In the world of UFO phenomena, there have always been conspiracies swirling around that run the range from the merely odd to the downright ludicrous. One corner of these UFO conspiracies is the existence of top-secret documents towards which all manner of conspiracies gravitate. These documents might outline UFO secrets, cover-ups, information on alien tech or aliens, and who whole bunch of other secretive things concerning UFOs, but they have always drawn intrigue and mysteries to them, and here we will look at some of these.
Our first story here revolves around a Russian scientist by the name of Genrikh Mavrikiyevich Ludvig, who was supposedly also an architect, philosopher, and scholar of ancient languages. He was also apparently very at odds with the Stalin regime, which landed him in trouble on more than one occasion, and he was also known for his extensive knowledge of the occult and for his considerable esoteric knowledge. He had a vast knowledge of ancient Sumerian and Etruscan civilizations, and also of medicinal herbs. During World War II, he was purportedly the designer of military technology and also an invaluable pioneer of architectural plans for military bases in marshy environments. Yet, a very curious chapter of this mysterious man’s life was the time when he was allegedly allowed access to the secret Vatican archives and purportedly found all manner of documents and evidence of ancient aliens within.
It is perhaps first important to understand just what the Vatican secret archives actually are. Comprised of approximately 53 miles of labyrinthine aisles of shelving harboring rows upon countless rows of texts, books, and scrolls ranging from the more modern to fragile, time-worn manuscripts reaching back 12 centuries into the shadows of time, the Vatican Archives, officially known as the Archivum Secretum Apostolicum Vaticanum, was originally constructed in 1612 by Pope Paul V and is a truly a huge treasure trove of information collected by the Church over hundreds of years. This vast repository of knowledge holds state papers, Holy See paperwork, papal correspondence and personal letters, and countless historical records, documents and texts accumulated by the Vatican from every corner of the known world that date back to the 8th century, all housed within a massive, carefully climate-controlled structure adjacent to the Vatican Library that is designed more like a fortress than a library, replete with impenetrable underground bunkers and with only one known heavily guarded entrance.
The list of known contents of the archives is far too long to completely cover here, but includes a wealth of historical documents including handwritten letters to the Pope from such important figures such as Mary Queen of Scotts asking for a pardon before her execution, King Henry VIII, Michelangelo asking to be paid for his work on the Sistine Chapel, Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Grand Empress Dowager Helena Wang of China in the 17th century, one written on birch bark by the Canadian Ojibwe tribe in 1887, and many, many others. Here, there are official edicts by Popes through the centuries, including excommunications such as that of German religious heretic and founder of Lutheranism, Martin Luther, official papal decrees such as the one made in 1493 by Pope Alexander VI that split the entire known world among Spain and Portugal, as well as personal communications from popes throughout history. Here one can also find such gems as a nearly 200-foot long scroll containing details of the trials of the Knights Templar for heresy and blasphemy dating to 1307, as well as a handwritten transcript detailing the trial of astronomer Galileo Galilei in the 17th century, as well as the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which states that Mary was conceived without sin, scrawled out on a piece of parchment dating to 1854.
The Vatican Archives are often referred to as the Vatican Secret Archives, mostly due to a mistranslation of the Latin word secretum, which is actually closer in meaning to “personal” or “private” rather than “secret” or “confidential” as many think, but it could also have to do with the archive’s history of strict inaccessibility and reclusiveness from the outside world. They had been for centuries practically completely forbidden and closed off from nearly everyone, even Church officials, with not even Cardinals allowed access to their treasure trove of information, and it was not until 1881 that Pope Leo XIII allowed limited access to outsiders, yet this does little to dispel the secrecy surrounding the archives and it is still no small feat to enter this inner sanctum of all of the Vatican’s knowledge.
