A Bracewell probe is a hypothetical concept for an autonomous interstellar space probe dispatched for the express purpose of communication with one or more alien civilizations. It was proposed by Ronald N. Bracewell in a 1960 paper, as an alternative to interstellar radio communication between widely separated civilizations. (Bracewell, 1960)
It’s not a satellite and it’s not a meteor. Any astronomer can tell you that. And he can tell you its color and, to some extent, its speed. [There's just one thing he can't tell you - what it is. He can't even guess.] That’s the status at the moment of the ”week-long nationwide attempt to identify the mysterious REDDISH object that has been circling the earth since last Thursday.” Astronomers all over the country admit that they’re puzzled. One, Frank Judson of Chicago’s famed Adler Planetarium says ”I’ve been watching it for days and I don’t have the faintest idea what it is.”
Even taking a picture of the object hasn’t helped. [ The Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corp. announced yesterday that a tracking camera at the Bethpage plant had photographed the object at 8:51 PM last Thursday. But, a Grumman spokesman added, "all the picture shows is a white line, so we still can't even begin to make an identification." ] The white line, difficult to detect, was barely visible even after the photo was enlarged.
Expert observers and just plain citizens have been catching glimpses of the mysterious object in Long Island, Chicago, Washington, Boston, New Haven, Chicago and points west. But the few conclusions that they are able to draw about its behavior only heightens the mystery of what it is.
Judson, who has been studying the object in conjunction with Robert L. Johnson, director of the Adler Planetarium sums up the conclusions about the thing this way:
“It’s not a meteor because it’s much too slow. And it’s not an artificial man-made satellite”…,
[In] 2016 I think that we’re going to have to announce to the world that there’s a probe that comes very close to the Earth every 15 or 20 years. And we’ve been calling it an asteroid. It’s not an asteroid. But it actually in reality is an artificial probe. In other words, somebody else put it here.... I’m talking about BG1991. Roughly 30 meters in diameter, highly polished surface. Asteroids don’t have a highly polished surface. It took corrective course changes to avoid collision with another asteroid. That don’t happen. This one it did.
In Disneyland of the Gods, John Keel writes of the Black Knight satellite. Never mind the almanac. You won't find it listed with Sputnik or Explorer. Black Knight is the name given to a radar blip discovered in 1960. This mystery satellite was found in a polar orbit, something neither the US nor the Soviets had accomplished. It was several times larger and several times heavier than anything capable of being launched with 1960 rockets. It shouldn't have been there, but it was.
If that weren't enough, ham operators began receiving odd messages from the Black Knight. One operator decoded a series of these messages as a star map. The map centered on Epsilon Boštes as seen from the earth 13,000 years ago. Remember, stars don't move very far even after 13,000 years, and Epsilon Boštes is moving towards us. Only the neighboring stars appear different after that amount of time. Was the Black Knight an alien calling card?
Perhaps the strangest effect associated with the Black Knight is the Long Delay Echo (LDE). The effect observed is that radio or television signals sent into space bounce back seconds (or even days) later, as if recorded and retransmitted by a satellite. They didn't begin with the Black Knight, but they were part of its mystery. Keel places the earliest LDEs in the 1920s. It's not in Keel's book, but in 1974 another mystery entered earth orbit. No radar saw it. No ham operator listened to it. One man contacted it- or rather, was contacted by it. That man was science fiction author Philip K. Dick.....
In February 1960 the US detected an unknown object in polar orbit, a feat that neither they or the USSR had been able to accomplish. As if that wasn't enough, it apparently was several sizes larger than anything either country would have been able to get off the ground.
And then, the oddness began. HAM operators began to receive strange coded messages. One person in particular said he managed to decode one of the transmissions, and it corresponded to a star chart. A star chart which would have been plotted from earth 13,000 years ago, and focused on the Epsilon Bostes star system.
On September 3, 1960, seven months after the satellite was first detected by radar, a tracking camera at Grumman Aircraft Corporation's Long Island factory took a photograph of it. People on the ground had been occasionally seeing it for about two weeks at that point. Viewers would make it out as a red glowing object moving in an east-to-west orbit. Most satellites of the time, according to what little material I've been able to find on the black knight satellite, moved from west-to-east. It's speed was also about three times normal. A committee was formed to examine it, but nothing more was ever made public.
Three years later, Gordon Cooper was launched into space for a 22 orbit mission. On his final orbit, he reported seeing a glowing green shape ahead of his capsule, and heading in his direction. It's said that the Muchea tracking station, in Australia, which Cooper reported this too was also able to pick it up on radar traveling in an east-to-west orbit. This event was reported by NBC, but reporters were forbidden to ask Cooper about the event on his landing. The official explanation is that an electrical malfunction in the capsule had caused high levels of carbon dioxide, which induced hallucinations.
