Whenever a story comes out claiming to show real pictures or video of UFOs, hope springs eternal that maybe, just maybe, this might be that elusive smoking-gun evidence of alien technology.

Not a day goes by, either, without something in the news questioning the honesty of certain Americans or Russians. Now it seems that UFOs have been added to that media storm.

The innocent image above is from a collection called Pixabay, which offers many free stock photos to use for practically anything you’d like. This one shows our sun with a circular black dot, reportedly the planet Mercury, making a transit across our home star.

Still, how would Pixabay feel if a Russian news site, Pravda.ru ― ironically, the name means “truth” ― took that same picture, added two more black dots, called them all UFOs and claimed this was, in fact, a picture captured by a NASA “STEREO spacecraft”?

Wow!

If you compare the two images, it doesn’t take long to figure out that the sun in the two pictures is identical and all that Pravda.ru did was finish it off with two more “UFOs” and a headline that reads: “NASA spacecraft captures three huge UFOs silhouetted against the Sun.”

That deserves another “Wow!”

When HuffPost reached out to a NASA spokesman to comment about all of this, he said, “I’m not aware of this photo being released. Certainly not from NASA. There is no official or unofficial NASA posting of the image.”

For what it’s worth, this isn’t the first time that UFO charlatans have tried to convince the public that extraterrestrial ships are getting a little too close to our sun.

Here’s a video of an alleged alien ship refueling, according to a source that is definitely not NASA:

NASA generally has well thought-out explanations for these types of “UFO” incursions into our solar system.

For its part, Pravda.ru, which is separate from the Communist Party paper, has a history of extremely creative “journalism.” But the truth is out there.

Just not Pravda.ru’s truth.