Hacker fears 'UFO cover-up'

[IndianaGreen]

In 2002, Gary McKinnon was arrested by the UK's national high-tech crime unit, after being accused of hacking into Nasa and the US military computer networks.

Hacker fears 'UFO cover-up'

Last Updated: Friday, 5 May 2006, 16:40 GMT 17:40 UK

SK: What did you find inside Nasa?

GM: One of these people was a Nasa photographic expert, and she said that in building eight of Johnson Space Centre 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.

I got one picture out of the folder, and bearing in mind this is a 56k dial-up, so a very slow internet connection, in dial-up days, using the remote control programme I turned the colour down to 4bit colour and the screen resolution really, really low, and even then the picture was still juddering as it came onto the screen.

But what came on to the screen was amazing. It was a culmination of all my efforts. It was a picture of something that definitely wasn't man-made.

It was above the Earth's hemisphere. It kind of looked like a satellite. It was cigar-shaped and had geodesic domes above, below, to the left, the right and both ends of it, and although it was a low-resolution picture it was very close up.

This thing was hanging in space, the earth's hemisphere visible below it, and no rivets, no seams, none of the stuff associated with normal man-made manufacturing.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/4977134.stm

[MADem]

1. He should have taken a picture of his screen

He might be telling the truth, he might be making the whole thing up, or he might have stumbled across some nerd's cool photoshop effort. With no proof, it's too easy to write him off.

We won't know anytime soon, though.

[IndianaGreen]

2. FWIW, here is the link to the video of the BBC interview

[Ganja Ninja]

5. One would think if you were clever enough to hack into a NASA

website you would have been able to save the images as well.

[Phoonzang]

3. Telling the truth or not..

...he's justified in not wanting to be tried in the US. He'll probably end up in Gitmo if he is. Besides, he did the US a favor...exposing their pitifully lax security.

[eppur_se_muova]

4. This guy sounds a bit flaky, and not too believable. But he did hack into

some computer systems that should have been VERY difficult to access. I hadn't seen anything about this story at all until this BBC article. The NASA/military attitude seems to be much as the same as Cliff Stoll described (in "The Cuckoo's Egg") -- no one wants to face the security problems, they just want to keep ingnoring them.

[htuttle]

6. Something in the interview doesn't make any sense whatsoever

Well, several things don't, but this is a really weird bit:

GM: No, the graphical remote viewer works frame by frame. It's a Java application, so there's nothing to save on your hard drive, or at least if it is, only one frame at a time.

SK: So did you get the one frame?

GM: No.

SK: What happened?

GM: Once I was cut off, my picture just disappeared.

SK: You were actually cut off the time you were downloading the picture?

GM: Yes, I saw the guy's hand move across.

"I saw the guy's hand move across"?

What the hell does that mean? Is he saying he 'saw' a 'hand' on his screen when they cut his connection? He can't really mean that, right? He says he's talking about computer files, not physical photographs that he's somehow using a robotic viewer camera to look at, right? How does a 'guy's hand move across' the screen? WTF?

How could any computer hacker make a bizarre statement like this? Are they sure he was even really the one who did the hacking? That's as weird as the apocryphal story of people holding pieces of paper up to their monitors in an attempt to fax them...

[Poll_Blind]

7. What he may have meant...

I use VNC to connect to a number of remotely-controlled computers over Hamachi. When I am in control of the computer it is not just taking input from my mouse cursor but from the mouse cursor on the other end as well. If someone on the other end is using the mouse while I am connected we "fight" for control. If someone were using VNC or something similar which accepted input from both mice at the same time, one remote one local, then he could have witnessed the mouse cursor moving, not under his direction, to close the application he was using (or whatever) while he watched.

There's alot about this guy that doesn't strike me as a hacker but the above is what I presume he meant.

PB

[mickeymystro]

8. UFO? Aliens?

Just because an object in a photo is strange or unidentifiable does not mean that it is green men from outer space. If it is a UFO, then it is UNIDENTIFIED.

Gary McKinnon is a nut.

[Occulus]

9. If it's the same guy I'm thinking of,

he spoke of some of the things he saw, once, when he hacked in. References to "offworld missions" and such, name on ships that are not any name given to any known military vessel, etc.

:wtf:

[Phoonzang]

10. Doesn't mean it's not either...

Besides, he may be mistaken but I doubt he's insane.

[Jeroen]

11. Hand moving

...and then he saw a hand moving and someone turned off the pc he was hacking (with PCAnywhere btw) hehe..;-)