DEAR PT5-THE BLACK KNIGHT RIDES AGAIN

Dear PT5 /

Dear 2024 PT5

Welcome to orbit! Or, should I say, welcome back to orbit. I’m writing this on the 29th of September 2024, and at some point today you’re going to begin your roughly two month placement as the planet’s second Moon. There’s a lot to catch you up on so, once a week, I’m going to write to you and get you up to speed on some of it. Besides, you’re a new Moon! That’s really cool! It’s not just cool though. It’s weirdly therapeutic. Because you, 2024 PT5 (Can I call you PT5?) are certain to not be a Milkshake Duck.

Let me explain. On 12th June 2016, Ben Ward, an Australian cartoonist using the name pixelatedboat, posted a joke on twitter.

I’m not explaining twitter by the way. You weren’t here for that. You deserve happiness.

To ‘milkshake duck’ has become synonymous with something or someone who is harmless and good being revealed to be a rampaging mess of sweaty meat and bigotry. It happens a LOT. Like it happened this morning as I write this, and it’ll probably happen again sometime this week.

The upside to milkshake duckery is that it’s honesty, even if that honesty is accidental. When someone shows you who they really are, you need to believe them and act accordingly. Safety and trust have become rare commodities even since you were last here. But not bigotry, hatred, or racism.  So, thank you for not being a milkshake duck.

Thank you too, for the soupcon of mystery you’ve added to the news cycle. Scientists are currently working off the theory you’ve been here once before, in 1960 and that date…tickled the back of my brain. I’m a reformed amateur UFOlogist, and a not remotely reformed writer, and if there’s one thing those two groups have in common it’s a love of a good story. So let me tell you about the Black Knight satellite. The actual origin of the Black Knight is lost. It’s one of those stories that just seems to arrive, fully formed, in orbit.

Anyway.

This all starts, as a lot of good stories do, with Nikola Tesla. Tesla, possibly the inventor of a death ray, electrical pioneer and beloved archetype of all things Odd detected signals he immediately took to be proof of life on Mars (Givenm that he was played by Bowie in The Prestige, that’s a delightful bit of serendipity, isn’t it?). The likely explanation is he was detecting Jupiter, or possibly signals from pulsars.

But if there’s one thing that hasn’t changed since you were last here, it’s that ‘likely’ almost never means ‘fun’.

In 1954, Ufologist Donald Keyhoe told newspapers that two satellites had been detected in orbit. No one had the capacity to launch them at that point. Keyhoe later pulled what’s called the ‘I was only JOKING!’ defence but the ink was on the page and the pen was writing unaided. Keyhoe was promoting a book at the time and may have been attempting to go viral (Again, you don’t need to know). As it stands he ended up as something close to a proto-milkshake duck. Serendipity! It’s what’s in orbit!

Keyhoe’s story connected to the experimental Black Knight satellite launcher the British spent 1958-1965 failing to make work and in the middle of all that, in 1960, Time magazine published a story about a Soviet satellite in orbit. Specifically, an orbit that nothing was supposed to be in…They then self-debunked, as it was revealed that the mysterious object in a mysterious orbit was actually the remains of an American Discoverer 8 satellite. Gordon Cooper’s Schrodinger’s UFO in 1963. Duncan Lunan’s 1973 theory about a 13,000 year old alien problem orbiting the Moon being what Tesla picked up.. Later retracted of course but what hasn’t been?

Then in 1988, photos.

An unsettling, winged, black form, turning in place around the space shuttle during the STS-88 mission. It looks terrifying, scale denied by shape, a black winged shape hanging in the sky. The Black Knight. Or a thermal blanket lost earlier on the mission. Fun and likely. The magnetic poles of story.

You were here in 1960 weren’t you? No it’s okay, it’s more fun if you don’t answer.  

Have a good week, PT5. I’ll see you next Monday.

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