Ukrainian soldier who filmed 1300-ft UFO over warzone tells his story

A disc-shaped object longer than the height of the Empire State Building emerged from the horizon of Ukraine‘s embattled Donetsk province last Friday, hovering eerily still a mile off the ground, a soldier has told DailyMail.com

That soldier, a drone operator, had cautiously guided his infrared quadcopter 500-feet for a reconnaissance mission, struggling against high winds, when he suddenly spotted the flat, 1,300-foot-long UFO, which stood motionless despite those winds. 

In an interview from the warzone, the soldier, who is with the Ukrainian army’s 406th Battalion, said he and his fellow servicemen had ‘never seen things like this before.’

‘Initially, I thought that it was something new invented by the Russians,’ he added, ‘but then I understood… ‘No! It might be [a] UFO.”

The ‘craft’ was 36 to 54 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than any other object this 406th drone pilot says he has ever tracked in the warzone — ruling out atmospheric phenomena, balloons and known enemy aircraft, he claimed.

‘We were surprised, very surprised,’ the soldier, whose first name is Vadym, recalled via an interpreter.

But Vadym told DailyMail.com that this ‘surprise’ was not quite fear, because he and his fellow soldiers have had to learn to suppress those emotions amid their effort to defend Ukraine from a now two-year-long invasion by Russia. 

‘We got scared on the 24th of February 2022,’ Vadym said. ‘After that, we aren’t scared of anything.’

The 406th’s drone pilot said he’d gotten his craft about ‘a few kilometers’ into its recon mission before spotting the UFO.

‘I looked right and saw this,’ Vadym said.

‘After 30 seconds, we decided to film it. All the emotions we had at that moment, they’re in the video… You you can hear it.’

As Vadym and his fellow 406th unit members scrambled to make sense of the apparent object, their confusion is palpable in the 17-second video, shared exclusively with DailyMail.com this week.

In between the swearing (‘Holy s***’) and the excitement (‘What the f*** is this?’), one member of the battalion asks: ‘Why isn’t it moving?’

Another wonders: ‘Why can’t he fire missiles at us? What do you mean?’

Aside from the object’s unusual heat signature, it appeared to more readily withstand the strong wind, but Vadym told DailyMail.com that no other extreme weather could help explain the unusual sighting.  

‘There was a very strong wind,’ Vadym said. ‘The wind was flowing into the same direction as we were flying basically.’ 

‘But it [the UFO] just stayed at the same place — and the sky was clear,’ he said. ‘So no clouds, nothing.’

‘I use this [infrared, heat vision] filter very often,’ the unit drone operator said, ‘and just got experience so I can differentiate how bright an object should be according to what temperature.’

Based on that experience, Vadym stated that the UFO ‘was very hot. I’m guessing 20 to 30 degrees [Celsius] hotter than other objects.’

Vadym estimated that the roughly 1,300 ft (400 meters) long UFO was also about 328 feet (100 meters) tall. 

The apparent object, craft or phenomena, was caught on the camera of a commercial DJI brand Mavic 3T thermal-imaging drone on February 23, 2024.

The UFO, spotted around 9:02pm local time, appeared to be approximately 37 to 40 miles away from the soldiers, he said, in the direction of Donetsk Oblast, the southeastern Ukrainian province that has been most dominated by Russia’s forces.

Vadym requested that his last name and other key details of the encounter not be disclosed for reasons of operational security amid the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ (UAF) effort to repel the Russian invasion.

But he noted that, while ‘it’s hard to count’ just how many times he has personally flown his unit’s Mavic 3T, it was probably ‘more than 10,000 times.’

‘We’ve seen different things [in the skies],’ he said, adding, ‘We’ve never seen things like this before.’ 

One potential explanation for the UFO was the well-known optical illusion phenomena called ‘Fata Morgana,’ a mirror-like atmospheric mirage produced by a ‘temperature inversion’ of hot air in the upper atmosphere.

But Vadym is adamant that what he saw was real. 

‘It wasn’t a mirage,’ Vadym told DailyMail.com, ‘because in thermal vision you can’t see a mirage. You can see it only with your naked eye.’ 

He continued to explain that the object did not ripple, shimmer or otherwise alter its shape, which would have been a tell-tale sign of a Fata Morgana mirage. 

‘Often, a Fata Morgana changes rapidly,’ as the flight safety guide SKYbrary notes. ‘The mirage comprises several inverted (upside down) and erect (right side up) images that are stacked on top of one another.

But according to Vadym, ‘The object was in a stable form. It wasn’t moving.’

That said, the UFO, whatever it was, wasted no time leaving its perch above Donetsk.

‘At another position, we had another drone and put it up in about three minutes,’ Vadym said, ‘[but] they didn’t see it [the UFO] at that moment.’

‘When we returned to the same position later, there was nothing there.’

This past Tuesday, a spokesperson for Mavic’s manufacturer DJI told DailyMail.com that, while it could not help in explaining what is present in the 406th’s UFO footage, an equipment error could have played a role.

But Vadym noted that he was confident the Mavic 3T’s systems were functioning normally at the time of the encounter. 

The red ‘warning’ or ‘error’ bar visible in the upper left-hand portion of the drone’s display, he said, related to the consumer-grade drone’s GPS navigation.  

‘It is a warning that we were flying without satellites on 100 percent manual controls,’ Vadym told DailyMail.com. 

‘Because Russia does everything they can to deny Ukrainians the ability to fly over and understand […] their plans.’

Vadym noted that similar combat-specific issues prevented the battalion from storing a recording of their UFO thermal-imaging footage directly on the Mavic drone itself.  

‘We remove the memory cards from the drones when we are doing flights over enemy territories,’ Vadym said. 

‘There is a risk that if we lose a drone because of enemy electronic countermeasures, they could pick up the drone, they could pick up the card, and read what’s there.’

When pressed again on how he and his fellow 406th Battalion members felt about the UFO, Vadym said, ‘The best I could say would be that for this video to have never happened, for us [the Ukrainian military] to never have to do the work we do.’

In a better world, Vadym said, the Russian invasion of February 2022 ‘never happened’ and ‘we just use civilian drones to film weddings.’