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Angel of The Thames

M

Mattattattatt

Gone But Not Forgotten
(ACCOUNT RETIRED)
Joined
Sep 17, 2001
Messages
511
I notice that in most of the pictures the angel obviously wasn't visible to the person when the photos were taken, because they mostly seem to be holiday snaps with people posing smiling inthe foreground. This makes me think it's most likely a camera fault/reflection. It is strange how it's the same shape every time though and that it always seems to appear next to a person.
 
I also wondered if it could be a reflection of light off a tall building, which appears at different places depending on the time of day
 
http://www.freewebs.com/jimiadamson/tourist1.jpg

To me that looks like it could be a computer manipluation, it looks slightly more "there" than the rest of the photo, I could be wrong but I would surprised if I was....the motion blur on it too looks like an effect I have used a lot it just looks to unreal to me.

Plus I thought the original version of this legend made the angel out to be a lot bigger and clearly visible to people.
 
My hoax alarms are ringing very loudly on this one.

The phenomenon has suddenly appeared out of nowhere in the news and the shape in the pictures is too consistent and appears to be photoshopped.

My office is in the background on many of the pictures, so I know the area extremely well and know of no local buzz about these "angels".

Not saying it's definitely hoaxed but it's very suspicious.
 
It probably gets fed up of hanging around Islington and just wanders down to the Thames for a change of scenery.

Has anyone heard of this legend before?

I suspect someone has a book or film they're trying to pitch
 
Stunned

I'm just amazed, stunned actually, that I'd never even once come upon this story before.
 
The general shape reminds me of a James Herbert novel chapter-header graphic - Creed?

Who is influencing who here?
 
DerekH16 said:
The general shape reminds me of a James Herbert novel chapter-header graphic - Creed?

Who is influencing who here?
Click to expand...

I thought exactly the same thing, yes it's Creed.

If this was genuine, I'm sure it would have cropped in Mayhew (who mentions the urban legend of feral pigs living in the sewers) or Dickens, or more recently in Peter Ackroyd's or Iain Sinclair's writings.
 
I've never heard of this before and it looks like no-one on here has either. The 'Angel of the Thames' site says this on the opening page:
There has been much speculation recently as to the identity and indeed the authenticity of the “Angel of the Thames”. A recent website (see LINKS) has put forward some quite fanciful propositions but seems largely to have ignored the historical evidence surrounding this well-documented phenomenon.

As a historian and amateur investigator of paranormal encounters I have a unique perspective on the Thames Angel and to set the record straight I have brought together the available images and some of my own research material.
Click to expand...

Surely the historian and 'amateur investigator of paranormal encounters' could refer to most of the people on this board? How has this guy managed to unearth an interesting story that ticks quite a few boxes and yet others haven't? If this wasn't manufactured, then surely it would be on a par with Drake's drum, Tower ravens, and King Arthur as myths and stories? I'm sure Gaiman would have milked this for all it's worth and guaranteed it a place in Neverwhere.

Surely some tourist/paranormal group would have picked this up? Over the last few years, the belief in angels (even angel-related jewellery) seems to have increased and they seem to have more cultural currency than in previous years. I'm half-tempted to go as far as to say angels are the new crystals but the fear of appearing in Private Eye's 'neophiliacs' column prevents me ;)

http://friendsofthethamesangel.blogspot.com/ seems to sell official merchandise, although how this gets official clearance is beyond me. Did the angel's lawyers clear this? :roll:

This blog also, apparently, uses the same images as http://www.angelofthethames.com/ , the owner of which explains "this blog is run by a former friend of mine. We don't talk, but he seems happy enough to use my images (I honestly don't mind)". Now to me, as cynical as I am, this seems a little odd to me. I realise that, for whatever reason, there's hardly a glut on Thames angel images out but it just seems a little fishy to me. Similarly, the way the site owner seems to critique the other sites feels like a bid to distance himself from them.

