A hacking collective claims to have obtained hours of on-board footage from NASA’s unmanned aircrafts, data from their climate observation missions and details about thousands of NASA staff. On top of this, they allege to have taken “semi-partial control” of a $200 million (£137 million) Global Hawk drone, which they attempted to crash into the ocean.

In a Pastebin thread, which is being continually removed then reuploaded, Anonsec said they obtained pre-planned flight route data for NASA's drones. The hackers said they replaced this route with their own, which they hoped would cause the drone to deviate from its set flight path and crash into the sea. However, the hackers say they lost access to the network before this was possible.

Anonsec uploaded 250GB of the obtained data online, including eight hours of raw footage from NASA's aerial drone fleet. Motherboard has uploaded 15 minutes of this footage to YouTube (below).

In the thread, members went on to explain the justification for the attack: “One of the main purposes of the Operation was to bring awareness to the reality of Chemtrails/CloudSeeding/Geoengineering/WeatherModification, whatever you want to call it, they all represent the same thing.

“NASA even has several missions dedicated to studying Aerosols and their affects on the environment and weather, so we targeted their systems.”

Conspiracy theories about “chemtrails” usually revolve around the idea that the streaks of water vapor left behind by airplanes are actually harmful chemical clouds. Theorists claim that these chemicals were developed by the military and used by governments to covertly push some kind of secret interest. Absolutely none of this has ever been scientifically verified or backed by legitimate scientists.

NASA has denied claims that any of their data was obtained by the group, claiming they could have found all the information through their 30,000 openly available databases.

NASA sent a statement to Forbes that read, “Control of our Global Hawk aircraft was not compromised. NASA has no evidence to indicate the alleged hacked data are anything other than already publicly available data. NASA takes cybersecurity very seriously and will continue to fully investigate all of these allegations.”