British MP Says He Was “Definitely Misled” Over UK’s Five Eyes UFO Cooperation
Written by Christopher Sharp - 29 August 2026
British MP Clive Lewis has said he was “definitely misled” by the Ministry of Defence (MOD) over the United Kingdom’s cooperation with Five Eyes allies on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP).
Lewis, the Labour MP for Norwich South and a former shadow defence secretary, is calling for greater transparency and democratic accountability over the issue.
He made the comments during a conversation with Dr Peter Skafish, co-founder and executive director of the Sol Foundation, a U.S.-based UAP research institute and policy think tank.
Skafish drew attention to questions Lewis had submitted to the MOD about whether Britain was working with the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand - its partners in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance - on UAP.
Skafish said:
“I believe one or two of your questions concerned whether the United Kingdom was working with other Five Eyes governments on the UAP issue - and, in both cases, I believe you received a negative answer.”
Lewis replied:
“Yes, that’s right. And yet we know that’s not the case. I think Five Eyes [members] have openly said they are [working together on the issue].
“So, have I been lied to? I’ve definitely been misled.”
The exchange followed a series of written parliamentary questions Lewis submitted in July and August 2025 about the MOD’s knowledge and investigation of UAP, as well as its involvement in international initiatives.
The initial questions were answered by Luke Pollard, who was then Minister for the Armed Forces and now serves as Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry.
Pollard said that the MOD had not conducted or commissioned any UAP studies since 2013. He also repeated that the department had stopped investigating sightings in 2009 after concluding that none of those reported over more than 50 years had indicated a military threat to the United Kingdom.
But it was Pollard’s answer on international cooperation that drew Lewis’s criticism.
Pollard stated:
‘The Ministry of Defence has not participated in any international groupings specifically focused on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) since May 2023.’
Lewis then asked whether UK cooperation with the Five Eyes UAP Caucus was ongoing.
Rather than answering yes or no, Veterans and People Minister Louise Sandher-Jones referred him back to Pollard’s earlier response.
Those answers sit uneasily alongside a documentary trail showing that British officials had been drawn into Five Eyes UAP coordination over a period of several years.
A Five Eyes Paper Trail Dating Back to 2021
That trail begins with the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, or UAPTF, the U.S. Navy-led body established by the Pentagon in August 2020.
Its mission was to detect, analyse and catalogue UAP that could potentially threaten U.S. national security. The task force was later replaced by what would eventually be known as the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO).
In June 2025, John Greenewald of The Black Vault published U.S. Navy emails showing that an introductory briefing between the UAPTF and Five Eyes representatives was being arranged in late 2021.
Further correspondence was later released in New Zealand following an appeal under the country’s Official Information Act.
The New Zealand material was provided to Liberation Times by Australian UAP researcher Grant Lavac, who has used freedom-of-information requests to trace Five Eyes engagement with UAP and previously brought the official agenda for the May 2023 caucus into the public domain.
The email chain carried the subject line ‘UAPTF Intro (unclassified)’ and described the proposed event as an ‘Introduction for FVEYS Office to UAP Task Force.’
Initially scheduled for 30 November 2021 and later moved to 8 December, the correspondence included British officials Owen Rimmer and Annabelle Janes alongside representatives from Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
Lavac identified Rimmer as a Royal Navy lieutenant commander. Although little additional information about his career is publicly available, the correspondence shows that he acted as the principal UK coordinator for the proposed briefing, forwarding the invitation and serving as a point of contact with U.S. and Five Eyes officials.
Janes is a senior British Army officer with a background in military intelligence and international liaison.
In 2010, while holding the rank of major, she served as a UK exchange officer at the U.S. Army’s National Ground Intelligence Center in Virginia. She was subsequently identified as commanding officer of the British Army’s Land Intelligence Fusion Centre and has since been promoted to colonel. In 2025, she was serving as the British defence attaché to Thailand.
The records establish that Five Eyes officials were coordinating with the UAPTF. They do not show that the briefing took place in 2021: both the New Zealand correspondence and Greenewald’s U.S. records indicate that it was postponed.
Formal meetings were not the only sign of UAP-related intelligence circulating within Five Eyes at the time.
Liberation Times previously reported that an intelligence assessment classified an object engaged by a Royal Air Force Typhoon over Syria in 2021 as UAP.
The alleged drone engaged over Syria by the RAF in December 2021 and later classified as UAP by a Five Eyes Intelligence Report. Photographer unknown. Image courtesy of WEAPONIZED.
The RAF described it as a hostile drone and said it had been destroyed. Journalists Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp, who said they had been exposed to the Five Eyes assessment, stated that it did not confirm the object’s destruction.
The assessment has not been released publicly, so those details cannot be independently verified. The episode nevertheless offers a glimpse of how UAP-related information may have circulated among allies even as the MOD maintained that it no longer investigated the subject.
From a Postponed Briefing to a Formal UAP Caucus
An email supplied to Liberation Times by Lavac confirms that a Five Eyes meeting eventually occurred in 2022.
In the email, sent to another researcher in June 2025, Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough wrote:
‘We don’t comment on the details of meetings with our Five Eyes partners, including which members were in attendance.
‘Please note that the 2022 meeting was with AARO, not the UAPTF. AARO had replaced the UAPTF by then.’
The Pentagon did not identify the countries represented. Since AARO later called the May 2023 gathering its first Five Eyes UAP Working Group, the 2022 event appears to have been an earlier introductory meeting.
Lavac repeatedly asked whether the 2022 engagement was the UAPTF briefing postponed from late 2021, but Gough did not answer.
