It's tempting to believe, isn't it? Our mortal enemies in the Islamic State are so primordial, so primitive, so twisted that they have sex with barnyard animals. As evidenced by this drone video! Except it's bogus. Here's why.

Having bubbled up from the sulfurous fever swamps of the internet this week, the mysterious infrared videorecording above was found by such reputable news outlets as the Sunday World tabloid and the Deccan Chronicle. Its purported revelation: "Coalition drone catches ISIS member in a compromising position with a donkey."

It sure looks like a guy doing sexual things to that donkey. And wouldn't that be a hoot! Islamist radical puritans caught hypocritically practicing bestiality! Heck, in a weird way, it could be interpreted to vindicate our creepy drone snoopin'. Some regional and conflict commentators got a little excited about the discovery:

FYI Drones have found an ISIS member having sex with a goat http://t.co/PbSUSfAnrI pic.twitter.com/ojhrVo1E7n — joshuafoust (@joshuafoust) October 9, 2014

Not a goat. But, goats are inherently funnier! In any case, this would explain so much about our adversary.

I think drones have caught members from about every Islamist terror group having sex with farm animals at this point. It's kind of a Thing. — joshuafoust (@joshuafoust) October 9, 2014

Except... how would we know that the apparent donkey-fucker is a member of ISIS, or that this video is from the current conflict? There's no weaponry or evidence of terrorism, and the recorders don't seem particularly intent on apprehending or attacking the donkey dude.

In fact, we can rule out this viral rumor pretty quickly.

At the start of the recording, you can just make out a timestamp in the upper left-hand corner of the frame:

It appears to have been shot on June 7, 2011, around 8:21 p.m. local time—long before we were embroiled in the ISIS campaign. More important, that local time is labeled as "UTC + 4.5," or four and a half hours ahead of Coordinated Universal Time. That corresponds with the time zone for Kabul, Afghanistan.

One military drone and manned-aircraft expert told me after watching the video that "the camera looks stationary, and aircraft generally don't hover" in Afghanistan and Iraq, for understandable reasons.

Given that fact, and the low angle of the footage relative to the ground, the expert guessed it was likely not from a drone but from a JLENS, a dirigible device tethered to the ground and constantly searching for threats to coalition forces, especially at night. (When I was in Iraq, our base had many of these overhead; we called them "death blimps.")

So what do we really have here? A 2011 video that's probably not from a drone of what may be an Afghan dude doing what may be a sexual act with what may be a donkey. Yet this video went stupid viral, and plenty like it have gone viral before. "I remember seeing this as far back as maybe 2007 or so," the military aviation expert tells me of videos purporting to show Taliban and Iraqi insurgents screwing goats and other livestock.

Propaganda that dehumanizes your adversary as bestial, it turns out, is highly shareable on social media. Here's a patriotic American hawking a video, apparently from 2010, of "Afghans defiling a goat." Here is the exact same video, posted last year, by an apparent friend of the Syrian Assad regime, warning that "the following clip may contain GRAPHIC and DISGUSTING material if you are a normal human being, otherwise you might like it and support the NATO-backed Syrian 'Revolution.'"

Oh, those guys? What goat-fuckers.