UK Lawmaker Says Government Misled Him on UFOs

A member of the British Parliament is telling the public he was misled by his own government over UFOs. Clive Lewis, the Labour MP for Norwich South and a former BBC political reporter who also served as an army officer in Afghanistan, filed formal written questions with the Ministry of Defence, the UK equivalent of the Department of Defense. In an interview with the Sol Foundation, Lewis explained that he asked three things, what information the department holds on UAP, whether it joins any international group focused on the subject, and whether it has run or paid for any studies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-A9w0aksfE

According to the department’s response, no reported sighting in over fifty years has shown a military threat to the UK, and it stopped investigating UAP reports in 2009, with its files up to that point sent to the National Archives. The Ministry also stated it has not joined any international group focused on UAP since May 2023 and has not conducted or commissioned any studies. Lewis did not accept that answer. As he referenced, the United States has already pointed to allied coordination. In May 2023, AARO, the Pentagon’s UAP office, held its first Five Eyes forum, and released records show the UK, Canada, and New Zealand each gave updates on their own UAP work. When asked about that meeting at the time, the Ministry of Defence declined to comment, citing intelligence policy, yet it later told Lewis there had been no such coordination since May 2023, the same window the forum was revealed. Washington describes allied coordination, London says there is none, and both cannot be true.

AARO

Lewis suggested the topic may not sit with the Ministry of Defence at all, but with the intelligence services, meaning an agency like MI6. He noted the United States appears to work this way, where the subject is often handled by intelligence agencies rather than the military under separate rules, meaning a military denial can be truthful and still hide the full picture. Notably, Lewis pressed hard on transparency but stopped short of saying whether he believes the UFO phenomenon is real. His point was narrower, that there is a discrepancy in what the public is being told, and that British citizens deserve the same information the American public receives.

That gap between what governments say and what they know is not new. According to reporter Ben Schreckinger, who has spent about a year researching UFOs, the core claim stretches back decades before recent headlines. He references while on Breaking Points a 1950s memo by Canadian government engineer Wilbert Smith, which reported that US officials treated flying saucers as real and rated the subject above the hydrogen bomb in secrecy, and a 1972 conclusion by Australian intelligence analyst Harry Turner that the US was quietly studying recovered craft. Schreckinger cautions that each analyst may have been handed the same cover story to hide an ordinary human program, leaving two possibilities, that governments held something extraordinary, or that trained intelligence officers were fooled the same way across generations. He is currently investigating what militaries can do with plasma physics, the study of superheated charged gas, which he expects to be part of the answer but not all of it.

Schreckinger also fact-checked a widely shared claim. In the Age of Disclosure documentary, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper spoke about strange activity over Area 51, which many treated as a major admission. According to Schreckinger, Clapper’s own attorney clarified that the director was referring to 1980s stealth aircraft testing, an answer Schreckinger felt added little clarity while not fully closing the door. 

James Clapper

He also suggested the ‘UAP label’ can serve as cover for classified programs, pointing to the late 2024 New Jersey drone sightings that faded from coverage shortly before Ukraine ran a complex drone operation inside Russia. What is clear is where this work now happens. The Galileo Project at Harvard is building instruments to study these objects with hard data, and the University at Albany received a major endowment gift to fund UAP physics through an effort called UAlbany Project X, led by physicist Kevin Knuth. With efforts also underway in Europe and Japan, none of this proves where the objects come from, but the questions have plainly moved from message boards into parliaments, journals, and university labs.

Sources

Breaking Points. (2026, August 27). Recovered UFOs? Traditional journalist goes all in on UAP mysteries [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7LnZ1k2tmE

Hanks, M. (2025, December 2). “UAlbany Project X”: How a team of New York physicists is launching a cutting-edge investigation into aerial mysteries. The Debrief. https://thedebrief.org/ualbany-project-x-how-a-team-of-new-york-physicists-is-launching-a-cutting-edge-investigation-into-aerial-mysteries/

Sharp, C. (2023, August 4). The UK’s Ministry of Defence denies knowledge of UFO retrieval programs. Liberation Times. https://www.liberationtimes.com/home/the-uks-ministry-of-defence-denies-knowledge-of-ufo-retrieval-programs

The Sol Foundation. (2026, August 27). British Member of Parliament Clive Lewis goes public on UFOs | The Sol Forum [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoUr0rsb7rU