Cabinet of Wonders - On The LAM

[philipacentaur]

If you don't already read Cabinet of Wonders, you should because it's great.

They recently did a great piece on the origins and meaning of the famous "LAM" portrait: Link

[Sepka]

If you don't already read Cabinet of Wonders, you should because it's great.

I'm impressed! On the first page alone, he deals with the problem of Gef the Mongoose, and discusses someone who claims to have a picture of the Black Knight. A Cabinet of Wonders indeed! Thanks for pointing that out!

[Et in Arcadia ego]

and discusses someone who claims to have a picture of the Black Knight.

Interesting, although I had to subtract points for the horrid techno/trance soundtrack on the second video..

I wish the images resolved better. Maybe that's just Cheney's remote power supply.

[Sepka]

Interesting, although I had to subtract points for the horrid techno/trance soundtrack on the second video..

I wish the images resolved better. Maybe that's just Cheney's remote power supply.

The soundtrack's unfortunate, yes. The stills are more informative than the movies, really.

And on further reading, it has little, if anything, to do with the Black Knight. Still, it's interesting. I'm guessing a lot of the stuff probably is military hardware.

especially caught my attention. There's girderwork plainly showing. Some of those things are huge, too. If they've been lofting that from Vandenburg, piece by piece on Titans and Atlases, then someone's been busy for a long time.

[lunarose]

When i saw CoW's focus on Gef the Talking Mongoose i was just waiting for Sepka to comment! I love Gef as well - From the CoW's The Quotable Gef:

"I am a freak. I have hands and I have feet, and if you saw me you'd faint, you'd be petrified, mummified, turned into stone or a pillar of salt."

"He's damned well not going to get to know my inferior complex." (vis those who would 'investigate' him)

"If you knew what I know, you'd know a hell of a lot!"

[philipacentaur]

Yeah, that Gef article is even better than what I made this thread about (which is really a rehashing of an FT article).

I've been fascinated by Gef since I read about him in the elementary school library. The plaster ceilings in my childhood home had lots of cracks, and we had colonies of both squirrels and raccoons taking up residence, so when my little imagination wandered...

[Sepka]

When i saw CoW's focus on Gef the Talking Mongoose i was just waiting for Sepka to comment! I love Gef as well

I just love the idea of talking animals, actually

[jingofever]

I don't think I have ever heard of the Black Knight. Looking it up, I saw that one source has it discovered in 1960, another has it in 1957, shadowing Sputnik, but maybe in a polar orbit, which they point out was not technically feasible in those days. Was there really a satellite discovered back then?

And I don't believe that Rense story about the latter-day Newton:

A young man by the name of John Lenard Walson has discovered a new way to extend the capabilities of small telescopes and has been able to achieve optical resolutions - at almost the diffraction limit - not commonly achievable. With this new-found ability, he has proceeded to videotape, night and day, many strange and heretofore unseen objects in earth orbit.

Why doesn't he give out the orbital information and let other people photograph these objects? And how did he modify his telescope?

The resulting astrophotographic video footage has revealed a raft of machines, hardware, satellites, spacecraft and possibly space ships which otherwise appear as 'stars'...if they appear at all.

Those certainly don't appear as stars, they move across the sky. And what about the ones you can't see with the naked eye? Are we to believe he is getting lucky just pointing his telescope anywhere in the sky?

[Sepka]

I don't think I have ever heard of the Black Knight. Looking it up, I saw that one source has it discovered in 1960, another has it in 1957, shadowing Sputnik, but maybe in a polar orbit, which they point out was not technically feasible in those days. Was there really a satellite discovered back then?

The actual Black Knight was detected in (speaking from memory) February of 1960, in a polar orbit. It was highly radar-reflective (or else very large) but didn't reflect sunlight, hence the name. The link from the Cabinet of Wonders page conflates it with the Philips/Eindhoven radio signals from (again, speaking from memory) 1924. So far as I know, no signals were heard from the Black Knight. After a few weeks, it vanished, as quietly as it arrived.

There were a whole raft of space oddities that occurred around that time as well, including long-delayed echoes, lights on the moon, and possibly one reported radar track of an unknown target outbound toward the moon.

Edit: The Philips/Eindhoven thing seem to have been in 1928, not 1924. http://www.haitianconnection.com/hcperl ... apsed&sb=5 has information about it. There's surprisingly little about it on the internet. I've got (somewhere) a copy of Duncan Lunan's book on the matter. His reasoning seems very tight to me, although he later repudiated it as reading a pattern into random signals. I find his original reasoning more compelling than the retraction. I'm surprised the incident isn't better-known than it is.

[jingofever]

I found some New York Times articles about the "satellite." Seems that they initially thought it was part of a Soviet rocket but later concluded that it was probably the recovery capsule of a Discoverer rocket. I can put these pdfs (five of them) in a tarball and send them if you want.

[Sepka]

I found some New York Times articles about the "satellite." Seems that they initially thought it was part of a Soviet rocket but later concluded that it was probably the recovery capsule of a Discoverer rocket. I can put these pdfs (five of them) in a tarball and send them if you want.

Ooo, yes, please! I've PMed you.

[Sepka]

My thanks to Jingofever for the NYT articles.

