Kyiv Main Astronomical Observatory UAP Study: "Cosmics" and "Phantoms"

August 2022. Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine was under way. On 23 August, three astronomers posted a preprint to arXiv. Boris Zhilyaev, V.N. Petukhov and V.M. Reshetnyk all listed the Main Astronomical Observatory of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. The title was plain: "Unidentified aerial phenomena I. Observations of events."

The work came from two meteor stations. One in Kyiv. One in the village of Vinarivka, in the south of Kyiv region, about 120 km away. Colour video cameras watched the daytime sky at 50 frames a second or faster, with exposures under a millisecond.

The authors described two kinds of object. The first they called "Cosmics." Luminous objects, brighter than the background of the sky, named after birds: swift, falcon, eagle. Some flickered. "One swift demonstrates regular intensity variations of about 25 Hz," they wrote.

The second kind were "Phantoms." Dark objects, with contrast from several to about 50 per cent. The team described a "completely black body that does not emit and absorbs all the radiation falling on it." By their estimates, phantoms were between 3 and 12 meters across, seen at distances of up to 10 to 12 km, moving as fast as 15 kilometers per second.

"Flights of single, group and squadrons of the ships were detected," the abstract said. One figure caught the moment "the phantom crosses the image of the falcon." Two synchronised cameras, the paper added, had detected a variable object at an altitude of 1170 km, flashing for one hundredth of a second. "We see them everywhere," the authors told Vice.

The story reached the international press in September 2022. On 15 September, Zhilyaev presented the work at the observatory's own Astrophysical Seminar. The verdict: the observations were original, but the processing and interpretation had been done "at an inadequate scientific level and with significant errors in determining the distance of the observed objects." The paper, critics noted, gave no dates.

The Scientific Council went further. The observations had been made in "test mode" during planned meteor observation. Publication "was premature and did not meet the professional requirements for publication." A review for the Academy, as reported by Mick West, called the paper "pseudo-scientific in form and content." Zhilyaev declined to debate. "The broad public interest will not allow me to debate," he told The Debrief.

The distance method sat at the heart of it. The team inferred range from colour, assuming zero albedo. Writing on Metabunk and in Skeptical Inquirer, West argued that zero albedo "does not really occur in nature." He looked at the phantoms and recognised "something I'd seen many times myself: flies." At the claimed distances, the motion implied more than 2,000 g. Close to the camera, about 4 g.

Physicist Avi Loeb offered another reading. Cut the distances tenfold, he argued, and the numbers fit artillery shells. West argued that idea failed on geometry too. Nobody alleged fakery. The dispute was about method. Zhilyaev later answered his critics in a video rebuttal. The objects, he said, were "not birds or insects."

The team kept publishing. A second paper in November 2022 reported two luminous objects at altitudes of 620 and 1130 km, and recast phantoms as oval-shaped objects from 20 to 100 meters. "The authors do not interpret these objects." In 2025, the group reported more than 20 objects near the Moon, filmed from Vinarivka, and experts pointed back to the errors of 2022. Paper I had cited NASA's independent UAP study and the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office. The Kyiv study faces the same question those efforts face. What can a camera alone prove?