The 57-year-old ended up in hot water after hacking NASA’s computers where he claimed to have found evidence of UFOs.

McKinnon, who suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome, became the focus of a trans-Atlantic legal battle when he was caught hacking into NASA files in an effort to find evidence of UFOs back in 2002.

At the time, the US had wanted to extradite him from the UK to face trial for his crimes – a move which would have likely seen him sentenced to as many as 70 years in prison.

After a great deal of legal wrangling, however, the extradition order was blocked by the UK.

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These days McKinnon keeps a low profile, however he does still speak out about what happened and in particular, exactly what it was he found while browsing through sensitive government files.

More recently, he has criticized NASA’s claim that it had found no evidence of alien visitors because he believes that he had actually found such evidence himself in the space agency’s systems during the hack.

“As usual, they said nothing, on balance,” he said. “And when pressed they just repeated their non-committal statement.”

“We’ll never get any truth from military institutions, which NASA is, regardless of the fact that it pretends to be a civilian institution.”

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McKinnon maintains that he found a photograph of a strange cigar-shaped craft on NASA’s computers, as well as satellite images and lists of ‘non-terrestrial officers’.

“It’s a fact that there are objects we don’t understand flying around in our skies, it’s also a fact that there are scientific, intelligence and military departments that study these objects,” he said at the time.