I hacked NASA’s systems… and uncovered a decades-old UFO cover-up

A British computer hacker has stepped out from the shadows to retell his discovery of an alleged UFO photo while accessing NASA’s systems.

Gary McKinnon was accused of perpetrating the ‘biggest military computer hack of all time’ after breaching 97 government sites in 2002. 

Though he has long insisted he was not searching for aliens, McKinnon said he was looking for evidence of suppressed energy or propulsion technology when he allegedly infiltrated NASA’s Johnson Space Center. 

That is when, he claimed, he found a high-resolution image of a cigar-shaped craft hovering above Earth. 

‘Then there’s like slowly a hemisphere started appearing, and I’m thinking that’s a planet. What the hell? And then suddenly there’s a big, straight kind of silvery line, cigar-shaped object, McKinnon said while speaking on the American Alchemy podcast with Jesse Michels.

He also claims to have discovered a spreadsheet labeled “non-terrestrial officers,” suggesting the individuals listed were not based on Earth. 

Moments later, he said, someone appeared to take control of his screen. ‘They right-clicked, disconnected and boom, that was it. I was cut out,’ McKinnon recalled. 

Following the hack, McKinnon faced a decade-long extradition battle with the US, where he was threatened with up to 70 years in prison, but the British government ultimately blocked it. There is still a live arrest warrant out on McKinnon, placing him on the Interpol red list so he cannot enter the US. 

McKinnon told Michels that his interest in UFOs began in childhood, inspired by family stories and a sighting he experienced at age 12. 

‘I saw this kind of reddish orange glowing light, and it was moving in an arc from there to the horizon,’ he said. 

Years later, after reading the Disclosure Project book by Steven Greer, he decided to test whether US government systems were as secure as officials claimed.

The hack began in March 2001 when McKinnon scanned vast ranges of IP addresses for government computers protected by blank passwords.

‘If you cast far enough a wide net, you know, something’s going to come in,’ he said. 

According to McKinnon, some highly sensitive systems had no password protection at all. 

He ultimately gained access to networks belonging to the NSA, the Defense Information Systems Agency, the Department of Defense, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force and NASA.

He described conducting the intrusions late at night while living in London. ‘I was in my dressing gown up till like four in the morning, smoking weed, drinking beer, just like ride of my life really,’ he said. 

From there, he used commercially available tools to escalate his access to the administrator level and ran keyword searches across thousands of machines.

His focus, he said, was not extraterrestrials but advanced propulsion and free energy. 

‘What I was interested in was the energy and the propulsion,’ he explained.

The hacker believed secret technology might exist that could ease energy poverty. 

‘To have something that was free, it was just too juicy not to have a go at finding,’ he said.

But what he found inside Building 8 at NASA’s Johnson Space Center stunned him.

McKinnon said he had read testimony from former NASA contractor Donna Hare, who claimed that while working in the same building in the late 1980s or early 1990s, she was shown an image of a large white disc casting a shadow on Earth. 

According to McKinnon, Hare alleged that such anomalies were removed before images were sold to the public. 

‘Well, we always have to airbrush them out before we sell them to the public,’ he quoted her colleague as saying.

Intrigued, McKinnon searched NASA’s network for computers assigned to Building 8 and gained access to several. 

He said the desktops were sparse, containing folders labeled ‘raw’ and ‘processed.’ 

Inside, he encountered a proprietary NASA image format that required running specialized software to view.

Using a 56k dial-up connection, he lowered the color resolution to speed up the transfer. 

The image appeared slowly, line by line. ‘There’s like blackness, then there’s like slowly a hemisphere started appearing, and I’m thinking that’s a planet,’ he said. As more detail rendered, he saw what he believed was Earth,  and then the object.

‘This thing looked very smooth on the outside. There were no lines… no screws and bolts and stuff,’ he said.

He described it as white or silvery and positioned laterally relative to the planet. ‘It was definitely white, silvery,’ he said. He did not observe antennas, seams or visible propulsion.

Moments later, his session ended abruptly when someone appeared to manually disconnect him. 

‘I see the mouse move… someone else is at the computer themselves,’ he said. 

McKinnon maintains he does not know whether the object was extraterrestrial.

‘It wasn’t your normal space stuff, so I knew that,’ he said. But he stopped short of claiming proof of aliens, suggesting it could have been secret human technology.

McKinnon’s activities came to an end in 2002 when he grew careless, connecting directly without proxies and using free AOL CDs. 

The alleged sighting predates by several years the 2004 encounter by US Navy pilot David Fravor with a so-called ‘tic tac’ object off the coast of California, footage later acknowledged by the Pentagon as authentic. McKinnon noted the similarity in shape.

Arrested in his sleep by the UK’s National High-Tech Crime Unit, he and family members, including a 12-year-old, were detained. 

UK authorities initially told him he faced perhaps six months, but after US meetings, the tone changed dramatically. 

The US sought extradition under a revised treaty, charging him with damage to every machine and threatening 70 years, ten years per count under seven charges, potentially in a secret military tribunal with Guantanamo-style restrictions. 

‘I bought potassium chloride… and I was just going to swallow it and have a heart attack and die,’ McKinnon admitted to his despair. 

In 2012, then-British home secretary Theresa May blocked extradition, stating: ‘Mr McKinnon’s extradition would give rise to such a high risk of him ending his life… I have therefore withdrawn the extradition order against Mr McKinnon.

McKinnon remains on the Interpol red list with an active US warrant. During the interview, his phone mysteriously hard-reset despite his finger on the power button, an event he said had ‘never happened before.’ 

He described a prior unexplained incident in which two perfectly circular holes appeared in his left heel after a sharp pain.

Now living in the UK, McKinnon continues exploring anti-gravity and free-energy concepts, including plans to replicate the Biefeld-Brown effect in his garden shed using a hydraulic press, furnaces and custom calcium copper titanate discs.