Ukrainian Drone Crew Films Hovering Disc on Thermal Camera

Over the front line in Ukraine, soldiers fly drones at night with thermal cameras. In the Spring 2026 special issue of CTX, a journal of the Naval Postgraduate School devoted to unidentified anomalous phenomena, two researchers from the Defense Intelligence Research Institute in Kyiv catalogued what Ukrainian forces had recorded. Artem Bilyk and Kyrylo Nikolaiev listed one entry under 24 February 2024. A single object. Disc or cigar shaped. Hovering.

It was night. The Daily Mail reportedly gave the time as about 9:02 pm on 23 February. A drone crew of the 406th Artillery Brigade had a DJI Mavic 3T in the air on reconnaissance. Its camera was set to black hot.

Then something appeared on the screen. A flat body, warmer than everything around it. It did not move. "Why isn't it moving?" one soldier asks. "It is staying in place on the screen. Zoom in more." Another is certain: "I'm telling you, it's a UFO, for sure." Someone wonders: "Maybe ram it?" No sound was recorded. A red error message flashed on the controller.

The clip surfaced on X on 28 February 2024. Soon it was everywhere.

The pilot, named only as Vadym, spoke to DailyMail.com. He said the object emerged from the horizon and hovered motionless. His first thought was a new Russian weapon. Then he considered a UFO. He guessed it was "20 to 30 degrees [Celsius] hotter than other objects." He described it as about 400 m long and 100 m tall, longer than the height of the Empire State Building. Experts cited by the Daily Mail placed it about 50 km away.

He rejected the idea of a mirage. "It wasn't a mirage," he said. In thermal vision, he explained, you can't see one.

Bilyk and Nikolaiev gave the object a size of 26.4 to 32.4 m, a velocity of 0 m/s and an altitude of 105 m. They classed it as UAP for its "large size, unusual shape, and hovering." No source states outright that this entry is the viral clip. Yet the sensor, the behaviour and the dates line up. The 105 m figure also matches the drone's own on-screen height above take-off. If so, it describes the drone, not the object. CTX notes that it is not an official Department of Defense publication.

DJI could not explain the images, but a spokesperson suggested an equipment error may have played a role. Viewers raised a Fata Morgana. Apostrophe answered that a mirage keeps changing its image, and this one did not. Experts compared the shape to the Baghdad Phantom, a thermal detection by a US Reaper over Iraq in May 2022.

On Metabunk, Mick West suggested a distant ship or a cloud. Others proposed a capsized vessel, a greenhouse reflection, a hill, valley mist or residual heat. One user placed the drone near Kherson from its telemetry, though West warned the gimbal readings were highly unreliable. The pilot spoke of Donetsk Oblast. Neither location has been confirmed.

The footage ran in the Daily Mail, Newsweek, the Kyiv Post, WION and many other outlets. In 2026 the Kyiv Post reported that Serhiy "Flash" Beskrestnov, a Ministry of Defence adviser on drones, said the Armed Forces hold a classified document on UFO sightings by troops. "With the beginning of the war, the study of UFOs in our space became more of a military task than a civilian one," he said. The shape on that thermal screen still has no confirmed explanation.