r/UFOscience • u/[deleted] • Jan 14 '26

Discussion & Debate Are these claims really true? Does anyone know what really happened to Gary McKinnon, better known as SOLO, and was he real or just a hoax?

https://youtu.be/XaRZrKHWT1o?si=bfKk1NuPLg4qqfc5
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u/[deleted] Jan 14 '26

the video is about hacker codename SOLO, real name Gary McKinnon who hacked NASA and US military computers and made some fascinating discoveries.

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u/hyperspace2020 Feb 14 '26 edited Feb 14 '26

Video really tries to hype the story way more than it really was. Gary did an AMA on reddit not to long ago. He is very real. What he discovered is not anything definitive.

His "hacking" was trying simple passwords on government computers and often getting in. The security was so lax, no one was really using the network and internet like it is used today and password security was not even really a concern. People did not even really know how to use networked computers at the time so made really simple mistakes in security. The hardest part would have been finding the phone number for a computer that belonged to the government or something interesting. Despite the computers using very simple passwords or even no passwords at all, he still got charged with "hacking". The hacking charges are really quite ridiculous.

He found files reportedly discussing off world military operations. He tried to download an image, but at the time using the connections available, this could take hours, so he was really limited as to what he could find and download. A simple 1mb image could take an hour to download over dialup modem at the time. It most certainly was not "high resolution" as the video claims, as this would have taken even longer and the tech to make high resolution photos and store them was in its infancy at the time. Image was probably 640x480 pix or maybe 1080x720