To gain access to these isolated archives and islands of knowledge, one must be a qualified, recognized scholar or researcher who has been thoroughly vetted by the Holy See, a process that can take years. Amateur historians, journalists, students, or armchair researchers need not apply and are strictly forbidden. If one is lucky enough to be granted access, they enter through the sole entrance, the well-guarded Porta Sant’Anna, after which they are required to state exactly what it is they are looking for among the voluminous collection. Once entering the rows of dusty old texts, there is no browsing allowed, and you can only retrieve three documents listed in one of the thick, intimidatingly massive catalogs that are meticulously handwritten in Latin or Italian. If you cannot decide what you want to look at within a set amount of time under strict supervision, you are ushered out of the archives and must wait until the following day to try again. Even if you do know what you want to look at, there are still oppressive limitations on what is available for perusal. All materials in the archives are only released for public viewing after a full 75 years have passed, meaning newer documents are restricted, and even then, there are large swaths of archived content that are totally off limits and probably forever will be.
In other words, this isn’t a library open to just anyone, yet in the 1920s, Ludvig was somehow granted access for reasons still left unclear. While there, he supposedly was free to peruse the vast stores of manuscripts on offer, and came across some very bizarre things indeed. He would claim to have come across numerous texts on alchemy and ancient codes, and even stranger still, manuscripts on UFOs and ancient aliens. According to Ludvig, there were texts outlining in detail how aliens had visited Earth many millennia ago and had managed to influence ancient civilizations such as the Egyptians, the Mayans, and the Mesopotamians. Some of the information he claimed to have gotten was about how the Egyptian pyramids were ancient energy machines, and he even said he had found historical records on nuclear weapons being used in ancient times, which had resulted in the melting of the fortress walls of Babylon, as well as plans for alien spacecraft.
None of this was allowed out of the Vatican archives, but Ludvig would apparently somehow get his hands on photographs of some of these documents, and the rest he would commit to memory and later write out as much as he could remember. He would show these to his own students, and apparently, this was enough to get him accused of being a Vatican spy and imprisoned in a gulag concentration camp in 1938. He would eventually be released and continue his work throughout World War II, keeping most of what he had seen in the Vatican to himself during these years, before taking most of it with him to his grave in 1973.
The story of Genrikh Mavrikiyevich Ludvig might have very well been forgotten and confined to the mists of time forever if it had not been discussed by Soviet mathematician Matest M. Agrest in the 1950s, and then later mentioned in the Russian publication Sovershenno Sekretno, in an article by writer and journalist Vladimir Kucharyants. It has since been picked up and much discussed among UFOlogists and ancient astronaut theorists, but one is left to wonder just how real any of this is. It is certain that he indeed was a real person, and was indeed an architect and occultist, but that is about all we know for sure. There is little corroborating evidence and very few sources available on his life, so who was Ludvig really, and did he really gain access to the secret Vatican archives and find all of this amazing information? If so, how did he manage to get photographs out of this veritable fortress of secrecy? One does not just waltz into this place and take photographs of these secretive tomes. How much of this is true and how much is possibly urban legend? There has certainly been some skepticism of the claims, and skeptic Jason Colavito has said of it all:
“Ludvig doesn’t seem to actually have been an ancient astronaut theorist in the 1920s and 1930s. Instead, the article talks about his belief in lost civilizations (the Sumerians, he said, were like a book whose first pages had been pulled out) and that ancient monuments had esoteric spiritual energy. The Pyramids, he said, could be activated with meditation. He spoke of astral projection and ascending to meet God in the spheres beyond earth. In other words, he sounds more like a Theosophist rather than a nuts-and-bolts ancient astronaut theorist, much like his contemporary, the émigré occultist Nicholas Roerich.
The only evidence that he believed in spacemen or that there was a nuclear bombing of Babylon comes from one of his former students, who recalled Ludvig talking of such issues much, much later—in the 1960s, the height of the Soviet ancient astronaut craze, when Matest M. Agrest, Alexander Kasantsev, and I. S. Shklovskii had popularized the idea. So, if I take the evidence at face value, it sounds like Ludvig had typical Theosophical-style esoteric ideas about ancient history in the 1930s and later converted to ancient astronaut beliefs in the 1960s, like many of his generation who saw parallels between the esoteric and ancient astronauts. As for the Vatican material, that is probably a combination of exaggeration, secondhand memory, and wishful thinking based on “interpretations” that the Russian scholar imposed on the source materials—source materials that are conveniently not cited by the only person to claim they existed, a student of his 50 years ago.”
