An artifact from the JFK-era space program has been contacting Earth for a decade now, without any clear reason known to anyone. Phil Williams, a British amateur radio enthusiast, was tuning in on a frequency outside the VHF band while listening to ham radio in his North Cornwall home in December 2012 when he detected something strange: an intermittent, ghostly pulse which repeated every four seconds on 237 MHz. He worked backwards and found it was being broadcast by one of the satellites the US Air Force and MIT had previously deemed space junk in 1967.
According to a 2024 MIT Lincoln Laboratory report , the LES-1 satellite had been turned off at the end of its planned mission almost 50 years ago, and no one, not even its designers, was expecting any signals from it now. This isn't found footage from a horror film. Not only is it a true, documented story of one of the earliest experimental satellites in America refusing to remain dead, but it's also a tale of the trash that humans have left orbiting above us.
The confusing satellite story
The first in a series of satellites built by MIT's Lincoln Laboratory for military communications technology was LES-1. It was launched from Cape Canaveral on Feb. 11, 1965, designed to be used for high-frequency radio transmission for the Pentagon's satellite network. However, it got stuck in the wrong orbit at the time of its launch, taking a circular path rather than the higher ellipse initially planned by the engineers. Its near-identical twin, LES-2, made its way to the correct orbit in the next few months, but LES-1 got little chance to do its job well. Its mission ended by 1967; the transmitter went silent, and it was hoped that it would ‘drift mute' in space for millennia.
