Cosmics and Phantoms Over Kyiv

In September 2022, researchers at the Main Astronomical Observatory of Ukraine's National Academy of Sciences released a paper describing dozens of objects observed over Kyiv and the village of Vinarivka, about 120 kilometres to the south, that they said could not be identified as known natural phenomena. 13

The method is what makes this worth attention. Rather than collecting eyewitness reports, the team ran specially calibrated cameras at two weather stations, at high frame rates, with a colour-difference technique for separating objects from background sky. 16

They sorted what they caught into two classes. *Cosmics* — luminous objects brighter than the sky behind them. *Phantoms* — dark objects, showing contrast from a few per cent to about fifty per cent against the background. 15 Phantoms were estimated at three to twelve metres in size, with speeds reported up to 15 kilometres per second. 1

The enormous caveat

That velocity figure is where the paper stops being straightforward. Speed derived from angular motion depends entirely on the assumed distance to the object, and the distances were not independently measured. If the range estimate is wrong, the speed is wrong by the same factor.

The paper was posted to arXiv and had not been peer reviewed. 14 And the observations were made over a country at war, in airspace saturated with drones, munitions and military aircraft moving too fast to identify in a single frame. 1 Skeptical analysts argued the results were most consistent with birds and insects close to the camera, misjudged as distant objects. 7

This is the best-instrumented UAP dataset in the public record and it still cannot answer the basic question, because the instruments could not measure range. Everything in this field runs into that wall.

Why it still counts

Because it is a working template. The Ukrainian group did what NASA's panel would recommend a year later: put calibrated sensors on the sky, publish the data, invite the argument.

They also kept going. A follow-up paper characterising dark UAPs appeared in 2025, extending the analysis. 8 Whatever the phantoms turn out to be, the approach — instruments, published methods, falsifiable claims — is the only one that has ever settled anything.