He does make a good point, and considering there are precious few sources for this story and it mostly revolves around the recollections of that one guy, it is left open to speculation as to whether Ludvig ever did make it into the catacombs of the Vatican archives and if so, what he really found there. It is all rather mysterious, and although both the man and the archives are wreathed in myth and legend, it is hard to know on this one where reality and fantasy lie and at what point they merge. It is all a rather interesting tale, nevertheless, and with a lack of any further information, will probably remain lost to history.
Moving along, what has become known as one of the earliest official UFO reports from a commercial airline crew began as a normal flight. On July 23, 1948, chief pilot Clarence Chiles and co-pilot John Whitted took off for a routine 7-hour flight from Houston, Texas, to Atlanta, Georgia, aboard their Eastern Air Lines Douglas DC-3 passenger plane along with twenty passengers. The weather was clear and calm, and both pilots were very experienced, with distinguished flying careers during World War II, so there would have been no reason to think that this would be anything more than a typical, uneventful flight, but this would soon prove not to be the case at all, and it would propel itself into the realm of great UFO mysteries, including a major investigation and lost secret documents.
At approximately 2:45 AM on July 24, the plane was in the skies near Montgomery, Alabama, at an altitude of 5,000 feet when Chiles’ attention was drawn to what he would describe as “a dull red glow above and ahead of the aircraft,” and he mentioned it to Whitted, who also saw it. They at first took it to be a military plane, but it would soon prove to be anything but, as it rapidly closed in on their position with astonishing speed in a horizontal path and silently whizzed by before shooting straight up into the sky while belching forth “a tremendous burst of flame out of its rear.” The proximity of the strange craft had been such that they had been forced to bank in an evasive maneuver, and Chiles would say of the encounter:
"We veered to the left and it veered to its left, and passed us about 700 feet to our right and about 700 feet above us. Then, as if the pilot had seen us and wanted to avoid us, it pulled up with a tremendous burst of flame out of its rear and zoomed up into the clouds."
Both men would get a good look at it, describing it as having been a cigar-shaped metallic object 100 feet long and 25-30 feet in diameter, with no noticeable wings or tail section, and they would explain that they had seen two rows of brightly lit windows along its side. It would turn out that only one of the passengers, most of whom had slept through it all, had seen anything unusual, saying that he had seen an eerie red glow pass the plane. Other witnesses would later turn out to be personnel from Robbins Air Base, near Macon, Georgia, who would claim to have seen the same object shoot through the sky a half an hour before Chiles and Whitted’s encounter.
The plane made it to its destination on schedule, and the pilots wasted no time in reporting what they had seen to the US Air Force, who in turn called in investigators from Project Sign, which was an early Air Force group for studying UFO sightings and sort of a precursor to the more famous Project Blue Book. The pilots were extensively interviewed, and they provided sketches of what they had observed. and it was found that their descriptions were remarkably similar except that Chiles claimed to have seen an actual cockpit on the craft, whereas Whitted had observed no such feature. Project Sign also meticulously mapped every known aircraft in the air for the entire southeastern United States in an effort to see if the object could have perhaps been another plane, but there was nothing else officially in the air at the time that could really explain the bizarre sighting. This, combined with the fact that the two pilot witnesses were seasoned professionals and had gotten a good, close look at the anomalous object, made this a very exciting, albeit alarming incident.
