Gary McKinnon: A UFO Search and a Decade Fighting Extradition

Late at night in a north London flat, over a 56k dial-up modem, a former hairdresser ran a tiny Perl script that could check 65,000 computers for blank passwords in about eight minutes. The computers belonged to the US Army, Navy, Air Force, Department of Defense and NASA.

Gary McKinnon wasn't after money or secrets of the usual kind. He was looking for proof that the American government was hiding evidence of UFOs and suppressed "free energy" technology, and he says he found it.

A US prosecutor called it "the biggest military computer hack of all time." What followed was a ten-year extradition fight that pulled in Pink Floyd's David Gilmour, Sting, the Daily Mail, two prime ministers and a US president, and ended with a decision no one in Washington wanted.

Gary McKinnon at a Glance

• Born in Glasgow in 1966 and raised in London, McKinnon got his first computer at 14, left school at 17 to cut hair and only drifted back to computing through a course in the early 1990s.
• Between early 2001 and March 2002, calling himself Solo, he scanned US military networks for blank passwords and walked into machines belonging to the Army, Navy, Air Force, Pentagon and NASA.
• He says he saw a spreadsheet of "non-terrestrial officers" and a photo of a cigar-shaped craft before his connection was cut mid-download.
• British police arrested him on March 19, 2002, and a Virginia grand jury indicted him that November on seven counts, each carrying up to ten years.
• The extradition fight began in 2005 and he lost at every turn: the High Court in 2007, the House of Lords in July 2008, the European Court of Human Rights that August.
• A diagnosis of Asperger's syndrome in August 2008 changed the case, and a campaign led by his mother drew rock stars, novelists and politicians.
• On October 16, 2012, Home Secretary Theresa May blocked the extradition on human rights grounds, and in December the Director of Public Prosecutions ruled out a British trial.
• McKinnon has never been tried. He runs a small search engine optimisation business and still gives long interviews about what he says he saw.

The Life of Gary McKinnon

McKinnon's Early Years

Gary McKinnon was born in Glasgow in 1966 and grew up there and in London with his mother, Janis Sharp, who remembers a toddler who talked about things toddlers usually don't.

He got his first computer, an Atari, at 14 and taught himself to code games on it. He also joined the British UFO Research Association, an interest that'd steer his whole life.

School didn't hold him. He left at 17 and became a hairdresser, and only in the early 1990s did friends persuade him to take a computing qualification, after which he picked up contract IT work and a spell as a systems administrator.

Solo Goes Looking for UFOs

By the late 1990s McKinnon had absorbed the claims of the Disclosure Project, a group presenting hundreds of witnesses who said the US had recovered alien craft and reverse-engineered anti-gravity and free-energy technology. He decided to find the evidence himself.

"I found out that the US military use Windows," he told the BBC in 2005, "and having realised this, I assumed it would probably be an easy hack if they hadn't secured it properly."

It was. His Perl script strung together other people's tools to hunt for administrator accounts with no password, and he found plenty. Then he installed commercial remote-control software and used each machine as a stepping stone to the next.

He worked at night, juggling American time zones. Once a network engineer spotted him and typed "What are you doing?" into WordPad; McKinnon replied that he was from Military Computer Security, and the engineer believed him.

The Picture That Got Away

McKinnon's account of what he found, given to the BBC's Click programme in 2006, is the part of his story that made him famous.

At NASA's Johnson Space Center, he says, he found folders of raw and processed satellite images in Building 8, where a witness had claimed UFOs were routinely airbrushed out. He pulled one picture down over his dial-up connection, with the colour depth turned down to 4-bit so it'd load at all.

What juddered onto his screen, he says, was a cigar-shaped object hanging above the Earth, studded with geodesic domes, with no rivets or seams. Then he saw a hand move across the remote desktop, and the connection died. He never got a copy.

He also claims he found a spreadsheet of "non-terrestrial officers" and records of fleet-to-fleet transfers between ships that don't exist. NASA told Click it had no evidence of extraterrestrial life and would never manipulate images to deceive.

