The Hack That Changed Everything

Gary McKinnon was obsessed with UFOs. From childhood, he believed governments were hiding evidence of extraterrestrial contact. His stepfather, a science fiction enthusiast, had passed that curiosity down to him. At twelve, Gary joined BUFORA, the British UFO Research Association. At thirteen, he saw his first unexplained light in the sky - red, moving in ways no aircraft could, defying physics with impossible angles and acceleration.

Years passed. Gary became a computer systems expert, skilled in networks and security. But the corporate world bored him. In 2000, he decided to pursue what he really cared about: finding proof that governments were lying about UFOs.

Gary knew that NASA and military agencies used Windows operating systems. He wrote a simple program to scan network-connected computers, looking for machines with the password "password" or no password at all. It sounds absurdly basic. But even today, millions of people use "123456789" or "password" as their login credentials.

He let the program run in the background for a year. It scanned hundreds of unprotected government computers. Eventually, it found what he was looking for: machines at the U.S. Navy, Space Command, and NASA itself, protected by laughably weak passwords.

Gary logged in. Most of what he found was mundane - bureaucratic documents, scheduling files, inventory lists. But then he stumbled across something strange: a spreadsheet titled "Non-Terrestrial Officers."

The document contained a list of names. Next to each name was a rank and a transfer assignment. But these weren't assignments to ships in the Navy's known fleet. Gary cross-referenced the vessel names with official naval records. None of them existed. At least, not in any public database.

The implication was clear. These were personnel assigned to spacecraft.

Gary kept digging. He had read testimony from Donna Hare, a former NASA employee who worked in Building 8, one of the agency's most secure facilities. She described seeing satellite images with unusual objects - cigar-shaped craft that appeared in raw footage but were airbrushed out before public release. One image in particular had stuck with her: a cylindrical object casting a shadow on the Earth's surface. Not a camera glitch. A real, unidentified object.

Gary wrote another program to search NASA's servers for the kind of raw satellite imagery Donna had described. He found folders labeled "Raw" and "Processed." The files were enormous, too large to download over his remote connection. But he could open them.

He double-clicked on one image. It loaded slowly, line by line. And there it was: a smooth, silver-white cylindrical craft. No wings. No exhaust. Just a sleek, seamless surface hanging in the frame.

Then the mouse cursor on the remote desktop started moving on its own. Someone at NASA had detected the intrusion. The connection was severed.

Gary had found what he was looking for. Governments were hiding evidence. But he had also just made himself a target.

Within months, the U.S. government formally requested his extradition from the United Kingdom. He was charged with 97 counts of computer intrusion and accused of causing $800,000 in damages to U.S. intelligence systems. If extradited and convicted, he faced up to 70 years in prison.

The case dragged on for a decade. Media coverage framed it as a cyberattack on critical infrastructure, carefully avoiding any mention of UFOs or classified programs. Only the British Daily Mail covered the deeper story. That article, Gary later said, may have saved his life.

In 2012, UK Home Secretary Theresa May halted the extradition on the grounds that Gary had Asperger's syndrome and would be at risk in a U.S. prison. The charges were never dropped. But he would not be sent to America.

Gary McKinnon became a minor celebrity among UFO researchers. To most people, the story ended there: a hacker who found some photos the government didn't want public. But what Gary had actually uncovered was far larger. He had glimpsed the edge of something organized, long-term, and deliberately hidden. A program involving spacecraft, personnel, and technology that officially did not exist.

He had found evidence of Solar Warden.