The idea that some large, unidentified flying object of this type had invaded U.S. airspace was a sensitive issue at the time, and so the Air Force was scrambling for answers. It was suggested that this could have possibly been some sort of advanced aircraft from a foreign nation, but this was problematic because the technology was seen as far beyond what anyone was capable of at the time, and nothing like it had been seen before. The detail of the flame shooting out of the rear of the craft was important in this regard because in those days, few aircraft had afterburners, and none of that magnitude. This was more like a rocket, but there was thought to be no conceivable way that such a massive low low-flying, horizontal rocket had been traveling through the area with the technology available at the time and with no discernible launching point.
Other ideas were suggested at the time as well, such as that the pilots had simply misidentified a particularly brilliant meteor, but this does not explain the object’s ability to make a sudden vertical ascent, nor details like the double rows of windows. Project Sign also briefly entertained the idea that this could have been a brush with a Navy plane called the RV6 Constitution, which could have been on a classified mission and was top-of-the-line cutting edge stuff at the time, and also just happened to be cigar shaped, with the characteristic feature of two rows of windows, but it did not spew long jets of flame and certainly could not perform the radical vertical maneuver that was observed. The Navy, for its part, would also deny that this sort of plane had been anywhere near the area at the time.
By all accounts, Project Sign was utterly meticulous and thorough with every aspect of the investigation, leaving no stone unturned and at every turn seeking to exhaust every possible option. In the end, they had completely ruled out the meteor theory and had considered the notion that this had been some experimental aircraft, highly improbable. In light of this, the Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC) compiled all of its findings into an "Estimate of the Situation" report, which allegedly came to the conclusion that the Chiles-Whitted object was an "interplanetary spaceship." The top secret and highly classified report itself has become almost legendary, partly because it would have been the first time a government had ever conceded that UFOs were actually aliens, but also partly because it would shortly after disappear off the face of the earth and into history and the annals of great conspiracies.
The first head of The Air Force’s famous Project Blue Book study of UFO phenomena, Edward J. Ruppelt, would insist that the report did in fact exist, that it was sent all the way up through the chain of command, to land on the desk of General Hoyt S. Vandenberg, the chief of staff. The result? Well, Vandenberg apparently was skeptical of the estimate that the UFO was of alien origin and doubted the evidence used to back that case up. Rather, he was a proponent of the idea held by another faction within the Air Force that believed that the object, and indeed UFOs in general, were the result of top-secret aircraft being developed by the Soviet Union, which fit in perfectly with the Cold War paranoia at the time. According to Ruppelt, the report would then be totally dismissed and destroyed, saying:
“The general wouldn’t buy interplanetary vehicles. A group from ATIC went to the Pentagon to bolster their position but had no luck, the Chief of Staff couldn’t be convinced. The estimate died a quick death. Some months later it was completely declassified and relegated to the incinerator.”
The mysterious report has gone on to become the stuff of legend in UFOlogy, with occasional witnesses saying that they have seen a copy, but no concrete evidence that it ever even existed at all. There are no photographs of it, no known pages remaining from it; it is a specter lost to the mists of time, only reports of having seen the report up close. In the aftermath of this, the official Air Force verdict was and has remained that what Chiles and Whitted saw was a meteor. Case closed. Of course, in light of the other evidence of Project Sign’s findings on the case, this explanation has been scoffed at and accused of being a weak attempt to obfuscate and blur the real truth, as has the fact that the actual report was apparently disposed of to leave us with nothing.
For their part, Chiles and Whitted would always stand by their account, never once faltering from what they believed was a truly anomalous situation and some sort of unknown craft. To this day, the case is discussed heavily, and it remains a very credible one considering the pedigree of its pilots and the very thorough investigation that came to the conclusion that this might actually be something not of this earth. Yet not everyone obviously agrees, and so we are left with questions. If this wasn't extraterrestrial in origin, then what was it? A meteor, an experimental aircraft, what? Why would this remarkable and mysterious report make it all the way up through the upper echelons of the Air Force brass to merely be brushed aside and destroyed? Doesn't incinerating it suggest they were merely trying to get rid of it? In the end, we don't know what it was, and it is all an intriguing mystery that we very well may never have the true answer to.
