Relative to the collaborative task requirements of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms under strong electromagnetic interference, an energy efficient optimization routing algorithm for wireless ultraviolet cooperative UAV swarms is proposed. The proposed algorithm exploits the advantages of the ultraviolet scattering communication to maximize the air operation time of the UAV and the efficiency of mission completion. The proposed algorithm improves the threshold of the candidate cluster head selection of non-uniform clustering algorithm by introducing distance and energy. In the inter-cluster communication process, cluster head nodes can select the optimum data transmission route to forward the information to the lead UAV. Compared to LEACH and EEUC, the simulation results reveal that the proposed algorithm increases the energy efficiency of the UAV network by 21.02% and 3.92%, respectively. Moreover, the lifetime of the network is extended by 23.5% and 5.6%, respectively. Therefore, the proposed algorithm can efficiently balance the energy consumption of the nodes and extend the lifetime of the UAV swarms.