Chelsea, what do you got? I'm not giving you a choice of things to choose from. I'm just going to give you this this random article that I found actually just before I came on to here to record. And this one is called, I don't even know what this one is called, but there's a quote directly at the top. So this might be the title. Okay. It might be it. And it is, where did these holes in
the ocean floor come from? Nobody knows, says scientist. Basically, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Ocean Exploration Team, that is a mouthful, discovered multiple sets of holes on the Atlantic Ocean floor late last month during the voyage to the ridge 2022 expedition. Now, these mysterious neatly aligned holes have been discovered deep in the ocean, as I'm pretty much, I think I just said. And scientists are stumped over their origin. The small oblong cavities
are spaced about 10 centimeters apart and repeat in some cases for several meters. It looks a little bit like a sewing machine punched its way through the sea bottom as Mike, I don't even know how to pronounce his last name. So he's just Mike, a deep sea biologist with the national, I'm not saying that again either. No way. Researchers in this place's ocean exploration team initially discovered sets of holes two and a half kilometers below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean north of the
Azores late last month. Later, the researchers found more holes and this time around 1500 meters deep on the Azores plateau. There's many hypotheses about what this could be. There's just some people saying it might be from a spike tire. I'm pretty sure it's not from a spike. It's actually says that in this article could be from a spike tire, but it's pretty far down into the
ocean. So I doubt it's a spike tire. Yeah, I assume they would be deep sea worms. Yeah, it says they probably think it's an animal, but anyhow, this long name researching thing really doesn't know why it's there, how it got there or anything like that. And leave you with one last quote from this. It might be the title, but this one's in the middle. So I'm not sure. And that is, I've never seen anything like that before. With that, I think it's a great time to start the episode.
God, I really hope that wasn't the title of the article. You know what, I would read more. I'm a sucker for clickbait. I've never seen anything like that before. Maybe people will keep listening now. On the unexplained to the mundane, why don't you come join us on our journey to the fringe? Hello and welcome to Journey to the Fringe, now with less than 30 parts per million of lead,
making our consumption only dangerous for the young and feeble. We are your mostly safe host for consumption, Taylor and Chelsea here today, following up on our space themed episode with a NASA episode. And I started out with a general idea of what I want to do for this episode. And there's so many different fringy controversies you can go down the rabbit hole with when it comes to NASA. We could do that NASA is full of Nazis or at least started full of Nazis. Unfortunately,
we've done that one. That's true though. Yeah, we could do the moon landing and just anything regarding that. Like, did you know there's an entire Wikipedia page just on fake moon landing conspiracies? You know what, I'm always disappointed when I go to you, oh Jesus, Wikipedia for anything conspiracy theory or cryptid related because it's all just shooting it down and all the reasons why it's not real. Yes. Because they get scientists to edit those. Yeah, but I also
feel like they have some like hope. Yeah. Yeah. Not hope, just like some hope. Hopium. Yeah. Hopium. Hopium. Like, I don't know what the word is. Like mystique, some like, you know, nice. I don't know. Just give me some promise that it might be true for a little bit and then shoot it down. We could also do that astronauts keep seeing UFOs while they're in space. We could do hell. NASA has many logos that have occult symbolism within them. The fact that they have a
Mars rover up there that keeps photographing gophers, lizards and bigfoot. We could talk about how NASA's live feeds keep mysteriously cutting out when people say they see weird things on them, or that NASA keeps denying there are planet sized spaceships siphoning fuel from the sun, or that NASA works in cahoots with Russia and other space programs to push a spherical planet agenda. That one's not out of the realm of possibility. Or hell, the fact that NASA
teleported a teenage Barack Obama to Mars to fight in a Mars war. That's a good one. Yeah. Which unfortunately would be a lie because that one's not actually NASA. That's CIA. Right. But instead I decided to focus on a nice little weird story that is based fully in fact about the weird guy who hacked NASA once. Okay, I like weird guys. Yeah. And God, Gary McKinnon, fucking Gary, is as weird as they come. That's who it is, Gary. Yeah, it's Gary. Gary's are crazy. Yeah, they are. Like
there's Gary Bucey, who's like the craziest living person on the planet. He's still living, right? Yeah, he is. Yeah, he is. And yeah, so I'm going to tell you a tale about the time that Gary McKinnon hacked NASA and everything that came from there. So Gary McKinnon at the time this happened in the early 2000. He's 46 years old and he suffers from Aspergers. He's a... Oh, I've seen him. I'm
sure you have. Please. Yeah. Yeah. Gary's lawyers describe him as a UFO eccentric, to say the least, who used the internet to search for alien life and is accused of causing the US Army's entire network of more than 2000 computers in Washington to shut down for 24 hours, which the US called the biggest military hack of all time. Oh. Yeah. So Gary has fully admitted that he hacked both the Pentagon and NASA computers under the pseudonym Solo. That's his name that he hacks under. Okay.