Our next case here revolves around the French astronomer, computer scientist, and UFO researcher Jacques Fabrice Vallée, who is one of the important figures in the study of unidentified flying objects, long a proponent of pushing the legitimacy of ufology as a viable scientific pursuit. A legendary icon in the field, he not only increased the legitimacy of the study of UFOs but also pushed at its boundaries, introducing many ideas that were considered groundbreaking in their time, notably the idea of extraterrestrials as interdimensional travelers. He is so important that he was the inspiration for one of the main characters in Stephen Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and his contributions to the field are innumerable. He is also known for uncovering a mysterious lost top-secret document that pointed to a grand conspiracy of the government controlling, twisting, and even fabricating the output of information on the UFO phenomenon.
In the summer of 1967, Vallée was living in the United States, and at the time was tasked with helping astronomer J. Allen Hynek get his documents in order. This is notable in that Hynek was then one of the most recognizable authorities on the UFO subject and had been the top scientific advisor to three UFO studies carried out by the U.S. Air Force, with those being Project Sign (1947–1949), Project Grudge (1949–1951), and Project Blue Book, which he was then overseeing. Indeed, the documents that Vallée was helping to organize were composed of UFO reports under investigation by Project Blue Book. It was apparently quite the task, since Hynek was notoriously disorganized with his files, something Vallée complained about profusely. One day, he unloaded some boxes of Hynek’s files, and as he went through them trying to make some sense of the chaotic mess, he came across a document that was dated 9 January 1953, stamped in red ink “SECRET – Security Information” and signed by a person he would later only refer to as “Pentacle.” What he would find within would change his whole outlook on the UFO phenomenon, shake him to his core, and inspire debate and discussion that has continued to this day.
Jacques Vallée on the right
Among the many revelations allegedly held within what would be called “The Pentacle Memorandum,” perhaps the most shocking had to do with what was called the Robertson Panel. Headed by Howard P. Robertson, a physicist from the California Institute of Technology, and organized in response to a recommendation to the Intelligence Advisory Committee following the Central Intelligence Agency’s own review of Project Blue Book, the Robertson Panel was convened in January, 1953, by a committee of expert scientists who had been asked to consider the UFO phenomenon for the purpose of weighing the threat that such objects might present to national security. These experts included Luis Alvarez, Nobel prize in physics; Lloyd Berkner, space scientist; Sam Goudsmit, nuclear physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and astronomer Thornton Page. Although the Robertson Panel was meant to be an impartial, open discussion on the matter that considered all angles and held nothing back, and this was what the public had been told about it, what Vallée supposedly discovered in this mysterious file cast a sinister light on it all.
According to the Pentacle Memorandum, which was addressed to Miles E. Coll at Wright Patterson Air Force Base and meant for transmittal to Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, the panel of scientists convening for the Robertson Panel was being manipulated and not told the whole story. Not only had a secret study of thousands of UFO reports carried out on behalf of the United States government by an organization called the Battelle Memorial Institute been withheld from them, but under what was referred to as “Project Stork” they were also told in no uncertain terms that, far from an impartial discussion, there were certain things they were not allowed to talk about. This was basically cherry picking and preselecting evidence, which would guide the conclusion the scientists would reach, and they even suggested postponing the Robertson Panel until it could be decided how much information would be made available to the committee. Vallée would write of this to UFO researcher Barry Greenwood:
The greatest implication, which is perhaps not obvious on first reading but which amounts to a scandal of major proportions in the eyes of any scientist, has to do with the outright manipulation of the Robertson panel. Here is a special meeting of the five most eminent scientists in the land, assembled by the government to discuss a matter of national security. Not only are they not made aware of all the data, but another group has already decided "what can and cannot be discussed (Pentacle's own words!)" when they meet. Dr. Hynek categorically stated to me that the panel was not briefed about the Pentacle proposals.
