Churchill's Alleged UFO Cover-Up: The RAF Reconnaissance Plane Encounter

August 2010. The National Archives released about 5,000 pages of Ministry of Defence UFO files covering 1995 to 2003. Among them was a letter sent to the MoD in 1999. The writer's name was blacked out. The press called him a scientist. Brett Holman, reading the files, describes an astrophysicist in Leicester who worked on software for spacecraft thermal engineering.

His story reached back more than half a century. His late grandfather, he wrote, was an RAF officer who was "part of the personal bodyguard" of Winston Churchill. The grandfather died in 1973. He had told only one person. His then nine-year-old daughter.

An RAF reconnaissance aircraft was returning "from either France or Germany." The encounter "occurred close to or over the English coastline." Nobody saw it coming. "The observed object was undetected until it was close to the aircraft." Then it was there, at the side of the plane, at very high speed. It "very rapidly matched its speed with that of the aircraft."

It appeared metallic. For a time it seemed to "hover" noiselessly beside them. Then it "very suddenly disappeared, leaving no trace of its earlier presence." In the press versions, the crew photographed it. No photograph has ever turned up.

The grandfather, the letter said, was in the room when Churchill and US General Dwight D. Eisenhower discussed the incident. Churchill's reported words travelled the world: "This event should be immediately classified since it would create mass panic amongst the general population and destroy one's belief in the Church." He is also said to have ordered it classified "for at least 50 years and its status reviewed by a future Prime Minister."

Newspapers everywhere ran it as "Churchill ordered UFO cover-up." Yet MoD records staff had already looked in 1999. They found "no records of such a meeting between Churchill and Eisenhower" and no written record of the incident. The Cabinet Office confirmed there were "no closed files relating to Churchill and UFOs."

There is a genuine Churchill UFO document. On 28 July 1952, during the Washington, D.C. sightings wave, he sent a minute to Lord De L'Isle and Lord Cherwell. "What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to? What can it mean? What is the truth?" The Air Ministry replied on 9 August 1952, blaming misidentifications, illusions, delusions and hoaxes. It shows Churchill asking questions. It is not evidence of a wartime cover-up.

David Clarke of Sheffield Hallam University, who worked with The National Archives on the releases, wrote a rebuttal titled "Churchill did not 'order a UFO cover-up'". He calls it a friend-of-a-friend tale, passed along by word of mouth for about 50 years. The mother recalled it after watching a TV programme about wartime foo fighter sightings. Clarke allows a possible "grain of truth", since the core resembles other reports from Allied aircrew. But nothing suggests it "would have been briefed to the highest levels".

Holman was blunter. "It's only hearsay." A crew inside a multi-engined aircraft could not know the object was silent. Reconnaissance cameras were fixed in the airframe. Wartime secrecy was automatic. The first letter's "arrow-shaped" object was withdrawn in a later one. His verdict: "somewhere down the line a leg was being pulled." In 2025, Joe Oliver of the Churchill Bulletin called the story "astonishingly unsubstantiated". Still, a prime minister, a general and a silent object over the coast make a story that will not quite go away.