'Cosmic' and 'phantom' UFOs are all over Ukraine's skies, government report claims

Astronomers observed dozens of objects that "cannot be scientifically identified."

Night sky over Kyiv, Ukraine, 2020. (Image credit: Getty)

The skies over Kyiv are swarming with unidentified flying objects (UFOs), according to a new report from the Main Astronomical Observatory of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

Of course, given that Russia and Ukraine have been locked in a months-long war that relies heavily on aircraft and drones, it's likely that many of these so-called UFOs are military tools that appear too fleetingly to identify, a U.S. intelligence agency has speculated.

Published to the preprint database arXiv, the report — which has not yet been peer-reviewed — describes recent steps that Ukrainian astronomers have taken to monitor fast-moving, low-visibility objects in the daytime sky over Kyiv and the surrounding villages. Using specially calibrated cameras at two weather stations in Kyiv and Vinarivka, a village about 75 miles (120 kilometers) to the south, astronomers observed dozens of objects "that cannot scientifically be identified as known natural phenomena," the report said. Government agencies tend to refer to such objects as UAP, short for "unidentified aerial phenomena."