Saying he was looking for evidence of flying saucers and other extraterrestrial activity. Or not. And in an interview, he describes what he heard from former NASA whistleblower, Donna Haer, who had been told by a colleague that the space agency was airbrushing UFOs from their photos. There was a colleague who was in another room. Sorry, this is a quote from Donna. There was a colleague who was in another room. They all had secret clearance, but they were on different
projects. And she was in this chap's lap or room or whatever it is. And he said, come and take a look at this. Haer's colleagues who are working in building eight of the Johnson Space Center in Texas, then reportedly showed her a picture of a large white disk above Earth. He later told her his entire lab was to do with airbrushing out UFOs from higher-esatellite imagery from NASA. McKinnon also told the show that it was relatively easy to hack the space agency computers because
the organization was not using non-rotable internet addresses. So yeah, that's the reason why he did it and just he said it was really easy. And he spent around two years not only breaking into NASA's online security, but also all the Pentagon's IT systems using a program called Landsearch. So when Gary was able to do this, when he got into NASA's files, he claims he saw folders named, and these are the four, filtered, unfiltered, processed, and raw.
Ha, ha, ha. However, he had a 56 kilobyte dial-up internet connection, 56K dial-up, and it slowed him down and he managed to just get one picture from the folder before he lost access. An image of a cigar-shaped spacecraft. Okay. When was this? Did we talk about this year? I have not actually yet. It was between 2001 and 2002. Okay. So he was on dial-up. It's not out of the realm of possibility.
I mean, we were still on dial-up at that time, but we lived in the boonies, so we had no other option. But people living in cities, I know they had. They had faster. They had cable internet. Faster internet. Oh, he's in the UK, right? Yeah. I wouldn't know about the UK, but what, at the house of the dial-up? I couldn't tell you about trans-fundamental internet speeds at that time either. Okay, suspicious, but okay. Well, but no, he actually did hack NASA.
Like the story behind this, there's no question about that. Yeah, I'm not calling BS on that. I'm just wondering why the hell he had dial-up internet at this point. Yeah. Why didn't he wait a few years until he had not dial-up internet? Was a thing you would have known. Yeah, it's true. During his search, he claimed to have found spreadsheets also on NASA's database titled Non-Terrestrial Officers, which he believes is proof of the US having space warships.
Describing what he saw, he said they were probably 20 officer names and eight to 10 ship names beginning with the letters USS, which I would find hilarious if they were using USS because that's all how they named ships in Star Trek. Like the Enterprise, the most common ship that people know from Star Trek is the USS Enterprise. Yeah. So an interesting find, I guess, to say the least, if true. And this is right from his, like he did several interviews after the fact.
This is right from one of his interviews as to what he was doing in his own words. A NASA photographic expert said that there was a building eight 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 their department. They had huge high resolution images stored in their picture file. They had filtered and unfiltered or processed and unprocessed files.
My dial-up 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 four-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 was 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 man-made or anything like what we have created. Because I was using a Java application, I could only get a screenshot of the picture. 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 the Excel spreadsheet. One was settled non-terrestrial officers. It contained names and ranks of US Air Force personnel who were 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. So, I did that quote. So, that's what he said he was doing on there. Can I ask a quick question or shall I hold my question? No, go ahead. Go ahead. Okay, so that's what he did. How long was he hacked into NASA? He says in total it was some time from in 2001 to some time in 2002. Okay, so he did it multiple times.
