an alien satellite and that the STS-88 object "was a thermal blanket, and nothing more."
The "13,000-year-old" framing that Carson's documentary and the wider Black Knight legend depend on is itself a splice: contemporary press coverage and aggregated research (summarized in the Black Knight satellite conspiracy theory entry on Wikipedia, and in a 2021 Space.com investigation) trace the legend back through 1950s radio-signal reports, a misattributed Nikola Tesla anecdote, and other unrelated sightings that were merged with the 1998 photo only after the fact; none of the earlier stories depict the same object as the STS-88 image. Carson's film treats that after-the-fact merger as a single, covered-up truth rather than engaging with the documented, named, photographically and orbitally verified explanation for the image it opens on.