Vallée found that this mysterious Project Stork extended beyond merely manipulating and guiding the Robertson Panel. There was also a plan to exploit areas of supposed high UFO activity to carry out an experiment to secretly and purposefully manufacture UFO phenomena to gather reliable physical data on eyewitness testimony, essentially creating what Vallée would call “a carefully calibrated and monitored simulation of an entire UFO wave.” A portion of the document explains this project:
“We expect that our analysis will show that certain areas in the United States have had an abnormally high number of reported incidents of unidentified flying objects. Assuming that, from our analysis, several definite areas productive of reports can be selected, we recommend that one or two of theses areas be set up as experimental areas. This area, or areas, should have observation posts with complete visual skywatch, with radar and photographic coverage, plus all other instruments necessary or helpful in obtaining positive and reliable data on everything in the air over the area. A very complete record of the weather should also be kept during the time of the experiment. Coverage should be so complete that any object in the air could be tracked, and information as to its altitude, velocity, size, shape, color, time of day, etc. could be recorded. All balloon releases or known balloon paths, aircraft flights, and flights of rockets in the test area should be known to those in charge of the experiment. Many different types of aerial activity should be secretly and purposefully scheduled within the area. We recognize that this proposed experiment would amount to a large-scale military maneuver, or operation, and that it would require extensive preparation and fine coordination, plus maximum security. Although it would be a major operation, and expensive, there are many extra benefits to be derived besides the data on unidentified aerial objects.
The question of just what would be accomplished by the proposed experiment occurs. Just how could the problem of these unidentified objects be solved? From this test area, during the time of the experiment, it can be assumed that there would be a steady flow of reports from ordinary civilian observers, in addition to those by military or other official observers. It should be possible by such a controlled experiment to prove the identity of all objects reported, or to determine positively that there were objects present of unknown identity. Any hoaxes under a set-up such as this could almost certainly be exposed, perhaps not publicly, but at least to the military. In addition, by having resulting data from the controlled experiment, reports for the last five years could be re-evaluated, in the light of similar but positive information. This should make possible reasonably certain conclusions concerning the importance of the problem of "flying saucers". Results of an experiment such as described could assist the Air Force to determine how much attention to pay to future situations when, as in the past summer, there were thousands of sightings reported. In the future, then, the Air Force should be able to make positive statements, reassuring to the public, and to the effect that everything is well under control.”
None of this had been revealed to the Robertson panel. Vallée saw all of this as an insidious government plan to spread misinformation and manipulate the truth, to obfuscate the honest search for true answers and mislead the public. He also wondered why the panel hadn’t been briefed on this and whether this was just one small part of a greater conspiracy to obfuscate the truth and construct just what the public knew about UFOs. In his opinion, this revelation potentially posed the threat of causing huge shockwaves in the UFO field and beyond into society itself. Vallée was quite alarmed by all of this and would write:
“Perhaps the Pentacle memo only proves that scientific studies of UFOs (and even their classified components) have been manipulated since the fifties. But it also suggests several avenues of research which are vital to the future of this field: why were Pentacle’s proposals kept from the panel? Were his plans for a secret simulation of UFO waves implemented? If so, when, where and how? What was discovered as a result? Are these simulations still going on? Hynek once assured me that if it ever turned out that a secret study had been conducted, the American public would raise an unbelievable stink against the military and Intelligence community. It would be an outrage, he said, an insult to the whole country, not to mention a violation of the most cherished American principles of democracy. There would be an uproar in Congress, editorials in major scientific magazines, immediate demands for sanctions.”
Making it all even more ominous was that when Hynek found out about the document, he had known nothing of any of this, meaning that Project Bluebook itself was being manipulated. Hynek went to directly confront members of the Battelle study about it, and their reaction was quite volatile. Vallée would say of the incident, “The man I have called Pentacle snatched his notes away and told him in no uncertain terms that the contents of the memo were not to be discussed, under any circumstances. Why should Pentacle worry so much about a simple letter written fifteen years ago?” Indeed, why would they have such a reaction, and what did this mean? All of this disturbed Vallée greatly, and he would later say of the document’s profound effect on him:
“The discovery of the Pentacle document had a major impact on me. It gave me an uncomfortable insight into the practices of government agencies and the high-powered consultants who serve them. It was the main reason for my return to Europe in 1967. It made obvious some unsavoury aspects of scientific policy at the highest level. It provided quite an education for an idealistic young astronomer.”
