LONDON – A British hacker is facing extradition to the United States after hacking into military computers for UFO evidence.

He is accused of hacking 97 military and NASA computers around 2001, often described as the biggest military computer hack ever. Authorities claim he deleted critical files from a number of expensive computers, but McKinnon denies this, saying he only accessed unsecure computers.

What was McKinnon looking for? Evidence of the government’s knowledge of alien life. In an interview with Wired Magazine, he described what he was after:

“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.’ 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.”

Is McKinnon telling the truth? There is no way to know, as he was unable to save anything he saw. He was subsequently arrested, and today was told he will be extradited to the United States to stand trial.

His mother, Janis Sharp, is pleading with President Obama to intervene, as McKinnon has Asperger’s Syndrome, which she believes led him to his unlawful behavior. “Obama wouldn’t have this. He doesn’t want the first guy extradited for computer misuse to be a guy with Asperger’s, a UFO guy,” said Sharp today.

Do you think he should be punished? Or was he really onto something?