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.

U.S. military expert Tom Erickson published his own conclusions ten years later. He believed that the Black Prince could not be detected by radars because it was coated with a graphite-based paint. One year later, a U.S. communications satellite suddenly vanished from the radar screens. The satellite had been put into orbit close to that of the Black Prince. Supposedly, the satellite collided with its mysterious counterpart.

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.

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