The renewed interest by the US government in UFO’s has caused a stir both nationally and abroad. Finally, some form of disclosure seems to be under way — videos are being leaked and confirmed, reports are being declassified, and the military’s stance on these mysterious flying objects has gone from “nonsense” to “national security threat.”

There’s uncertainty in the air. We don’t know where these things are coming from: be it another planet, another dimension, another time, or from the depths of our own oceans — or, skeptically, if they somehow belong to the Russians or the Chinese.

And now the Russians are capitalizing on that uncertainty and America’s revived UFO interest. Why not? The US is clearly flabbergasted by something in their airspace — it seems like a perfect opportunity to take credit for something unknown and unexplainable — the perfect time to capitalize on your adversary’s state of confusion.

So, on July 11 the Russian United Aircraft Corporation (UAC) posted the following tweet.

What could it mean? Have they been playing us this whole time? Did we just get punked on an international scale? Do we all look like idiots!?

There are no clear answers yet, but the general consensus is that Russia is trying to troll the fuck out of us. They’re preparing to release their new generation of “first single-engine low-observable hypersonic light tactical fighter aircraft” — which is likely what this marketing ploy is in reference to. They want us to question whether this whole UFO phenomenon can simply be chalked up to their latest and greatest Ruskie-tech.

Between the amount of video, radar data, expert eye-witness accounts and other information that the US has collected on these UFO’s over the years, though, it seems very unlikely that military personnel involved in incidents like the Nimitz encounter or the USS Omaha incident wouldn’t have recognized a Russian fighter jet for exactly that: a Russian fighter jet — man-made, explainable, identifiable vehicles.

However, the UFO’s observed in these instances, demonstrated “beyond-next-generation” flight capabilities that simply put every current technology on Earth to shame. They defy our current understanding of physics and science, and have the ability to easily outmaneuver American military jets, can instantaneously accelerate to unimaginable speeds and can transition between air and water without disturbing either medium. They are wingless, engineless, propulsion-less, featureless craft that don’t even halfway resemble the Russian’s new SU-57 fighter jet.

Still, people are reading into the chess references used in this meme. Not only is the UFO in the famous photo, replaced by a flying knight-piece, but the UAC also tagged it with “#checkmate.” Is the knight’s unique movement pattern (three forward and one to the side) a reference to the UFO’s reported abilities to change direction without inertia? Or is it in reference to the SU-57’s “thrust vector control engine” and “super-maneuverability”?

Let’s hope that it’s the latter. Because if the Russian’s have developed the kind of UFO technology that our Navy has observed interfering in our controlled military airspaces (and even underwater), and invading our most secure nuclear missile sites, then we’ve got a problem. That kind of a leap in flight tech and physics would lend itself not only to planetary domination — but to colonizing the entire solar system and beyond without resistance.

If these UFO’s are truly the result of Russian scientific advancements, we’ll be living on Planet Russia in the Russian Solar system very, very soon. The simple fact that hasn’t already happened is evidence enough to suggest the Russians are just doing what they do best: internet trolling.