"Your Security Is Crap"

The US government tells a different story. The 2002 indictment said McKinnon accessed and damaged 92 computers belonging to the Army, Navy, Air Force, Defense Department and NASA, plus six at private businesses, between March 2001 and March 2002.

He installed a remote administration tool and hacker tools, copied password files, deleted user accounts and critical system files, and crashed a Washington-area network, cutting about 2,000 users off from the internet and email for three days. The estimated loss was about $900,000.

He admits leaving notes, including one that read "your security is crap." He's always denied causing damage, and insisted that the only sensible thing to do with wide-open military machines was to say so.

Arrested in Wood Green

British officers from the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit arrested McKinnon on March 19, 2002, at the request of the Americans. On November 12, 2002, a federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, indicted him on seven counts of computer fraud, each carrying up to ten years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

For three years nothing much happened. Then the UK's Extradition Act 2003 came into force, letting the US request extradition without presenting evidence to a British court, and in 2004 Washington asked. In June 2005, Scotland Yard's extradition unit arrested him and a magistrate granted bail.

The courts sided with the Americans every time. A district judge recommended extradition in May 2006, Home Secretary John Reid signed the order that July, the High Court refused his appeal in April 2007 and the House of Lords rejected it on July 30, 2008.

McKinnon told the BBC he was no web vandal, just a "bumbling computer nerd," but he also conceded: "Unauthorised access is against the law and it is wrong." Prosecutors talked of a sentence that could run to decades.

The Diagnosis and the Campaign

On August 25, 2008, McKinnon was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome by Simon Baron-Cohen, director of Cambridge's Autism Research Centre. Three days later the European Court of Human Rights declined to stop the extradition, and the home secretary refused to reconsider.

That's when the case stopped being a legal matter and became a cause. Janis Sharp campaigned relentlessly, the Daily Mail took up the fight, and supporters included Sting, Julie Christie, Nick Hornby and Terry Waite. In 2009 David Gilmour, Chrissie Hynde and Bob Geldof recorded a song of support.

The courts still said no. McKinnon lost another High Court challenge in July 2009, and that November Home Secretary Alan Johnson quashed what looked like the final attempt. By July 2010 the question was being put to Barack Obama and David Cameron at a joint White House press conference.

Theresa May Says No

Theresa May inherited the file when she became Home Secretary in May 2010. On October 16, 2012, she told the House of Commons that there was no doubt McKinnon was "seriously ill," and that his extradition "would give rise to such a high risk of him ending his life that a decision to extradite would be incompatible with Mr McKinnon's human rights."

The extradition was blocked. The US Department of Justice said it was "disappointed," particularly given that British courts and previous home secretaries had all said he should face trial in America.

On December 14, 2012, Keir Starmer, then Director of Public Prosecutions, announced there'd be no prosecution in Britain either: the witnesses and evidence were in the US, and the prospects of conviction weren't high. Ten years after his arrest, the case was simply over.

His lawyer, Karen Todner, said she had mixed feelings. The US warrant remained outstanding, which meant her client couldn't safely travel outside the UK.

McKinnon Today

McKinnon stayed out of the hacking world and went into search engine optimisation, running a small company, Small SEO Ltd, that helps little businesses outrank big ones in markets "ranging from vegetarian sweets to Xerox machine repairs," as he puts it on his own site.

His mother told the family's side in a 2013 book, Saving Gary McKinnon. He's never stopped telling his, and in March 2026 he sat for a two-hour YouTube interview about the space fleet he believes he glimpsed, watched by hundreds of thousands of people.

Gary McKinnon: The Hacker Who Never Stood Trial

Strip away the UFOs and McKinnon's story is about two things: how badly secured the most powerful military on Earth was in 2001, and how far a country will go to protect a vulnerable citizen from a treaty it signed itself.

The case ended without a trial in either country. The Americans never had to prove their allegations, and McKinnon never had to answer them in court.

He went looking for evidence that the truth was out there. The only thing he conclusively proved was that the passwords weren't.