“The Flying Saucer Conspiracy” and the Black Knight Satellite: Cold War Spy-Fi?

a reply to: Baddogma

The basic claim of small objects in orbit before there should've been is the "real" Black Knight genesis, as my old brain tells me, anyway.

That's what this thread is about. The origin of that claim.

a reply to: Phage
Yah, just mentioning that Keyhoe is part of the mosaic, not the "God" of this creation.

a reply to: DJW001

Yes, you read that correctly. Donald Keyhoe (emphasizing his military cred, naturally) informed the Associated Press of the preliminary "moonwatch" findings, interpreting them as artificial and promptly linking them with an alleged "flying saucer" sighting by one of the highest Air Force officials! (Who promptly denied it, of course.) No wonder the Pentagon was "set abuzz" by the rumor... which Keyhoe himself started and never admitted to in his book.

It should be noted that LaPaz also disavowed Keyhoe's claim, in print.
www.roswellproof.com...

a reply to: Baddogma

Probably not, but as DJW001 has carefully pointed out: Keyhoe is the single literary source for the story.

It was a clean kill and elegantly done.

It was the evening of December 23, and wintry darkness had settled over Michigan. At an isolated radar station Air Defense operators were watching their scope in a routine guard against possible enemy attack.

Suddenly the “blip” of an unknown machine (!) appeared on the glass screen. The Ground Control Intercept officer took a quick look. The “unknown” was flying over Soo Locks—and no aircraft was scheduled near that important target. Whatever it was, it had to be identified swiftly….

The "God" is in the details.

a reply to: Bybyots

Agreed that DJW001 did a fine job and a great thread.

It is good to disentangle UFO myth at every opportunity, though i fear it is too grand a job for one, or several lifetimes.

That said, it seems there were unidentified orbiting thingies of whatever genesis before there were any launched in the public sphere... and that gets lost in the conflating, tabloid noise.

Sometimes the intelligence agencies don't have to lift a finger (assuming they'd want to in the first place). The need for bigger book sales do a fine job of confusing any base facts from which the rickety edifice of mainstream UFOlogy is built.

a reply to: Baddogma

That said, it seems there were unidentified orbiting thingies of whatever genesis before there were any launched in the public sphere

According to whom?

a reply to: Baddogma

The problem is that the myth has been rewritten so that the chronology has been jumbled up. Tombaugh and La Paz were not responding to an alien radio message, they were hired by the Defense Department to do a survey of near-Earth space as a preamble to the beginning of "space operations." Other astronomers were set to work calculating how many meteoroids of various sizes spacecraft might encounter, others were investigating the links between solar flares, the Northern Lights and radio transmission.

In the early 1970s Duncan Lunan suggested that some mysterious radio echoes detected by radio pioneers might be interpreted as some sort of delay-based picture writing. Since these echoes pre-dated the Tombaugh-La Paz survey, they were assumed to be the cause of the investigation, despite the fact that they were not "decoded" until twenty years later! Once the storytelling kicked in, the myth began to grow... where the claim that it is hundreds of thousands of years old came from, I don't know. That "information" must have been channeled.

a reply to: Phage

Vallee is what sticks in my mind... from one of his first paperbacks... but darned if I remember which one.

Okay, from the first Google hits for 'Vallee 1960's retrograde orbit' at

www.topsecretwriters.com... s-vallee-continues-begging-for-serious-ufo-research/

Quote:

"In 1961, he was a staff member of the French Space Committee. This was the year he “witnessed the destruction of the tracking tapes of an unknown object orbiting the earth.”

Vallée and his fellow scientists assumed the object they’d witnessed in a retrograde orbit, meaning that it was traveling in the opposite direction of the Earth’s rotational direction, was an asteroid. However, when his superior erased the tracking recording of the object, Vallée was confused since at the time, “there were no rockets powerful enough to launch such a satellite.”

a reply to: Baddogma
But you said:

That said, it seems there were unidentified orbiting thingies of whatever genesis before there were any launched in the public sphere

You know when Sputnik was launched, right?

a reply to: DJW001

No argument here!

a reply to: Baddogma

It is good to disentangle UFO myth at every opportunity, though i fear it is too grand a job for one, or several lifetimes.

