Ukraine.Ukraine · UAP study by the Main Astronomical Observatory (MAO/NASU)

In 2022, amid the war following the Russian invasion, a team from the Main Astronomical Observatory (MAO) of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (NASU) —led by B. E. Zhilyaev, with V. N. Petukhov and V. M. Reshetnyk— released on arXiv two papers titled 'Unidentified aerial phenomena I. Observations of events' and 'II. Evaluation of UAP properties'. The work described daytime-sky observations over Kyiv made with two meteor stations —one in Kyiv and one in the village of Vinarivka to the south, with a baseline of about 120 km— fitted with video cameras. A key contextual point is that these data were not taken in a dedicated UAP campaign but in 'test mode' during scheduled meteor observations; the team then applied a 'special observation technique' to detect and characterize objects crossing the field at high angular velocity.

The authors proposed their own taxonomy: 'Cosmics', luminous objects brighter than the sky background (which they named after birds —swift, falcon, eagle), and 'Phantoms', dark objects with contrast up to ~50%. They reported striking figures: a luminous object in the troposphere at 2.6 km altitude, moving at Mach 2.3 with a size of ~6 m, and 'Phantoms' at distances of up to 10-12 km, between 3 and 12 m, with speeds of up to 15 km/s. They posted the preprints without the observatory itself having reviewed or internally discussed them before publication.

The corpus framing is explicitly skeptical about the phenomenon. The National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine itself concluded a review and officially discredited the report as unprofessional and lacking scientific rigor: the processing and interpretation had been done at an inadequate level and with significant errors in determining the distances to the objects. The most cited skeptical analysis is by Harvard physicist Avi Loeb, who showed the problem is geometric: the authors likely overestimated distances by up to a factor of ten, and because speed and size are derived from that distance, the error inflates them spuriously. If the 'Phantoms' were ten times closer to the camera than assumed, their size and speed suddenly match those of an artillery shell —objects entirely expected over Kyiv in 2022. Other analysts (Skeptical Inquirer, Live Science, Snopes) agreed that what was observed is consistent with birds, insects, ordnance or nearby artifacts mistaken for distant, fast objects. What anchors the case is not the phenomenon —almost certainly mundane— but the complete institutional episode: a national academy observatory publishing a study dedicated to UAP, and that same academy issuing a public correction. It is science self-correcting in the open record.

Ukraine's first record and a case of methodological, not phenomenological, value: an observatory of the National Academy of Sciences published a dedicated UAP study with its own instrumental technique, and the same academy publicly discredited it for distance errors. It is included —like Morocco 1976 or Ireland 2018— for the documented institutional episode, and because it illustrates the opposite of a cover-up: open correction. It is a reminder that 'institutions looking at the sky' does not equal 'confirmed anomaly'. The case also teaches how false positives are born in this field: a wrong distance estimate propagates its error into speed and size, so a nearby, slow object —a bird, an insect, a shell— becomes, on paper, something fast and large that no known technology would explain. The methodological lesson of Loeb's correction is transferable to much of the casework: without an independently measured distance, almost anything looks anomalous.