Transformer models, trained and publicly released over the last couple of years, have proved effective in many NLP tasks. We wished to test their usefulness in particular on the stance detection task. We performed experiments on the data from the Fake News Challenge Stage 1 (FNC-1). We were indeed able to improve the reported SotA on the challenge, by exploiting the generalization power of large language models based on Transformer architecture. Specifically (1) we improved the FNC-1 best performing model adding BERT sentence embedding of input sequences as a model feature, (2) we fine-tuned BERT, XLNet, and RoBERTa transformers on FNC-1 extended dataset and obtained state-of-the-art results on FNC-1 task.