KIEV, Ukraine — A haunting, abandoned amusement park. The tarnished Soviet hammer and sickle emblem atop an empty apartment complex. A forest rising from the cracks of a city square. Not a soul in sight.

It's a sprawling, decaying landscape overgrown with vegetation, a ghost city frozen in time.

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Such is the view from a drone hovering over Ukraine's Chernobyl and the deserted city of Pripyat, home to one of the world's worst nuclear disasters.

Danny Cooke, a British filmmaker, captured the incredible aerial footage during a visit earlier this year while on assignment with CBS News' 60 Minutes to the nearly 1,000-square-mile radioactive area known as the Chernobyl exclusion zone.

The result is a three-minute video titled "Postcards from Pripyat, Chernobyl" that takes viewers above and inside the eerie, abandoned city. The drone sweeps over an empty and decrepit swimming pool inside a recreation center before making its way down the halls of a school, and into classrooms where students' notebooks are strewn across the floors.

Pripyat, the so-called "ghost city," was once home to some 50,000 residents before they fled after reactor no. 4 at the nearby Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded, killing 31 people, and spewed a cloud of radioactive dust into the air that spread across much of Europe.

Gas masks strewn across the floor of the school cafeteria. A cash register and sinks for hand-washing can be seen in the background.

The catastrophe occurred on April 26, 1986, and has been called the worst nuclear power plant accident in history. The Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011 is the only other nuclear event to be classified as a level 7 event on the International Nuclear Event Scale. The amount of radiation released into the atmosphere that spring day was 400 times that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

The swimming pool inside one of Pripyat's recreation centers.

The fallout from the catastrophe has had lasting adverse health effects for thousands of people. There has been an extreme increase in rare cancers and other conditions found in those living in and near the zone, as a result of the radiation, as well as among the thousands of workers tasked with cleaning up the site.

Meanwhile, without the presence of humans, the environment has thrived, with plant life sprouting from the cracks in the city's pavement and buildings. Animal life, too, has experienced a resurgence. Radioactive boars and feral dogs roam free throughout the zone. Catfish have grown over 6 feet long in the stream, leading to the power plant's cooling ponds. Just this week, scientists captured what is believed to be the first image of a brown bear in the Chernobyl area after a century-long absence, according to the BBC.

The Hotel Polissya, once a fixture of Pripyat's central square, has been taken over by vegetation in the 28 years it has been left abandoned.

"During my stay, I met so many amazing people, one of whom was my guide Yevgen, also known as a 'Stalker,'" Cooke explains in the video's description, referring the men who sneak inside the zone to gather scrap metal and discarded possessions, or who simply enjoy the zone's strange beauty.

"We spent the week together exploring Chernobyl and the nearby abandoned city of Pripyat. There was something serene, yet highly disturbing about this place. Time has stood still, and there are memories of past happenings floating around us."

Cooke used a DJI Phantom 2 drone and a Canon 7D for his video. "Armed with a camera and a dosimeter geiger counter, I explored," he says.

Today, visitors may obtain passes for daylong excursions inside the exclusion zone and the city of Pripyat. The only others allowed inside are workers who are constructing a "New Safe Confinement" over top of the crumbling sarcophagus that was hastily erected around the exploded reactor after the disaster, which continues to leak radiation. They work on rotation, spending a limited number of hours there each month. Scientists estimate that the area will remain contaminated for another 20,000 years.