Absolutely. To me the best ones are like the one that the OP has torn into here: the ones where the story is broken down using what's available in print, on the web, or from wherever. I find the process, rare as it is, to be one of the most exhilarating things that can be done with written-stuff. I get a physical charge out of it and that's why I like the OP's OP so much; it is written so that I can hitch a ride with hie/her discovery-process and share the rush of experiencing bull# die.

That said, it seems there were unidentified orbiting thingies of whatever genesis before there were any launched in the public sphere... and that gets lost in the conflating, tabloid noise.

Yeah, I hear its siren-call as well, but it just makes me circle so that's a warning sign. Removing anything that is "orbiting", especially when there is no evidence for anything like that, ends the loop. Remember: What Vallee "saw" was "seen" on r____.

Sometimes the intelligence agencies don't have to lift a finger (assuming they'd want to in the first place). The need for bigger book sales do a fine job of confusing any base facts from which the rickety edifice of mainstream UFOlogy is built.

Well, that's the gift of the promulgation of things seen on r____, folks that see it find that they are compelled to truly feel as though the things "had to be identified swiftly….", if they were looking at r____ it was obviously their job.

I've learned recently that "things" really do become "fluid" under pressure; especially when it involves people. Under the sort of pressure described above the default "go to" story seems to be (have been) a flying (obviously) "machine" of unidentifiable origins, so the story automatically follows that it is a UFO, a flying saucer, a "spaceship". The prevailing culture immediately offered this as the context-of-choice for any unidentifiable flying machines.

So, no, they don't really have to lift #, do they?

a reply to: Phage

Yup (guesstimated 58 but my electronic memory says Oct '57) I would assume Vallee and the august astronomers knew when Sputnik launched, too ... along with most who had contact with civilization.

So I get your point, but it doesn't wipe out the bare facts that helped generate this erroneous internet beast about "unknown satellites before they were supposed to be there getting joined to some Black Knight" that was a conflated mess made by the UFO gods whose pantheon consisted of Zeus (Keyhoe) and Diana (Lunan).

My only point, poorly and lazily expressed as it was/is, is that there are some "real" facts that get conflated in the Black Knight mess, is all... and the detected "satellites" were most likely black projects, and not ancient devices or saucers, imo, to be clearer.

May I go now?

a reply to: Baddogma

May I go now?

No.

What have you had for lunch?

The Soo radar was only 3 miles south of the locks so I would think it really wouldn't pick up anything that close. It was built for watching Russia.

originally posted by: DJW001

originally posted by: 123143
Jim Oberg, the resident NASA expert, has weighed in on the Black Knight "satellite" many times. You may want to do a search and learn the truth of this object.

I'm pretty sure Jim will find the results of my research delightful. I can identify the exact origin of the story now.

Of course he will. Jim always loves prosaic explanations that favor the Non-inexplicable and the mundane.

Donald Keyhoe was an astute insider who knew the intricacies of counter-intelligence and how it was being employed back then, and he was correct when he said that military brass were simply following orders to explain away the phenomenon as mundane things.

a reply to: NoCorruptionAllowed

Keyhoe also covered his tracks when he misrepresented research. There are more examples if you are interested.

a reply to: Baddogma

My only point, poorly and lazily expressed as it was/is, is that there are some "real" facts that get conflated in the Black Knight mess, is all... and the detected "satellites" were most likely black projects, and not ancient devices or saucers, imo, to be clearer.

That's what makes it a wonderful tale. A little bit of this, a little bit of that.

originally posted by: DJW001
a reply to: NoCorruptionAllowed

Keyhoe also covered his tracks when he misrepresented research. There are more examples if you are interested.

"misrepresented research" Could mean anything. And since he was a big fat thorn in the military side, they would cast him in that light most assuredly.

I know from personal experience what big liars counter-intelligence people are when it comes to UFO stuff, and Hector Quintanilla of project blue-book was an exceptional liar.

Point being, it's tough to really take any official view seriously because of their own track record, and granted, that doesn't mean every whistle blower type is spotless or completely honest as well..

Keyhoe was very productive, also publishing

"UFOS's are real" www.sacred-texts.com...

and

"Flying saucers from outer space" - reviewed here illadvised.blogspot.co.uk...

"Flying saucers: top secret" - partly reproduced in bright green here

www.sacred-texts.com...

and also 'Aliens from outer space'

here he is interviewed in 1958:



transcript here: www.hrc.utexas.edu...