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BRITISH COMPUTER HACKER ACCESSED SECRET UFO FILES 0 the United States, he is a seriously dangerous man who put the nation's security at risk by committing "the biggest military computer hack of all time". But Briton Gary McKinnon says he is just an ordinary computer nerd who wanted to find out whether aliens and UFOs exist. During his quest, McKinnon broke into computers at the Pentagon, NASA and the Johnson Space Center as well as systems used by the US Army, Navy and Air Force. McKinnon is now battling extradition to the USA, where, if found guilty, he faces up to 70 years in prison and fines of up to $1.75 million. His lawyer fears he could even be sent to Guantanamo Bay. McKinnon was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1966. His parents separated when he was six and he moved to London with his mother and stepfather, who was a bit of a UFO buff. "He comes from Falkirk, and just outside Falkirk there's a place called Bonnybridge, which is the UFO capital of the world. When he lived there, he had a dream that he was walking around Bonnybridge seeing huge ships. He told me this and it inflamed my curiosity. He was a great science- fiction reader. So, him being my second father, I started reading science fiction, too, and doing everything he did." When he was 15, Gary joined the British UFO Research Association (BUFORA). When he was 17, he saw the film War Games and he wondered: "Can you really do it? Can you really gain unauthorised access to incredibly interesting places? Surely it can't be that easy." So, in 1995, he began to hack. He was looking for, and found time and again, network administrators in high levels of the US government and military establishments who hadn't bothered to give themselves passwords. That's how he got in. He did a few trial runs, hacking into Oxford University's network, for example, and he found the whole business "incredibly exciting". When asked if he is brilliant, he says "No". He's just an ordinary, self-taught techie. And, he says, he was never alone. "Once you're on the network, you can do a command called NetStat—Network Status—and it lists all the connections to that machine. There were hackers from Denmark, Italy, Germany, Turkey, Thailand." What I think it means is ‘not Earth-based’. I found a list of 'fleet-to-fleet transfers’ and a list of ship names. I looked them up. They weren't US Navy ships. What I saw made me believe they have some kind of spaceship, off-planet. "There was a group called The Disclosure Project. They published a book which had 400 expert witnesses ranging from civilian air traffic controllers, through military radar operators, right up to the chaps who were responsible for whether or not to launch nuclear missiles. They are some very credible, relied-upon people, all saying ‘Yes, there is UFO technology, there's anti-gravity, there's free energy and it's extraterrestrial in origin, and we've captured spacecraft and reverse-engineered it." He said one NASA scientist reported that the Johnson Space Center had a facility where UFOs were airbrushed out of high- resolution satellite images. So he broke in to see for himself. "One of these people was a NASA photographic expert, and she said that in Building Eight of Johnson Space Center they regularly airbrushed-out images of UFOs from the high-resolution satellite imaging. What she said was there, was there: there were folders called ‘filtered’ and ‘unfiltered’, ‘processed’ and ‘raw', something like that. Off-planet technology So do aliens exist? Yes, according to McKinnon. "T found a list of officers' names," he under the heading 'Non-Terrestrial . It doesn't mean little green men. 62 = NEXUS JUNE — JULY 2006 www.nexusmagazine.com