Published: 7:02 AM 10/27/2009

Newly-appointed UK Home Secretary Alan Johnson has “stopped the clock” on the extradition of a British man who hacked into US government computers and discovered a secret military space project.

While searching for evidence of anti-gravity and UFO technologies, 43-year-old Gary McKinnon hacked into the NASA computer network between February 2001 and March 2002.

Besides finding the US military had a very lax computer security network, McKinnon found evidence of not only UFO-based technology, but of a secret American military unit operating in outer space.

As McKinnon told Wired.com back in 2006:

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.

McKinnon did admit that what he discovered “could be a game — it’s hard to know for certain.”

Johnson says he was “very carefully” review new information that McKinnon suffers from a rare form of autism called Asperger’s syndrome before deciding if he should be extradited to the US to face trail there, where he faces up to 70 years in prison and US $2 million in fines.