Also, whilst comments regarding the photographs quite rightly point out their dubious nature (the shape of the angel is so distinctly repetitive it might as well be a brush style in Photoshop) I also think the engraving of the Thames angel looks very suspect too. In fact, I think it's a photoshopped collage of an etching and a later period sentimental painted rendering of an angel grey-scaled to suit. I think the actual composition and scale just seem completely wrong. I'd be very curious as to whether this engraving actually turns up elsewhere as engravings and etchings are fairly well documented and collectable, particularly of anything relating to period London.

Whilst the Illustrate London News site isn't complete, as far as I know, I couldn't find anything that commented on the angel either.

I wish this image was clearer so I could comment further. Whilst I could be wrong, and I'll happily stand corrected on this if I am, everything about it just seems like a badily executed hoax.
 
..and the author will undoubtedly try & capitalise on this hoax by way of a book in the not too distant. :evil:
 
Whoops! Let's keep this REALLY simple for the American:

Is it then the jury's verdict that the entire "Angel of the Thames" yarn, including the supposed Restoration sightings, is entirely a very modern, recent hoax?
 
Weird! I've never heard of this before.

OTR - that does indeed appear to be the FTMB's Jury's verdict, but one may keep an open mind and see where this ends up.
 
H_James said:
....one may keep an open mind and see where this ends up.
Click to expand...

Indeed, but that becomes more and more difficult with an Internet that has become filled with purposely-created and highly-layered hoaxes of this kind. A few examples:

1. The Virginia Bunnyman Killings saga, with its detailed accounts (names and dates) of dozens of gruesome murders. None of these killings ever took place and the murder victims themselves never existed.

2. An entire 19th century Canadian town wiped out by the Wendigo, in mind-numbing historical detail. But in actuality neither the town nor this particular Wendigo ever existed,

3. A Cincinnati genealogist drove many miles to visit a cemetery she'd discovered on the Internet - hundreds of names, birth and death dates, a burial plot map, even the complete history of the cemetery. Alas, the place never existed and all the details had been made up for some unknown purpose.
 
OldTimeRadio said:
Whoops! Let's keep this REALLY simple for the American:

Is it then the jury's verdict that the entire "Angel of the Thames" yarn, including the supposed Restoration sightings, is entirely a very modern, recent hoax?
Click to expand...

I don't think there was anything prior to a single news item (at least on the web to my knowledge) which some monkey has taken & ran with.

A number of the supposedly independant sites were registered using the same registrar, a couple even on the same day. The ones that can't be tracked are hosted with free webspace providers & the like.

So I should coco.
 
Mulder1800 said:
http://www.freewebs.com/jimiadamson/tourist1.jpg

To me that looks like it could be a computer manipluation
Click to expand...

Zoom it right up in PSP/PSD and note how incredibly similar the white blob is to the effect you can acheive in about 5 seconds flat by spraying a rough white angel shape and applying a motion-blur filter at 45 degree.

Definitely looks dodgy to me.

Every piece of structure in the blob area is aligned exactly on a 45 degree line. You can see this very clearly by zooming in enough to see the individual pixels.

Alli
 
allicorn said:
Mulder1800 said:
http://www.freewebs.com/jimiadamson/tourist1.jpg

To me that looks like it could be a computer manipluation
Click to expand...

Zoom it right up in PSP/PSD and note how incredibly similar the white blob is to the effect you can acheive in about 5 seconds flat by spraying a rough white angel shape and applying a motion-blur filter at 45 degree.

Definitely looks dodgy to me.

Every piece of structure in the blob area is aligned exactly on a 45 degree line. You can see this very clearly by zooming in enough to see the individual pixels.

Alli
Click to expand...

Yes, I agree. The basic shape of the 'angel' is so repetitive I'd suggest that it's a custom brush or a 'custom shape' in Photoshop. Given the blur effect, I wouldn't be surprised if it was an action specifically created for the job.
 
OldTimeRadio said:
Whoops! Let's keep this REALLY simple for the American:

Is it then the jury's verdict that the entire "Angel of the Thames" yarn, including the supposed Restoration sightings, is entirely a very modern, recent hoax?
Click to expand...