Does he talk about anything else he found other than just finding things related to UFOs and extra terrestrial secret space stuff? No, he does not. And the weird thing is, is he hacked into many other departments and he doesn't talk at all about what he was doing in those other departments. And part of the problem too is this guy has, he is on the spectrum. He has Asperger's, so he hyper-focuses on things. Maybe he just didn't find it interesting.
I just find it interesting in his quote that literally everything he clicked on was related to UFOs in his opinion. And then second of all, that the image that he's viewing is in very low resolution. I can only imagine with a dial-up connection the quality of an image that he's looking at. Yeah, and it was just coming in line by line, very slowly as he was getting it. Who knows if he even saw the whole picture?
But who will nonetheless, and I, could you imagine NASA having all these folders in every folder that you go into? It's like auto-shopped, not photoshopped. Yeah. Like, and obviously he's actually done it, but that would be cool to be able to hack into NASA and like see that kind of stuff. Cause I would imagine that they do heavily photoshop. They're known to heavily photoshop their stuff because the surface of Mars is not red, and they were photoshopping the color of it for a while.
Well, for the longest time, we were only getting black and white photos from space, so they add color. Oh yes. Yeah, so far. So that, I fairly like his description. Like, I wanted to see if there were anything alien related, so I just went in there and saw it. Here's the Wikipedia description of what happened. McKinnon has admitted in many public statements that he obtained unauthorized access to computer systems in the United States, including those mentioned in the United States indictments.
He stated his motivation drawn from a statement made before the Washington Press Club on May 9th, 2001 by the Disclosure Project, was to find evidence of UFOs, anti-gravity technology, and the suppression of free energy, all of which he states to have proven through his actions. I could not find quotes from him on anti-gravity or free energy, so weird. He'd be nothing that he saw actually. Well, yeah. Why would NASA have free energy or anything as well? Well, Tesla was working on it. NASA?
I don't know. That's the only thing I can connect it to. Okay, because he hacked NASA, not Tesla, right? Yeah, yeah, he hacked NASA. I don't know if you can hack Tesla. The person, not Tesla. True. It would probably be pretty difficult. In an interview televised by the BBC's CLIC program, he stated of the Disclosure Project that they are some very credible, relied upon people, all saying, yes, there is UFO technology.
There's anti-gravity, there's free energy, there's extraterrestrial in origin, and they've captured spacecraft and were first engineered in. He said he investigated a NASA photographic expert's claim that a Johnson Space Center building eight images were regularly cleaned of evidence of UFO crafts, and confirmed this, comparing the raw originals with processed images. He stated to have viewed a detailed image of something not man-made and cigar-shaped.
Floating above the Northern Hemisphere, and assuming his viewing would be undisrupted, owing to the hour, but he did not think of capturing the image because he was so bedazzled, and therefore did not think of securing it with a screen capture function and software at the point when his connection was interrupted. So I just like that description of it, where he talks about a lot more overall, but I couldn't actually find anything outside of him really being into UFOs.
But there's just clear agreement that the guy had the chance to take a photo, and if you're able to hack into NASA, why would you not screen capture? He said at one point that he did of the one that was in very poor... I know, I know, that's the weird thing. He said he did, but in Wikipedia, they said they didn't, and I've never seen the photos that he screen-captured. Screen-captured, so I'm more in line with Wiki how they've described it.
But he himself was quoted as saying he's screen-captured. Yes, it's very true. So odd. And then the next part of it, which is the US description of events. US authorities stated he deleted critical files from operating systems, which shut down the United States Military District of Washington network of 2000 theaters for 24 hours. McKinnon also posted a notice on the military's website, quote, your security is crap, unquote.
After the September 11th attacks in 2001, he allegedly deleted weapons logs at the Earl Naval Weapons Station, rendering his network of 300 computers inoperable in paralyzing munitions supply deliveries to the US Navy's Atlantic Fleet. McKinnon was also accused of copying data, account files, and passwords onto his own computer. US authorities stated that the cost of tracking, correcting the problems he cost was over $700,000, which frankly I found was very cheap.
