A strange infrared recording from the war in Ukraine has reopened an increasingly serious military question: when soldiers encounter an aircraft they cannot identify, are they looking at an enemy weapon, a friendly classified system, or something genuinely outside the known inventory?

In May 2026, Ukrainian electronic-warfare and drone specialist Serhiy "Flash" Beskrestnov published footage that he said had been recorded by Ukrainian military personnel in May 2025 at an altitude of approximately 800 meters.

Beskrestnov did not claim that the object was extraterrestrial. His original comments made the opposite point: unidentified flying objects have become a national-security issue because an apparently inexplicable aircraft could turn out to be an undisclosed weapon.

He said Ukrainian forces had developed a formal document dealing with unidentified aerial observations and encouraged military personnel who obtained relevant footage to submit it for examination.

Kyiv Post subsequently described the infrared target as a rounded object surrounded by six pointed projections, with an apparent central heat source and a warmer plume or cloud extending behind it. The object appears to move slowly or hover while an observation drone's camera changes orientation. No obvious aerodynamic surfaces, conventional fuselage or familiar aircraft configuration can be established from the publicly released recording.

That makes the footage unusual. It does not make it extraterrestrial.

A Russian Experimental System Is an Obvious Possibility

The simplest military explanation is that Ukrainian forces encountered a Russian system they had not previously identified.

Ukraine has become perhaps the world's most intensive testing ground for unmanned warfare. Russian forces have continuously modified reconnaissance drones, FPV aircraft, one-way attack systems, communications links, electronic-warfare equipment and decoy aircraft throughout the war.

Reuters reported as early as 2024 that Russia had begun introducing previously unfamiliar inexpensive drones designed to locate Ukrainian air defenses and act as decoys. Some operated around 1,000 meters altitude and incorporated cameras and cellular communications.

The pace of development has only accelerated. The Royal United Services Institute documented increasingly sophisticated Russian integration of drones, electronic intelligence, fiber-optic control systems, jamming and layered reconnaissance by 2025.

Beskrestnov himself emphasized this possibility. In his original Telegram post, he argued that what gets classified as a UFO could actually conceal "a new weapon" belonging to Ukraine's opponent.

There is therefore nothing extraordinary about Ukrainian troops encountering an unfamiliar Russian aircraft.

What is unusual is its appearance.

If the six-pointed geometry is physically real, it does not closely resemble Russia's widely documented Shahed/Geran drones, Lancet loitering munitions or conventional reconnaissance UAVs. That could indicate an experimental design, specialized payload or entirely different platform.

But there is another problem: the six projections may not actually exist.

The "Star" Could Partly Be Created by the Camera

Infrared imagery should not automatically be interpreted as an ordinary photograph.

Bright thermal targets can produce optical diffraction, detector saturation, blooming and processing artifacts that change the apparent size and geometry of an object. Research involving military infrared focal-plane arrays has specifically documented blooming and diffraction effects when sensors encounter sufficiently intense sources.

Thermal-camera manufacturer Teledyne FLIR also notes that small aerial targets captured with limited pixels provide very little reliable shape information. At only a few pixels across, fine structural details disappear and classification becomes dependent primarily on gross contrast, movement and thermal signature.

This matters because the Ukrainian object's striking "star" configuration may therefore represent a combination of an actual hot target and the optical characteristics of the camera.

If that is the case, analysts may be trying to identify an aircraft based on a silhouette the aircraft never physically possessed.

The Pentagon Recorded Something Strangely Similar in 2013

The Ukrainian footage became more interesting after the Pentagon released a separate infrared recording designated DOW-UAP-PR38.

That footage was collected by a U.S. Central Command platform somewhere in the Middle East in 2013.

The Pentagon describes the target simply as an area of infrared contrast "resembling an eight-pointed star with arms of alternating length." During the recording, it moves through the sensor's field of view with what appears to be a visible trail. The camera zooms toward it before the target eventually leaves the frame.

