"Black Prince" is watching you

Alexander Kazantsev, a Soviet author of sci-fi books, once said that
a mysterious "unaccounted" satellite called Black Prince was
spinning around Earth. The writer believed the object might be an
alien probe, a messenger from extraterrestrial civilizations. Some
people including scientists paid attention to the writer's
hypothesis.

U.S. astrophysicist Ronald Bracewell was the first to take the
hypothesis seriously. In 1960, he published a study to back his
conclusions with data of practical radio engineering. The data
indicated some strange phenomena, which took place during the
transmission sessions. The scientist believed the phenomena were
caused by the probe's attempts to make contact with earth dwellers.

According to Bracewell, the probe has been in the vicinity of Earth
for a long while. The probe will "return" our calls if we pay
attention. But it will communicate only after a protracted period
(about 200 years) of political stability on Earth and a continual
interest shown by several generations of humans. After getting in
touch with its mission control center, the probe may relay valuable
information to Earth. We will probably join a chain of
civilizations, which have been communicating one another for a long
time.

Steven Slayton, an amateur astronomer in Arizona, reported on the
Black Prince in 1958. As he watched the Moon in his telescope, he
spotted a dark ball-shaped object moving across the sky at a very
high speed. The object moved along a straight line and disappeared
after reaching the edge of the Moon. Slayton qualified the object as
anomalous.

The military requested the object's flight path information from
Slayton. The information was provided. The military pointed their
radars at the sky but saw nothing. A report was sent to newspapers
about Slayton who might have seen a meteor flying near the Moon.

The news from the city of Gorky sparked off another wave of interest
in the mysterious object 20 years later. The Gorky astronomers
detected an object while testing new supersensitive equipment. The
object was reported to have run a temperature above 200 degrees
Celsius. Conventional equipment could not have detected the object.


Someone is watching Earth from space

In February 1962, John Glenn saw an UFO while in space. He saw three
objects in pursuit of his ship. Minutes later the objects overtook
the ship and disappeared without a trace. UFO's would show up at one
point or another virtually in every manned U.S. space mission.

Speaking to Vechernyaya Moskva in 1978, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri
Romanenko said that Georgy Grechko and he saw an object pursuing the
Soyuz-6 for two spins during the December 77 space mission. However,
Romanenko said later that the object turned out to be a biowaste
capsule.

On August 1978, four members of a joint Soviet-German crew could see
a large object flying over the space station. After the mission was
over, Valery Bykovsky said that the crew really saw something
strange. But the cosmonaut refused to elaborate.

2006-03-16