The first article dated Feb 10, 1960 notes that the satellite is completely silent. That in itself was an oddity in those days, as all satellites had radio beacons (and some even had flashing lights) to help in tracking. It's being tracked by the SPASUR system, and the DoD estimates its size at about the "upper stage on a Discoverer" (i.e., an Agena, since these were lofted on Thor-Agenas). The popular theory seems to be that it's the failed Lunik III, a Russian moon shot that never left orbit.

By February 11th, un-named sources theorize it to be a film recovery capsule from Discoverer VIII that failed to re-enter. The Air Force denies this, though, as these little film capsules were about 30cm across, and they think SPASUR is tracking something much bigger. It's interesting to me that the Air Force is involved, since SPASUR is a Navy system. Discoverer was ostensibly a NASA civilian science mission, but was actually flying the Air Force's Corona/SAMOS surveillance cameras to spy on the Russians. I suppose that the AF may have been involved simply because it was an 'airspace' issue.

The orbit of the Black Knight is given as 79 degrees from equatorial, apogee 1074mi, perigee 134mi, with a period of 104.5 minutes. The article gives the orbit for Discoverer VIII as 80.7 degrees from equatorial, apogee 'about 1000', perigee 'about 120', and period of 103 minutes. NASA's records for Discoverer VIII (cited in astronautix.com) are actually closer to the figures given for the Black Knight - Inclination: 80.50 deg. Apogee: 1,661 km (1,032 mi). Perigee: 186 km (115 mi). Period: 103.50 min. That's a pretty good match, were it not that the Air Force is insisting that they're tracking something about 25 feet long.

Another article later on the 11th (evening edition?) repeats the previous data, and adds that the object is tumbling end over end in a reasonably stable orbit, and is likely to stay there for months.

The next article is an editorial, which reviews the facts, and speculates on their meaning.

The final article in the series, dated February 23rd, claims that the target was probably the film recovery capsule from Discoverer V, launched in August of 1959. NASA claims that capsule was lost on re-entry on February 11th, 1960, though, right when all this started. The orbital data for the recovery capsule is a pretty good fit, though: Inclination: 78.90 deg. Apogee: 1,700 km (1,000 mi). Perigee: 218 km (135 mi). Period: 104.30 min


So... I'm left with speculations.

1. SPASUR is a radar fence system, designed to detect exactly what it found - silent satellites. It's very good at pinning down the precise location at which a satellite breaks the beam. It generally needed multiple passes to determine speed and orbital period, though. The only way I can imagine SPASUR being able to tell whether something was the size of a bucket vs. the size of an Agena would be by the brightness of the reflected signal. However, I may not be fully aware of all its capabilities, and the Air Force may have been getting information from some other source as well.

2. The statement that the object was tumbling is an interesting one. SPASUR could certainly detect that in multiple passes by the variation in the brightness of the radar reflection. That's quite plausible, and could accoutn for the size estimates too. If it really was tumbling, and presenting enough of a discrepancy in its radar profile to be noticable by SPASUR, that pretty much categorically rules out a Discoverer re-entry capsule. They were dubbed 'buckets' for their size and shape. They'd present about the same profile regardless of attitude.

3. There's no explanation as to why the speculation suddenly shifted from Discoverer VIII to Discoverer V. It isn't a typo, since they cite the approximate launch date for both missions. If we take NASA's 'lost' date for Discoverer V's capsule (cited in astronautix.com) to mean comm-loss, rather than verified destruction, it looks pretty promising. However, we're left with the fact that the DoD says that they're been tracking the Black Knight for some days prior to letting the civilian government know, during which time NASA apparently tracked the Discoverer V capsule. The Navy had to have been talking with the Air Force and NASA, and I can't believe that got overlooked.

I'm left with about as many questions as I started with, but they're different questions. As Bambi observed, much of the fun lies in imagining the answers Thanks again, Jingofever.

[orz]

Why doesn't he give out the orbital information and let other people photograph these objects? And how did he modify his telescope?

Don't forget that he supposedly can somehow also use it to HEAR these things and they sound suspiciously like camera hum and room tone amplified, looped and pitch shifted.

[Sepka]

Why doesn't he give out the orbital information and let other people photograph these objects? And how did he modify his telescope?

Don't forget that he supposedly can somehow also use it to HEAR these things and they sound suspiciously like camera hum and room tone amplified, looped and pitch shifted.

Apparently he just lined up a TV dish in line with his telescope and recorded the noise. That's crude, but plausible. So far as orbital information, I'd assumed he was just pointing his scope at objects as he saw them illuminated by sunlight. Again, it's crude, but workable. He may not actually know the orbital data.

I'll note that he'd have to have an extraordinarly low-vibration drive to follow satellites steadily, so steadily as to get the resolutions that he's claiming. I'd not rule that out, though.

What interests me is that it's entirely possible to just hide satellites in plain sight like that now. 40 years ago, people used to actually watch satellites and space junk, and knew what this and that dim light was. Now nobody pays any attention, and there's so much cruft floating about anyway that tracking sites report only the major satellites. You can see all kinds of things floating slowly overhead whose identity you'll never determine.

[orz]

Apparently he just lined up a TV dish in line with his telescope and recorded the noise. That's crude, but plausible.

Ah OK, the article I read didn't explain that. Still, unless I'm misinterpreting what he's presenting in the videos and there's some reason for his manipulating/looping them, those sounds are pretty fake.