They're giving a very different story of what he is saying that he did. Yeah. Are there legal ramifications for what they're saying he did? Oh yeah. Okay, because he's basically saying, I went into these files and look at these UFOs. UFOs definitely exist, but the US is saying that he went and deleted some pretty heavy stuff. And why would he wanna do that if he's only after UFOs and free energy?
Yeah, and the interviews that I've seen with him, like to be fair to the interviewer, I get why you wanna focus on the UFO stuff. You gotta ask him, what the fuck are you doing with the rest of the stuff? Yeah, like what else did you see? Or why? Or is he really just after, like he's making it out to seem like he was only after UFOs. Yeah. If he's actually going in and delete, like why those files? And he's saying the actual thing. And how do they know that it's him that was deleting files?
Well, I don't get into it fully, but this next line is somewhat damning. While not admitting that it constituted evidence of destruction, McKinnon did admit leaving a threat on one computer. US forest policy is akin to government sponsored terrorism these days. It was not a mistake that there was a huge security stand down on September 11th last year. I am solo. I will continue to disrupt at the highest levels. And US policies to fight back, these attacks as strongly as possible.
As a result of Mr. McKinnon's actions, we suffered serious damages. This was not some harmless incident. He did very serious and deliberate damage to military and NASA computers and left silly and anti-American messages. All the evidence was that someone was staging a very serious attack on US computer systems. Yeah, I mean, why were they so easy to hack into if they didn't want their system hacked into? Because it was dialed up. Nobody really focused on IT back in the day.
Oh yeah, this is before like all the national security stuff, I guess. Yeah. Okay. But yeah, kind of a crazy story so far, eh? Yeah, like it. So he gets arrested by the British national high tech crime unit in March of 2002. And they held him in custody for about six or seven hours. His own computer and once he was fixing for others were taken away and the other machines were eventually returned, but they kept his hard drip that was sent to the US.
And in November of 2002, the US Department of Justice started their extradition process. And I took this directly from the extradition, documents that were posted online, London. England hacker indicted under computer fraud and abuse act for access in military computers. Gary McKinnon of London, England was indicted in Alexandria today by a federal grand jury on seven counts of computer fraud and related activity.
McKinnon faces on each count a maximum sentence of 10 years of imprisonment and $250,000 in fines. The United States intends to formally request the United Kingdom Extradite McKinnon. According to the indictment between March of 2001 and March of 2002, Gary McKinnon accessed and damaged without authorization. 92 computers belong to the United States Army, Navy, Air Force, Department of Defense in NASA. And six computers belong to a number of private businesses.
And this is, I find this kind of weird, but this is Gary's a weird guy. So like whatever he thinks is just in his mind. So he could face up to 70 years in jail with what he was being charged with. He also suspects he would be sent to Guantanamo Bay, but I could not find any evidence as to why he believes that. I mean, if he has Asperger's, it could be for any reason. Yeah. Could have been in the files that he was into and deleting. Yeah. He deleted them so there's no proof.
Yeah, that's exactly how it works. And then the British Crown prosecution was also going to bring charges against him, but they dropped them in June or July of 2005. And at that point he's put in prison and going to be extradited to the US. Oh no, not to Guantanamo. I know, exactly to Guantanamo. So the UK was going to extradite him, but Gary gets a lawyer and he appeals the extradition. And I don't just purely my opinion, the lawyer has a terrible plan here. So they appeal it.
And as Barrister told the law lords that the prosecutor had said McKinnon faced a possible eight to 10 years in jail per count if he contested the charge without any chance of repatriation, but only 37 to 46 months if he cooperated and went voluntarily to the United States. So that would be a plea deal. If you agree to just go and serve the time, you're pleading guilty, you can just do the time. Okay. And plea bargains are not a part of English jurisprudence.
So Gary's Barrister said that the law lords should deny extradition if there was an abusive process. Quote, if the United States wishes to use the processes of English courts secured the extradition of an alleged offender, then they must play by our rules. So because they offered him a plea deal, he's saying, no, they can't do that. They have to use British rules for an extradition.
