NASA agent comes out on UFOs

NASA agent defends UFO hacker Gary McKinnon.

A veteran NASA agent who says he processed the real X-Files has come clean with the inside story on the Roswell aliens.

Joseph Richard Gutheinz Jr, a practising criminal lawyer and decorated former NASA special agent, spoke out in defence of UFO hacker Gary Mckinnon last week. Having also spent the last four years on the Texas Criminal Justice Advisory Committee on Medical and Mental Impairments, he felt qualified to call on the US government to cease its unfair hounding of the UFO hacker.

But Gutheinz, it turns out, is himself a poster-boy for UFO conspiracists, just like McKinnon: he is famous for telling a mysterious tale of dead Roswell aliens being kept in Building 265 at NASA's Johnson Space Centre where he used to work in Houston, and of a sinister government cover up.

Gutheinz led a team of agents in NASA's Office of the Inspector General (OIG). They worked from a secret bunker with grass and trees covering it. It had cypher doors leading to secluded rooms furnished with nothing but a desk, a lamp and a single telephone. Beyond the steel doors to the outside world, astronauts were training for Space Shuttle missions.

"It was kind of a spooky building. People always wondered what went on there," Gutheinz told The Inquirer. "Except for Mission Control, it was the most highly secured building at Johnson Space Centre."

The OIG agents were so secret that even NASA wasn't allowed to know what they were investigating. "The joke at NASA OIG is that whoever was the producer of the X-Files picked the wrong agency, because nobody calls the FBI. They don't trust the FBI. What they do if they think they've been abducted or something like that, they used to call the criminal investigators at NASA, which is the Office of the Inspector General.

"As a senior special agent I used to get these calls on a regular basis where somebody says I've been abducted, I've got a chip in my brain, there's somebody following me around," he said.

"It's one of the things that interested me about the Gary McKinnon story because here's a guy who really thinks there's UFOs, who's going the extra step to prove it. I understood that, because I had dealt with so many of those individuals in the past," Gutheinz added.

The most prominent of those people was Jerry Alan Whittredge, who impersonated an astronaut and thought he was a CIA assassin. He blagged his way into Mission Control, was given Space Shuttle specifications and permission to fly jets. "That was a lot of the people that we used to get calls from," said Gutheinz.

OIG agents were involved in the seven-agency investigation that caught Gary McKinnon snooping around their systems for evidence of captured UFO technology. Typically, the OIG roots out internal fraud at NASA. That's why they have to be secret. What they don't do is interrogate aliens.