It would be fair to say that President Donald Trump has a lot on his plate, not least the wars in Iran and Ukraine and the looming midterm elections later this year.

Despite this, however, Mr Trump has devoted at least some of his time to matters much further afield. From different galaxies.

With the President’s blessing, the Pentagon has released hundreds of previously secret files on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) – better known as UFOs – from the likes of Nasa and the CIA.

They include videos purporting to show unknown flying objects in destinations from the Persian Gulf to Syria – including a suspected UFO being destroyed in gunfire.

There are grainy black-and-white images and videos of suspected alien phenomena stretching back decades.

One ‘senior US intelligence officer’ said he witnessed ‘orange orbs flaring up and down’ from a military helicopter last year after inspecting a suspected UFO site in the western United States. ‘They were oval-shaped, orange with a white or yellow centre, and emitted light in all directions,’ the officer noted in the declassified files.

A state department cable from the US embassy in Tajikistan in 1994 detailed how one Tajik pilot and three Americans witnessed a brightly lit UAP ‘making 90-degree turns, doing corkscrews and manoeuvring in circles at great rates of speed’.

Watching all this unfold almost 4,000 miles away from his home near Leicester, was one Gary McKinnon.

Twenty-four years have passed since Mr McKinnon, then a 36-year-old computer geek with an interest in UFOs bordering on the obsessive, was arrested in a north London flat by officers from the now-defunct National Hi-Tech Crime Unit.

Handcuffed in his pyjamas at dawn, the unemployed programmer suspected why the squad searching the property might be there – but reasoned that if he had committed a crime, it was deserving of little more than a slap on the wrist.

In the months before the police showed up, Mr McKinnon, who has autism (formerly known as Asperger’s syndrome), had been spending 12 hours each day looking for ‘proof’ of extraterrestrial life on the internet – then in its infancy – in the kitchen of a flat in Crouch End belonging to his then girlfriend’s aunt.

Using the codename ‘Solo’, he had decided the best way to find evidence of UFOs was ‘from the horse’s mouth’, he told me in his first newspaper interview for years. So he hacked into dozens of Nasa and military computers in what the US authorities would later brand ‘the biggest military computer hack of all time’.

It wasn’t the typical work of a cyber terrorist: Mr McKinnon was on a cheap desktop computer, and found that many of the supposedly elite databases used easily breakable codes – like ‘password’ as the computer password – allowing him to infiltrate the devices. ‘It wasn’t particularly clever,’ he recalls. Indeed, as a 1970s classic rock fan and something of a hippy, his UFO ‘research’ while hunched over the monitor on his kitchen table would often be accompanied by a beer and marijuana ‘joint’.

Yes, he did wrong – but master villain he was not.

That did not stop the US Justice Department indicting him on eight counts of computer-related crimes and accusing him of more than £370,000 worth of damage to their military systems as he looked for evidence of little green men between February 2001 and March 2002.

Rather than six months’ community service, as Mr McKinnon had been warned he might receive if prosecuted in the UK, he was now facing extradition to America and up to 70 years in a US supermax prison.

That this all took place against the backdrop of 9/11 only made matters worse, as he was accused of using the cover of UFO-hunting for more nefarious activities at a time when the terror threat was at a critical level.

Mr McKinnon was, at the very least, naive. He used his own email address and left digital ‘notes’ on the US systems warning them that their ‘security was crap’ or, more unwisely, ‘I am Solo and I will continue to disrupt at the highest levels’.

What followed was a ten-year diplomatic row after successive British Home Secretaries refused to block Mr McKinnon’s extradition. In 2005, as the process rumbled on, he was arrested on the street in London and whisked by police to Brixton Prison.

He became a cause celebre, with the US attempting to make an example of him after he had exposed its lax military cybersecurity. His supporters insisted he had not caused any real damage and his autism was not being properly considered. ‘They were the big bully in the playground,’ Mr McKinnon, now 60, says of the US’s conduct back then.

Sir Keir Starmer, then Director of Public Prosecutions, backed sending him to the US, according to Mr McKinnon’s late mother.

It was only after countless High Court hearings and high-profile campaigns – spearheaded by the Daily Mail – and the backing of MPs and musicians such as Sting and Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, that Mr McKinnon was finally spared extradition in 2012 on the orders of then Home Secretary Theresa May. It was then decided he would not be prosecuted in the UK, either.

Now, Mr McKinnon’s story is set to grip the public once more with a television dramatisation of his life in the pipeline based on the memoir of his beloved mother, Janis Sharp, who was so prominent in the campaign to free her son and sadly died from cancer in March.

Even now, 14 years after he was finally told he would not be extradited to the US, the Daily Mail can reveal that Mr McKinnon continues to be punished by his harrowing ordeal – today, he still cannot leave England or Wales for fear of arrest.

Should he set foot in a foreign jurisdiction, he risks immediate extradition to the States and prosecution. He could not even go to his father’s 2016 funeral in Scotland, where Mr McKinnon was born. As his lawyers pointed out, the Scottish legal system is different and could facilitate extradition. His mum, in her book Saving Gary McKinnon: A Mother’s Story, said the threat of extradition hangs over him ‘like the sword of Damocles’.

So how does he feel today given that Mr Trump has now released the very information he was searching for, supposedly in the interests of ‘transparency’? ‘I guess it does [vindicate me],’ he says. ‘It proves that they’ve known about them [UFOs] for a long time, but I already knew that.’

He believes the US pursued him with such fervour because, in the wake of 9/11, they ‘needed a poster boy . . . and I almost offered myself up.’ But shouldn’t the US now drop its threat of arrest? ‘I would love to be able to travel abroad,’ Mr McKinnon replies. ‘It’s up to the President. He does seem unpredictable but he might be supportive.’

In an unusual twist, Mr McKinnon believes the President may have another reason for coming to his assistance: the two could be distantly related. Mr McKinnon’s grandfather, Donald MacLeod, was born in Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland.

Mr Trump’s mother Mary had the same surname of MacLeod and was born just four miles from Stornoway in the village of Tong. A coincidence? Perhaps.

The psychological scars from Mr McKinnon’s ordeal continue to run deep. ‘I was very depressed for a long time,’ he says. ‘It modifies your behaviour. It makes you more withdrawn. It took me a while to get out of that but I’m OK now.’

He admits to being less obsessed with the extraterrestrial today than he used to be.

For a number of years, he has run his own internet search engine optimisation company, helping businesses gain prominence on Google. Does his infamous background help or hinder him?

‘Some customers are aware of my background but I never mention it,’ he says. ‘They say: “If you can get into the Pentagon, you can probably help with my website!” ’

He has also set up his own store on Etsy selling handmade and quirkily hand-painted vases and coasters, under the name Fablicious.

Today, he is a man content, living a quiet life with his long-term partner Lucy, away from the glare of the media spotlight which followed him for a decade.

Surely, Mr Trump, the time has come to remove the threat of arrest and prosecution from your fellow UFO enthusiast?