Well, there's a lot of holes in this.

As well as what I mentioned earlier, the two similarly named websites www.angelofthethames.com and www.angelonthethames.com - despite the former declaring the latter tacky in appearance - are very, very similar beyond the aesthetic veneer. More or less the same information and both sites hinting at more but don't actually deliver. They have same list of historical sightings on their sites, and yet none of them actually upload any more details of these alleged sightings. There's a lot of pre-WWII sightings with images documented, apparently, which would surely make this the best documented single paranormal phenomena known, and yet these images aren't uploaded for viewing? It seems very strange and self-defeating to me. Also, where are these historical images coming from? They're not appearing in any book that I know of.

With reference to that etching I mentioned earlier, I find this aspect of it unusual. The www.angelofthethames.com guy, who claims to be an historian and "amateur investigator of paranormal encounters" has a scaled down image of the etching on his site, and given his lofty status of the authority on this phenomena I presume him to have much of the source material to hand if all this is genuine, then the other less-knowledgeable folks are taking this guy's information and images. Yet if this is the case, then why does Jemima Waterhouse at http://www.freewebs.com/jemimawaterhouse have a better, clearer and larger copy of the etching on her site?

Other things that seem wrong about this particular site include the way her essay (which mysteriously isn't on her site) on the angel of the Thames has got such intellectual interest. It seems Dr. Miriam Hayles (who I can't find a reference to and would be interested to see if there really was a Dr. Miriam Hayles teaching in the Humanities dept. at Greenwich - in fact, on Monday, I'm going to find out!) loved it and so did Prof. Martin Adams who's coming over from Oregon to give a talk about this - despite my not being able to find a reference to a Martin Adams on the Oregon State University web site nor the University of Oregon.

Other 'facts' surrounding this don't seem to be too solid either. I thought the number of people in 1666's fire was one of those numerical values that shifted depending on who retold the story?

Similarly the story with Pepys, now perhaps I'm not looking hard enough, but I can't reference to Pepys sighting of this at all.

Also, whilst the 'Whois' information for both these sites doesn't tie-up (which, of course means nothing - who hasn't got friends in different parts of the country?) they are both of a similar summer July/August 2006 vintage. Strangely enough, the blog at http://friendsofthethamesangel.blogspot.com/ only goes back to August too. The http://www.freewebs.com/jemimawaterhouse page only dates as far back as post-May as that when the 'Jemima Waterhouse' first saw the angel of the Thames.

The blogspot page claims that days trips to see the Thames angel have been happening (at least) since 1963 and yet, again, there doesn't seem to be any record elsewhere of such a sustained interest in what's basically a fringe interest. Anyone else a member of a Fortean-related club that's lasted as long as this without anyone else knowing of it? Apparently, if you join the club you get access to a forum and chat room that can't be found on the internet either!

I'm thinking of writing to the http://www.angelofthethames.com guy and inviting him here to talk about the Angel of the Thames.
 
Diabolik8 said:
are you sure those domains don't tie up?
Click to expand...

Not according to Whois they don't. I'm not sure about the privacy issue of posting the personal data on here, but run www.angelofthethames.com and www.angelonthethames.com through whois and they are registered to different people, in different parts of the country, one in the start of July and one in the start of August.
 
jeff, the registrar is the same for both domains which I reckon is suspicious.

does anyone remember a year or two back a thread on here regarding a web-page reporting a camera found in suspicous circumstances with a mystery film? the page held some form of diary of events that were supposed to be taking place, all ficticious of course. in the end it turned out to be a bloody viral marketing campaign for a book (as most of us suspected)

that's what this is if you ask me. more insidious crap we're actually helping to propagate.

doh!
 
Diabolik8 said:
does anyone remember a year or two back a thread on here regarding a web-page reporting a camera found in suspicous circumstances with a mystery film? the page held some form of diary of events that were supposed to be taking place, all ficticious of course. in the end it turned out to be a bloody viral marketing campaign for a book (as most of us suspected)

that's what this is if you ask me. more insidious crap we're actually helping to propagate.

doh!
Click to expand...