The UK’s participation is clearer in May 2023.
An official Pentagon agenda shows that the inaugural Five Eyes UAP Caucus Working Group was held on 24 May 2023. The United Kingdom was listed alongside Australia, Canada and New Zealand as one of the partners scheduled to provide a UAP update.
The agenda also looked ahead to possible reporting networks, shared databases, collection planning and further meetings.
As previously reported by Liberation Times, the MOD’s Defence Intelligence Secretariat later confirmed that two of its officials attended. An Information Commissioner’s Office decision also records that confirmation.
The Pentagon subsequently indicated that the discussions continued.
In June 2024, Gough told Liberation Times that AARO ‘continues to discuss areas of mutual interest and concern related to UAP with its FVEY partners.’
Gough did not say whether every Five Eyes country took part in every later discussion. But the MOD’s refusal to answer Lewis’s follow-up leaves Britain’s position unclear.
After the names of Rimmer and Janes emerged, Lavac requested their UAP and Five Eyes-related correspondence from the MOD.
In a response dated 31 July 2025, the MOD refused to confirm or deny whether it held relevant records, citing national security, defence, security bodies and international relations.
The MOD stressed that its refusal did not prove the records existed, although it referred to Britain’s work with international partners on ‘collaborative joint defence matters.’
The evidence requires a careful distinction. The 2021 and 2022 material does not directly contradict Pollard’s answer, which concerned participation after May 2023. Nor does the Pentagon’s 2024 statement establish that Britain took part in every subsequent discussion.
What the record does show is that British officials were involved before and during the May 2023 caucus, that AARO later described discussions with Five Eyes partners as continuing, and that the MOD declined to say whether the United Kingdom remained involved.
Australia’s Contradictory Account
The transparency questions raised by Lewis are not confined to Britain. Australia has faced its own contradictions over the same May 2023 meeting.
On 19 July 2023, the Australian Department of Defence responded to a Question on Notice from then Greens senator Peter Whish-Wilson by categorically denying that Australia had attended AARO’s UAP briefing in May 2023.
The denial was clear and unambiguous. Yet on 15 December 2023, less than six months later, the department reversed its position and acknowledged that a defence representative from the Australian Embassy in Washington, D.C., had attended the inaugural AARO Five Eyes UAP Caucus Working Group briefing.
It also confirmed that Australia had not merely observed the meeting, but had actively presented at it.
The inconsistency followed an earlier exchange over UAP discussions with the United States.
On 17 May 2022, during the first U.S. congressional hearing on UAP in more than half a century, Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott Bray testified that the Pentagon had brought allies and international partners into its discussions.
Six months later, on 9 November 2022, Senator Whish-Wilson questioned then Chief of Air Force Air Marshal Robert Chipman during Senate Estimates.
In light of Australia’s close defence relationship with the United States, the senator asked whether Australian intelligence or the Air Force had participated in those discussions.
Chipman said he was not aware of any formal discussions with the United States and that such matters would have crossed his desk if they had occurred.
Yet Australian officials had already been included in preparations for the late-2021 Five Eyes briefing, although the records indicate that it was postponed. The Pentagon has also confirmed that a Five Eyes meeting was held with AARO in 2022, but has not identified the countries represented.
Lavac told Liberation Times that the lack of transparency was "very concerning".
Lavac added:
"The Chief of Air Force leads all discussions on UAP in Australia when called before a Senate estimates, so if there's one person that needs to know what is happening on the UAP topic in an Australian context and our discussions with allies, it's him."
"He was either completely uninformed due to a complete lack of intelligence sharing, or there's a high-degree of incompetence, or it's something more sinister like plausible deniability or deliberate obfuscation. Any one of those scenarios are of great concern. What confidence can Australian taxpayers have that their elected representatives are going to have their pertinent questions answered truthfully and accurately by those in positions of authority in the Australian Department of Defence?"
Against that wider Five Eyes backdrop, Lewis is seeking to bring the unresolved question of Britain’s involvement under closer scrutiny in the House of Commons.
“We’re a Democracy Too”
Although UFOs and UAP have periodically surfaced in Parliament, some of the most prominent interventions have come from the House of Lords, including a dedicated debate in 1979 and an exchange initiated by Lord Sarfraz in 2021. Sustained engagement from elected MPs remains rare.
Lewis is therefore a notable exception, particularly given his experience as a former shadow defence secretary and a British Army infantry officer who served in Afghanistan.
However, Lewis is cautious about what UAP may represent and does not assert that they are of non-human origin.
Lewis said:
“I don’t make a public judgement on whether UAP are real, whether the technology exists or whether we have been visited by non-human intelligence.
“I just think there is a discrepancy in what we’re being told, and I think the British public have a right to know.
“The U.S. public seem to be hearing things that we should also be hearing here in the United Kingdom. We’re a democracy too.”
He added:
“The approach I take in the United Kingdom is that, whether UAP exist or not, you can already see from what’s coming out in the United States that there are contradictions which need to be dealt with.
“At some point, someone somewhere in my government, or one of the institutions around it, has decided that the British public should not hear about this. As a parliamentarian, I have an issue with that.
“I accept there are some things which are classified for good reason that I don’t need to know about.
“But when we look back through history, there are many things governments did not need to hide. They were concealed not because of the security of the realm, but because they represented inconvenient truths.”
For Lewis, the unresolved question is not what UAP ultimately represent, but whether the government has given Parliament and the British public a candid account of the country’s involvement.