It would not be until 1992 that word of this secret document came to light for the public, with the release of Valee’s four-volume series titled Forbidden Science. Not long after this, a purported leaked copy of the Pentacle Memorandum came into the possession of UFO researchers, and Vallee would confirm that this was the very same document he had seen back in 1967. The document would ultimately end up hitting the public with a whimper, not creating nearly the sort of uproar that Vallée had been expecting. Most people just didn’t really seem to care all that much. Even within UFO circles, it got a mixed response, with some sharing Vallée’s alarmist and paranoid interpretation, while others said the document was not particularly significant in the grand scheme of things. Still others took the more extreme stance that the document “proved” that the government was behind the whole UFO phenomenon, and that there were no aliens or spaceships, just a large-scale psi-ops scheme. All of these various interpretations have managed to make the Pentacle Memorandum a controversial and much-debated document right up to the present, with no general agreement on what it all means or what implications it might have. It remains an odd footnote in the history of ufology that we may never truly understand for certain, its ultimate implications unknown to us.
In our last case here, we delve into the world of hacking and stumble across strange documents. Born in 1966, from an early age, Scottish-born Gary McKinnon had been interested in computers, getting his first computer and learning to use it on his own at the age of 14. Later, inspired by movies such as WarGames and the book The Hacker's Handbook by Hugo Cornwall, McKinnon began to become more and more enthralled with the world of hacking, to the point that he became absolutely obsessed with it. He found himself spending more and more time shirking his duties as a systems administrator for a small business in order to pursue his passion for hacking, and this obsession led to him losing his job. It did not bother him much at the time, as this just allowed him to devote more time to what he really wanted to do, all while he crashed at the house of his girlfriend's aunt in London and delved deeper into what he was capable of. Calling himself by the hacker name “Solo,” for a while, it was all sort of a hobby and addictive game for him, but then it would careen into what has been called “the biggest military computer hack of all time,” leading McKinnon down a dark rabbit hole of secret military projects, documents, aliens, and UFOs.
By the late 1990s, McKinnon had been drawn more and more towards looking for evidence of government cover-ups of all kinds, and decided to use his hacking skills to look for it, once saying, “I hate conspiracy theories, so I thought I'd find out for myself.” He became utterly devoted and further obsessed with this mission, spending all of his time snooping through government and military files and systems, to the point that it absolutely consumed him. Additionally, this was all far from legal. He said of this crusade to throw the veil off of secrecy:
“I am not blind to criminality, but I was on a moral crusade. I was convinced, and there was good evidence to show, that certain secretive parts of the American government intelligence agencies did have access to crashed extra-terrestrial technology which could, in these days, save us in the form of a free, clean, pollution-free energy. I thought if someone is holding onto that, that is unconstitutional under American law. I didn't think about jail sentences at the time. I'd stopped washing at one point. I wasn't looking after myself. I wasn't eating properly. I was sitting around the house in my dressing gown, doing this all night.”
According to him, he was digging up all manner of weirdness in the process, and one of the weirdest of these was evidence of what he describes as some sort of secret space force. He stumbled across this while looking into NASA and U.S. Space Command files after hearing of a conspiracy that they were holding UFOs at the Johnson Space Center. Not content to just discuss conspiracies about it, he began hacking into NASA to see for himself, and it would turn out to be shocking and very weird. McKinnon would say of this in an interview with Wired:
“A NASA photographic expert said that there was a Building 8 at Johnson Space Center where they regularly airbrushed out images of UFOs from the high-resolution satellite imaging. I logged on to NASA and was able to access this department. They had huge, high-resolution images stored in their picture files. They had filtered and unfiltered, or processed and unprocessed, files. My dialup 56K connection was very slow trying to download one of these picture files. As this was happening, I had remote control of their desktop, and by adjusting it to 4-bit color and low screen resolution, I was able to briefly see one of these pictures. It was a silvery, cigar-shaped object with geodesic spheres on either side. There were no visible seams or riveting.
