The Daily Mail and Newsweek report that a Mavic 3T thermal-imaging (TI) drone was being used by a unit of Ukraine’s 406th Artillery Brigade to carry out nighttime frontline surveillance on Wednesday when it captured images of a strange, silent, disc-shaped object.
The footage recorded by the drone was posted on X/Twitter by the milblogger @albafella, who regularly provides updates on the ongoing war in Ukraine, and the RealWar Telegram channel.
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The operators of the drone can be heard asking “What the f**k is this? Why isn’t it moving?” as they observe the object apparently hovering over the battlefield.
“It is staying in place on the screen. Zoom in more,” one of the troops says.
“Can’t you see it’s standing still?”
“I’m telling you, it’s a UFO, for sure. It’s staying in place, on the screen,” another soldier says.
One member of the drone team joked that “maybe we should ram it.”
The Mavic drone is a quadcopter that weighs just over a kilogram when all sensors are loaded with a flight time of about 40 minutes and a control range of around 15 kilometers. The drone involved in this incident is one of over 300 TI drones used by the Ukrainian Armed Forces (AFU) to carry out reconnaissance and target acquisition, many provided by funds raised by organizations, such as the DeepInspire Foundation or by individual initiatives.
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Experts, cited by the Daily Mail say that it is impossible to estimate the size, shape and height above ground level (AGL) of the object but based on the drone’s altitude of about 150 meters (500 feet) suggests a large object around 50 kilometers (30 miles) away.
The temperature of the UAP/UFO, as indicated by the readout on the TI drones control station, shows it as being warmer than its surroundings – “black hot” in drone user’s jargon. A red error message is flashing on the control interface at the time of the sighting which casts some doubt on the details provided in the experts’ interpretation.
A spokesperson for DJI, the Chinese manufacturer of the Mavic drone, told the Daily Mail that it couldn't explain the images but suggested that an equipment error could have played a role.
This is not the first time that strange objects or phenomena have been reported in the skies above Ukraine since the start of the war with Russia.
In September 2022 Kyiv’s Main Astronomical Observatory produced a report cataloging several UAP that could not be attributed to any military action at the time. A spokesman said “We see them everywhere. We observe a significant number of objects whose nature is not clear.”
Reuters reported that video clips posted overnight on social media in April 2023, showed the night sky over Kyiv being suddenly lit up by a bright light and a flaming object crashing to the ground. At the time Yuriy Ihnat, spokesperson for the Ukrainian Air Force, suggested it was a meteorite while Andriy Yermak, head of the presidential office, jokingly posted an emoji of a UFO on Telegram.
Ukraine’s 406th Artillery Brigade is a naval artillery unit originally formed in 2015. It is equipped with American-made M777 155mm towed howitzers and a range of Soviet-era 152 mm guns firing conventional, cluster and extended-range artillery munitions such as the M982 Excalibur.
The expert says the object looks a lot like an object that came to be known as the “Baghdad Phantom” after being detected by the TI camera on a US Air Force Reaper drone in Iraq in May 2022.
A similar UAP was reported by the Russian news site Lenta.ru to have been seen flying close to a nuclear power plant near Russia’s St. Petersburg, triggering a “special response status.”
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