Singular Cerebrations: The Divine Narrative
The supposed angelic etching.
The original image taken from the Thames Embankment page at Wikipedia.
In 2006, a man named David Grant made an angel. He took some photos, some of which are definitely photoshopped, and some that may not be, but fit his narrative, and he built an angel from the ground up using nothing but the power of belief. This angel purportedly haunts the River Thames, and is best known for invoking feelings of well-being and happiness in tourists and passersby.
Every bit of information you're going to find on the phenomenon of this angelic being, which he calls the Angel of Promise, is either to be found on his website, or uses it as a source. You can look all you want, but you're not finding anything else to support its existence. Some of the pictures on the site, like the one pictured above, are clearly faked to fit his narrative; others, I believe, may just happen to conveniently have a bit of lens flare or a water droplet in the right shape to suit his needs.
Faked photo or convenient smudge? WE MAY NEVER KNOW.
Right about now you might be wondering why he bothered. Well, it's unlikely that the advent of the charity Global Angels, which he strongly supports, coincidentally coincides with the launch of the world's best--and only--source of information regarding this mysterious angelic being. He faked an angel on the River Thames to support a charity with angel in its name that--you guessed it--at the time was preparing to hold a major charity event on the banks of the Thames. You can't make this stuff up.
Did it work? Yeah, sure it did. But at what cost? I don't care that it raised money or created awareness for Global Angels*, because now people believe in an angel that isn't there. A quick internet search will provide plenty of links to 'real' angel sighting websites that use this as evidence of their divine narrative--and this evidence is 100% demonstrably false. The fortean field gets a little dimmer and a bit more difficult every time this happens, and I'm certain that there's a better way of getting people to donate to your charity other than tricking them into believing a comforting lie. So please, let's all do our homework and remain incredulous in the face of the impossible, because sometimes an angel is just a devil with wings.
Yours in Impossibility,
Tobias
*I mean, sure, I think raising money for charity is good, I'm not a monster. But creating a new piece of internet folklore that's going to continue to confuse the credulous for who-knows-how-long is, in my humble opinion, very bad.