« PREVIOUS ENTRY
Chaos Theory

NEXT ENTRY »
The “octodog”

The truth is out there

Gary McKinnon is a 39-year-old British man who is a world of trouble. Over the last few years, he hacked into a pile of US governmental computers, ranging from US Space Command to various Forts (Fort Benning, Fort Meade). The government hunted him down and charged him with 20 counts, including stealing computer secrets, and he faces up to 70 years in jail.

But the really weird thing is the reason why, precisely, McKinnon was snooping — he was a UFO buff looking for evidence of extraterrestrial coverups. In a rather hilarious (if sad) profile in the Guardian, there’s this terrific exchange:

“What was the most exciting thing you saw?” I ask.

“I found a list of officers’ names,” he claims, “under the heading ‘Non-Terrestrial Officers’.”

“Non-Terrestrial Officers?” I say.

“Yeah, I looked it up,” says Gary, “and it’s nowhere. It doesn’t mean little green men. 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.”

“The Americans have a secret spaceship?” I ask.

“That’s what this trickle of evidence has led me to believe.”

“Some kind of other Mir that nobody knows about?”

“I guess so,” says Gary.

“What were the ship names?”

“I can’t remember,” says Gary. “I was smoking a lot of dope at the time. Not good for the intellect.”

(Thanks to Rachel for this one!)


blog comments powered by Disqus

Search This Site


Bio:

I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.

Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!

More of Me

Twitter
Tumblr
Flickr


Recent Entries

Teleportation, the last battle, and the Creator talks: How the world ends inside an online game

My latest Wired magazine column: Troll taming at Whitehouse.gov

Apparently NASA is filled with Joss Whedon fans

Incredibly weird, inch-wide single-celled creatures discovered rolling across the sea floor

In praise of the 3-hour game: My latest Wired News video-game column

» visit the Collision Detection archives

Clive Thompson's Tumblr
a bunch of stuff

March 25, 2009 » 05:10 PM
I had to ask! I was investigating getting DirecTV for my new office when I saw this pop-up window …

March 22, 2009 » 08:54 PM
““From an acoustical perspective, music is an overstructured language, which the brain invented and which the brain loves to hear.”” - Basics - In One Ear and Out the Other - NYTimes.com

March 20, 2009 » 04:48 PM
“No wonder young people find mainstream journalism uninviting; it would almost be more frightening if they embraced what passes for news today.” - The Death and Life of Great American Newspapers (Page 2)

March 19, 2009 » 01:12 PM
Printing The NYT Costs Twice As Much As Sending Every Subscriber A Free Kindle

March 18, 2009 » 08:44 PM
“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” — Edward Abbey” - Via Thor Muller’s twitter stream.

» visit my Tumblr

Recent Comments

Photos

» see all of my photos on Flickr

Collision Detection: A Blog by Clive Thompson