There was no reference to the size of the object, and the picture was taken presumably by a satellite looking down on it. The object didn't look manmade or anything like what we have created. Because I was using a Java application, I could only get a screenshot of the picture -- it did not go into my temporary internet files. At my crowning moment, someone at NASA discovered what I was doing and I was disconnected. I also got access to Excel spreadsheets. One was titled "Non-Terrestrial Officers." Yeah, I looked it up 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. It contained names and ranks of U.S. Air Force personnel who are not registered anywhere else. It also contained information about ship-to-ship transfers, but I've never seen the names of these ships noted anywhere else.”
McKinnon claims that this space program is called “Solar Warden,” in operation since 1980, and every bit as bizarre as you might imagine. He says that it acts as a sort of interplanetary border control to protect against aliens that would do us harm, and that it is under control of the US Naval Network and Space Operations Command (NNSOC), and through his snooping around, he was able to glean a surprising amount of detail on the program. He claims that Solar Warden has at its disposal eight massive cigar-shaped motherships longer than several football fields, 43 small "scout ships” and various other flying objects, as well as advanced beam weaponry, all of it derived from reverse-engineered alien technology tested at secret bases, including the infamous Area 51 in Nevada. It sounds absurd, but McKinnon swears it is true and has never backed down from his story. In addition to Solar Warden, he also uncovered images of UFOs in the atmosphere and various other information on aliens and UFOs, as well as documents called “The Disclosure Project,” which supposedly contain reams of testimony from high-level sources on the existence of such things, and of which he has said:
“There is The Disclosure Project. This is a book with 400 testimonials from everyone from air traffic controllers to those responsible for launching nuclear missiles. Very credible witnesses. They talk about reverse-engineered technology taken from captured or destroyed alien craft. There 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 they've captured spacecraft and reverse engineered it.”
Unfortunately, he was never able to get too far into it, as all of this was highly illegal, and it eventually caught up with him. In 2002, McKinnon was arrested at his flat in Wood Green, north London, and accused of hacking into 97 United States military and NASA computers over a 13-month period between February 2001 and March 2002, much of it allegedly causing a lot of damage in the process. For instance, he is accused of altering or deleting critical files from operating systems, rendering important systems inoperable, copying data, account files, and passwords, interfering with military operations, compromising sensitive and classified data, and leaving threatening messages, all of which was according to officials “intentional and calculated to influence and affect the US government by intimidation and coercion." Considering that this all happened directly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the U.S. government took this very seriously and made aggressive moves to have him extradited to face trial there, something which could mean up to 70 years in prison for McKinnon. So far, there have been endless appeals and judicial reviews, meaning that he has yet to face these charges on American soil, and likely never will, although extradition efforts have been ongoing.
We are left to wonder just what he really found while breaking all sorts of laws. Did he really see top-secret government files pertaining to aliens and UFOs, and more importantly, did he really uncover evidence of some space force using alien technology? There have been plenty of people and so-called "whistleblowers" making similar claims, so what are we to make of this? He has not provided one shred of concrete evidence, and his detractors have pointed out that he was high on weed most of the time he was hacking, so is this all just tall tales? McKinnon is definitely in deep doo doo with the American government, but whether any of that has anything to do with aliens and UFO space programs remains to be seen.
This has only been a sampling of the many mysterious, classified documents swirling about the UFO field, and there have been many other purported documents just like them. We are left to wonder, do they really exist, and if so, just what is the extent of the secret information contained within them? We may never know for sure, their secrets locked away from the public eye, but that will never stop the conspiracies from coming, or people digging around to find the true answers.
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