If this is some kind of campaign, then it's being really badly done and will ubdoubtedly fail, despite this thread on the subject. It's too fringe and too 'small'. It's got no drama and no narrative. What's the story here? 'When will the angel appear again?' is hardly that gripping and we're not being given anything genuinely new on a regular basis to keep us, as a potential audience, interested. The similarity of the new sightings are actually boring as there is no twist.

There's no puzzle or challenge either, nothing for us to work out. With the recent Lonelygirl15 hoax at least that unfolded as a bit of a mystery and there was something for everyone to see so we could all play armchair detective. Also, to put it bluntly, with Lonelygirl15, people wanted to fuck her or save her, and 'hot chick needing rescuing' have been a staple of narratives since people started telling stories.
 
jefflovestone said:
Similarly the story with Pepys, now perhaps I'm not looking hard enough, but I can't reference to Pepys sighting of this at all.
Click to expand...

I've been trawling through Pepys and I can't find it either, the only Angels I come up with refer to coins or pubs, and 'Holy apparitions' doesn't throw up anything that I can see either. You'll notice that he doesn't give a date for the Pepys reference, which would have been very simple if he'd actually wanted people to be able to check his sources.
 
Timble2 said:
jefflovestone said:
Similarly the story with Pepys, now perhaps I'm not looking hard enough, but I can't reference to Pepys sighting of this at all.
Click to expand...

I've been trawling through Pepys and I can't find it either, the only Angels I come up with refer to coins or pubs, and 'Holy apparitions' doesn't throw up anything that I can see either. You'll notice that he doesn't give a date for the Pepys reference, which would have been very simple if he'd actually wanted people to be able to check his sources.
Click to expand...

Yes, it's a bit suspect to say the least. It's weird, or perhaps not, how the other sites all recount the same (non)references about Pepys, the list of sightings (but no pictures or stories attached to them - if it was real, would make it one of the most heavily documented Fortean stories I've ever come across), references to real events but no real facts about how the Angel actually fits in to all this.

Has anyone in London actually even seen these 'Angel of the Thames' walks advertised? The last one was supposed to have been on 20th September.

I'll admit that I hadn't read Herbert's book 'Creed' but as soon as I saw a website reference that said the 'Fallen Angels of Europe' I actually groaned out loud. If anyone else hasn't seen the image/book that Timble and DerekH16 mentioned, compare

http://www.jamesherbert.org/15_creed.jpg

with any of the images on the sites already mentioned.
 
Diabolik8 said:
jeff, the registrar is the same for both domains which I reckon is suspicious.
Click to expand...

I'm not so sure. On it's own, I wouldn't think anything of it as it's a big registration company. But, in the face of everything else mentioned, I suppose it does all add up.
 
The story is posted to a forum on Global Angels, a child support charity website.


Elsewhere on the forumabout a charity concert

David Grant came on stage to welcome everyone, what a great ambassador he is for GA. Then Molly came on to talk about the "Step UP" campagne and we watched a video.
Click to expand...

David Grant is also one of the sponsors of the Charity

The home page is Global Angels Foundation

Is there a connection?

*EDIT. I hope I haven't accidently scuppered someone's fundraising efforts.*
 
The original of that Thames Embankment engraving, minus angel, can be found on Wiki
 
Timble2 said:
The original of that Thames Embankment engraving, minus angel, can be found on Wiki
Click to expand...

Brilliant! :D well found, Timble. :D

On a similar tip, according to http://www.freewebs.com/jimiadamson/thetheories.htm

The Angel on the Thames has been compared to the rainbow of promise in the Bible ( Genesis 3; 7 )
Click to expand...

There is no rainbow of promise in Genesis and one doesn't appear until Revelations (Rev 4:3, Rev 10:1).

Is it 'the done thing' to email these people now? :?:
 
jeff & timble, your detective work's proving really interesting reading - carry on! :)

i'm all for fundraising for honest charities though, no matter how insidious.

heh.
 
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