Okay. And then the House of Lords absolutely rejects it and they say that the difference between the American system and our own is not perhaps so starked as McKinnon's argument suggests. And that extradition proceedings should accommodate legal and cultural differences between the legal systems of the many. Foreign friendly states with whom the UK has entered into reciprocal extradition arrangements. I may not understand British law, but that just seems like a bad argument in my mind.
Yeah, I'm not really sure, to be honest. And then he appeals again to the European Court of Human Rights, which actually puts a bar on the extradition. On June 23rd, 2009, he won the right to apply for judicial review against the extradition. And then he loses at the High Court. So he's gonna get extradited until one plucky young political up and comer by the name of Theresa May, who's actually Prime Minister of the UK at this time.
In 2012, announced to the House of Commons that the extradition had been blocked. She specifically said that Mr. McKinnon is accused of serious crimes, but there is also no doubt that he's seriously ill. He has Asperger's syndrome and suffers from depressive illness. Mr. McKinnon's 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.
She stated that the director of public prosecutions would determine whether McKinnon should face trial before British court. On December 14th of 2012, the department's DPP, Kier Stamer, announced that McKinnon would not be prosecuted in the United Kingdom because of the difficulties involved in bringing a case against him when the evidence was all in the US. So this guy actually never served any jail time, but it is the weirdest court cases that you would ever hear.
Because he was gonna be extradited and then he can't be extradited because the UK says, look, this guy has Asperger's and would not fare well in a US prison. And then they would try him, but the US government has all of the evidence and they don't wanna pay to send somebody over with all that evidence and all the people who can sit on the trial for it as witnesses. So they're just like, fuck it, you can go. So they won't even like offer to throw him in jail in the UK?
No, he's never actually got charged with anything. Now, I also do wanna just conclude this quote from Gary's mom while this is all going on. I'll do it in my best cockney dachshund I can. Oi, what Gary did was wrong, born of his compulsive and obsessive behavior, but does not justify Gary's extradition, which would be a cool and excessive punishment, particularly given his ass-bocus. However, just because he didn't serve time, doesn't mean that he doesn't have repercussions from it to this day.
In fact, his lawyer after this all finished up made a statement saying like every other country that America has an extradition treaty with that extradition warrant is still out there and still live. So basically Gary can never leave the UK for the rest of his life. Oh, that sucks. Yeah. But hey, this was a long time ago. What's Gary up to these days? Well, the most recent update I could find on him was from 2014. A long time ago.
And yeah, Gary is now offering a personalized low entry cost search engine optimization service for businesses and organizations through his company, smallseo.co.uk. Are you sure that's not spam? No, it's not. Actually, it was on, there was a website called like freegary.co.uk and it was giving updates the whole time and the very last update is this is what Gary's up to now. He charges $40 an hour and on average, clients get charged about 250 pounds.
I'm pretty sure we get a million emails from Gary McKinnon like every day. On his website too, there's people who leave reviews. I can recommend smallseo to anyone wishing to promote their website on all the main search engines. Gary was expert and professional in all his dealings. Gary. But yeah, that is the weird saga of the guy who performed the largest hack in US Department of Defense history and says he found UFOs on NASA's hard drives. Nice, like that. Really took a turn, didn't it?
Did, yes. Thought it was a feel good. It kind of is a feel good story in the end actually. Oh, and also sorry, can you please go to smallseo.co.uk right now and look at the logo he decided to use. Smallseo.what? .co.uk. I like that logo. It goes with our logo. Yeah, it is a circle with a UFO at the top beaming up a man who's standing on the ground. And then one of the first picture flashes is a small man sitting on the keyboard of a laptop. Yeah, he's recommending it. But him?
Very well, could be. But that is the end of this episode, probably not the end of our discussion on NASA. There are many things we could discuss NASA for. You listed like five at least to starting this episode on. So we're going to have to do more. Exactly. In the meantime, I have been Taylor here with Chelsea talking about some weird NASA stuff. Thank you all for listening and we will see you next week. Thanks. Thank you for listening to Journey to the Fringe.
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