AARO has not publicly identified it.

There is also remarkably little contextual information. According to the Pentagon, the original reporter provided no written or oral description of the observation. The released material does not publicly establish the object's dimensions, range, propulsion system or precise velocity.

The similarity between the 2013 and Ukrainian imagery is therefore worth examining, but it should not be overstated.

Two infrared cameras producing star-shaped images do not necessarily mean they recorded the same technology. They might instead have recorded different heat sources creating similar optical artifacts.

That distinction is critical.

Could It Be American Technology?

The possibility of an American or Western system should not automatically be dismissed either.

Ukraine has operated numerous U.S.-supplied unmanned aircraft since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, including systems whose exact capabilities were deliberately withheld from the public.

One example is the Phoenix Ghost tactical unmanned aircraft. When the Pentagon announced its deployment to Ukraine in 2022, officials openly said that detailed parameters and specifications would not be released for classification reasons.

The United States eventually committed large numbers of Phoenix Ghost systems to Ukraine. By early 2023, Pentagon documentation listed approximately 1,800 of them among American military assistance.

That does not mean the object in the Ukrainian video is a Phoenix Ghost. Its appearance provides no basis for making that identification.

The important point is broader: classified and semi-classified American unmanned systems have operated inside Ukrainian airspace. Other Western reconnaissance, electronic-warfare and experimental technologies may also have characteristics that are not publicly documented.

A friendly or allied aircraft could therefore theoretically be misidentified by a Ukrainian unit that had not been briefed on its presence.

Modern battlefields make this surprisingly possible. CSIS researchers have noted that drone fratricide, one military unit mistaking another friendly drone for a hostile system, is a recurring problem for both Russian and Ukrainian forces because individual units do not always know what other units are operating overhead.

American origin remains speculative, but it cannot be eliminated simply because the observers were Ukrainian.

Then There Is the Genuine UAP Possibility

There is finally the possibility that the object is genuinely anomalous.

That statement requires careful definition.

"UAP" does not mean extraterrestrial spacecraft. It means that available evidence has not established what an observed phenomenon actually was.

By that standard, the Ukrainian target presently qualifies.

The public footage does not provide the data required to determine its dimensions, range, exact speed, material composition or propulsion mechanism. There is no publicly available radar track, multiple-angle imagery, recovered hardware or independent sensor package conclusively identifying it.

The Pentagon faces the same problem with many American UAP cases.

AARO's Fiscal Year 2025 report recorded 319 new UAP reports. Investigators resolved 114 as conventional objects such as balloons, birds, satellites, aircraft and drones. Another 191 cases were placed in an active archive because there was insufficient information to determine whether the events represented natural phenomena or technology beyond the known state of the art. Nine reports were considered worthy of additional technical analysis.

Crucially, AARO reported that none of the cases it successfully resolved demonstrated breakthrough foreign technology.

NASA has reached a similarly cautious conclusion: there is currently no conclusive scientific evidence establishing an extraterrestrial origin for UAP, but poor and incomplete observational data frequently prevents definitive identification.

That is precisely where the Ukrainian footage currently sits.

It could be Russian.

It could ultimately prove to be Ukrainian, American or another allied system.

Its strange geometry could largely be an infrared-camera artifact surrounding an otherwise conventional aircraft.

Or the underlying object could remain genuinely unidentified after those explanations are tested.

The most important evidence is therefore not the apparent six-pointed shape. It would be the original uncompressed recording, sensor specifications, range information, flight telemetry, radar observations, electronic-warfare data and additional recordings from other platforms.

Until those become available, calling the object a UAP is justified.

Calling it alien technology is not.

But identifying unknown aircraft over an active war zone is more than a UFO curiosity. If something can enter heavily monitored Ukrainian airspace, remain unrecognized by experienced drone operators and leave behind imagery resembling another unresolved military observation recorded thousands of kilometers away more than a decade earlier, determining what produced those images is a legitimate intelligence problem.