--- title: "The Signal From Orbit Was Coming From Our Laptop" dek: "For four days this newspaper reported a repeating twelve-bit sequence from catalogued debris object 25570. The sequence was an artefact of our reporter's analysis software, which reproduces it from a file of silence in under an hour. The struck-through paragraph stays visible." kind: news (News) desk: Off-World author: Ambrose Teague (fictional) published: 2026-07-28T15:00:00Z updated: 2026-06-04T14:00:00Z url: https://theyburied.com/article/black-knight-transponder tags: Black Knight, orbital debris, retraction, signals, method genre: satire status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented --- # The Signal From Orbit Was Coming From Our Laptop *For four days this newspaper reported a repeating twelve-bit sequence from catalogued debris object 25570. The sequence was an artefact of our reporter's analysis software, which reproduces it from a file of silence in under an hour. The struck-through paragraph stays visible.* Object 25570 is a thermal blanket. It was lost during a shuttle mission in 1998. It has been in the public catalogue ever since, its orbit is free to download, and anyone with a receiver can watch it go over. It is also, in a story told since the 1950s and pinned to this object since 1998, a thirteen-thousand-year-old satellite of non-human origin. > **Figure:** Four days — see https://theyburied.com/article/black-knight-transponder We set out to record three passes. What came back was nothing — and for four days we reported that it was something. ## What we published, and what was actually happening The ninth paragraph of the original story said the recording contained a repeating twelve-bit sequence. ~~The sequence recurred on all three passes at intervals consistent with the object's rotation period.~~ That sentence is struck through above rather than deleted, and it will stay struck through, because a reader who arrives here in five years is entitled to see the shape of the error and not just its absence. There was no sequence. The pattern was generated by the decimation stage of a consumer analysis package, from any sufficiently low-amplitude input, including no input at all. Dr. Solveig Barrantes-Ng reproduced it for us from a file of pure silence, on the same software version, in fifty-one minutes. ## How we found out Our correspondent found out. Four days after publication he re-ran the analysis on a control recording of his own equipment pointed at a wall, got the same twelve bits, and telephoned his editor at 06:40 on a Sunday. We published the retraction that afternoon. > I got a pattern out of a wall. That was a very bad four minutes. > > — Ambrose Teague ## What we changed A correction that only fixes a sentence is a correction that will be needed again. This one changed a practice. This newspaper will no longer report any measurement as a measurement unless it has been taken on two independent instruments, with at least one of them not chosen by the reporter. Where that is impossible, the story says so in the paragraph where the measurement appears, in the same size type. The rule is now clause 7a of our [editorial standards](/standards) and its addition is logged in the [corrections archive](/corrections). ## What object 25570 is A thermal blanket, tumbling, in a near-polar orbit, radar-visible, catalogued, and completely unremarkable except for the story attached to it. Herschel Pond, who has been asked about it more often than about anything else in a thirty-four-year career, offered the sentence he says he has now given to eleven journalists. "It is a piece of a spacecraft, and it is up there because we put it there and then dropped it," he said. "I understand why that is a disappointing sentence. It has the disadvantage of being the one that is true, and the advantage that you can go and look." ## Sources (invented) - Ambrose Teague, This newspaper's Off-World correspondent — His own observations and his own error, reported here at his insistence (May–June 2026) - Dr. Solveig Barrantes-Ng, Radio engineer — Interviewed by video call; reproduced the artefact on request (1 June 2026) - Herschel Pond, Retired radio astronomer — Interviewed in person (30 May 2026) - Public catalogue of orbital objects, Two-line element sets for object 25570 — Public data, retrieved and archived by this newspaper (May 2026) ## What we could not confirm - Nothing outstanding. The claim this story originally made has been retracted and the retraction is the story. --- They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.