Tesla’s contemporaries may have thought his claims were just a publicity stunt, but people kept hearing weird things from outer space. According to Vice, in 1927, a Norwegian engineer named Jorgen Hals was listening to radio signals when he noticed some of them had a strange “echo.” (Why is it that aliens keep contacting people in really cold places?) This echo involved the signal he was listening to bouncing back to him several seconds after the original transmission had ended. Despite turning to other physicists for help (including the incredibly dapper Carl Stormer, pictured above), Hals could never explain these “long-delayed radio echoes.” Other scientists haven’t been able to either, and we all know that big, unexplained questions should be answered with conspiracy theories. 

Even the French managed to get in on the conspiracy action. In 1961, a man named Jacques Vallee (at right in the photo) was working away in a Paris observatory tracking satellites. One day he made a startling discovery: there was a bright, unidentified object in retrograde (meaning it was moving in the opposite direction of Earth’s rotation). Why was this a big deal? There’s technology for that, right? Sure, there is now, but the technology to put satellites in retrograde didn’t exist at that time. Despite this, Vallee and his colleagues assumed the UFO must be something innocent, like an asteroid that had gotten caught in the Earth’s gravitational pull. And that’s where the story would end, except for the crazy thing that happened next. When Vallee showed the tape of the object to his supervisor, his supervisor confiscated the tape and then erased the footage.

In an interview, Vallee said the official story was that the supervisor didn’t want to share half-baked information that made no sense with the other countries involved in the project. France might look silly! (Thank goodness France doesn’t look silly.) Vallee wondered if it was just an asteroid, why the secrecy? This is the stuff that conspiracy theorists live for. Unsurprisingly, they view this as another obvious sighting of the Black Knight satellite.

If there really is a mystery satellite in the sky, who put it up there, according to the believers? Some think this question was answered in the 1970s, not by a scientist or an astronomer, but by a science fiction writer named Duncan Lunan. He took the long-delayed radio echoes Jorgen Hals discovered in the 1920s and mapped them against constellations. His conclusion was that the signals were originally from the star Epsilon Boötis and that they first arrived here around 11,000 B.C., the same time the Black Knight satellite supposedly arrived here. He also claimed to have decoded their message:

“Our home is Epsilon Boötis, which is a double star. We live on the sixth planet of seven — check that, the sixth of seven — counting outwards from the sun, which is the larger of the two stars. Our sixth planet has one moon. Our fourth planet has three. Our first and third planet each have one. Our probe is in the orbit of your moon.”

Note the following facts. First, this supposed message clearly states that the probe is orbiting our moon and not the Earth. Second, Lunan later withdrew his claims, saying the original data was faulty. However, that hasn’t stopped conspiracy theorists from connecting his findings to the Black Knight satellite. In fact, Lunan’s name became so synonymous with the conspiracy that he was forced to officially deny that he thinks the long-delayed echoes have anything to do with it.