'Angel' cloud appears over Texas skyline

I believe and I see an angel. Just like the OP picture, I believe there are signs all around us. I believe things happen for a reason. May sound stupid to some but I believe someone at that time needed to look up and see that cloud in @OldDude49's picture.

 

@oldman11 Regarding cloud formations and ambiguous security camera images, it is one thing to say, that an image resembles an image that vaguely looks like an 'angel', or some other supernatural entity, but quite another to say that the image is a manifestation of a supernatural entity. The former is an interesting oddity, the latter requires more evidence than mere assertion: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Had Mr Ferrero taken the snapshot from directly underneath the referenced cloud formation...or from a vantage point at say 90 degrees to the right or left of the line of sight along the road referenced in Mr Ferreros snapshot...the cloud would probably have appeared as some utterly unremarkably blobby formation that would not have looked anything like an 'angel'....and would therefore not have attracted much interest, if any, from viewers of his Facebook picture wall.

As I have mentioned before, photographic images of 'angels' and other 'sacred' identities are invariably examples of pareidolia... the following Youtube clips illustrate this particular phenomenon.









Demonic beefsteak anyone?


of course examples of auditory pareidolia exist too.....





It is unsurprising that some instances of pareidolia are primed by the information already in one's brain.....if one is exposed to cultural descriptions of angels...even if one does not believe in their actual existence, then it is possible to perceive the image of an angel, when, objectively the physical phenomenon is just actually water vapour and light occurring naturally in this world. Perhaps, in a culture that has no knowledge of what angels are, or what they are described as being, through the cultural artifacts of art and literature, then Ferreros cloud formation might be described as resembling something quite different...such as an Aztec God, or some other deity...

 

I'm a believer.

 

Why can't he say it IS? You cannot prove it wasn't. No one can prove it isn't. Science is constantly changing and discovering new things. People seem to think they know all but we do not. We are human, we are a blip in the universe. I saw an angel. I am a believer that there has to be something more then this life. I sure hope my beliefs don't let me down.

 

I didn't say that anyone couldn't make that claim...people make unsubstantiated claims all the time (President Trump is a prime example), and I couldn't stop people from believing what they will, regardless of whether or not their belief is justified by evidence, just that the burden of proof for such a claim is on the person making the positive claim...if that proof / evidence is not forthcoming, or is insubstantial....then there is little reason why anyone should place any credence to the claim. The appropriate stance would be scientific skepticism Skepticism - Wikipedia .
Skeptical movement - Wikipedia

Fewer assumptions are required to attribute a cloud formation to the known natural forces of this world (water vapour, sunlight, gravity, air pressure differentials, wind conditions etc etc etc), than are required to posit supernatural causes or phenomena....
It is worth applying Occam's Razor to funky cloud formations.

 

I've been in the presence of both good and evil things. I've had other experiences as well that I won't go into. I can't prove any of it, and even if I had proof we live in an age where any evidence can be manufactured so it would be pointless anyway.

 

Lets leave trump and all politics out of this discussion.

Occam's razor. the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. I guess you could apply that to the cloud. But it would depend on who you ask

 

This.

 

This ^^ and the mention of Occam's razor reminds me of the movie Contact. The scientist and the holy man are talking and he asks, did you love you father? Then he says, prove it. The scientist could not prove it. Somethings cannot be proven. That is my simplest answer

 

Probably less upon whom one asks, but more upon an evaluation of the evidence submitted supporting the claim. If a claim is unfalsifiable, Unfalsifiability then what empirical basis is there for validating the factual truth of a claim? In principal, truth claims should be falsifiable, and testable...else, there is no basis for placing any weight upon such claims, except perhaps as a starting point for enquiry, rather than justified true belief.

 

That site stinks. Unfalsifiability It is an anti-religion site and are sarcastic about it. Their two examples proved to me that one cannot get an unbiased/ no agenda discussion there.

It does depend on who you ask. If one asked an Aboriginal person, they ma not say angel, the could say something else BUT I do believe that that cloud was an angel because someone there needed a sign of hope.

 

Stand alone post-

I want you to know @chelloveck that I am not trying to convert you. That is between you & Him. But I am a simple person and that cloud that some claim is an angel is not hurting anyone. This life has ups and downs and can be quite shitty at times. If a cloud in the shape of an angel brings people joy why try to destroy that? Science is cold and hard, it seems almost robotic to me but we are humans who feel and think. Somethings bring people hope. Why is that bad?

 

Angels and the military have a long history - for example

The Angels on Mons

Perhaps the most enduring legend of the Great War was that of the "Angel of Mons." The legend first appeared in a short story titled The Bowmen, by Arthur Machen, which appeared in the London Evening News on 29th September 1914. Coincidentally, the 29th was also the feast day of St Michael and All Angels.

The card below, “THE ANGELS OF MONS” was from the painting by W.H. Margetson. It was published by ‘A. Vivian Mansell & Co., Fine Art Publishers, London’ and was ‘No, 1017.’



The story starts on Sunday 30th August after Machen had read in his morning newspaper about the retreat of the British Expeditionary Force (B.E.F.) from Mons. "…I have not forgotten the impression that made on my mind. I seemed to see a furnace of torment and death and agony and terror… and in the middle of the burning was the British Army." He also said that the inspiration for the story came to him in church, "as the blue incense floated above the gospel book on the desk between the tapers."

In the story, St. George, with an army of medieval English bowmen, appeared in the sky and annihilated the Germans with ghostly arrows at a critical moment during the retreat and saved the B.E.F. Machen later said that he felt he could have told the story better and added, "If I failed in the art of letters I had succeeded, unwittingly, in the art of deceit."

The Bowmen appeared at a time when people were looking for a miracle and perhaps because it appeared in a newspaper, the story seemed to have some credibility. Whatever the reason, many people in Britain were ready to believe that heavenly intervention saved the B.E.F. from total defeat.

As the story gained more coverage, the bowmen turned into angels. Arthur Waghorn asked his readers in The War Budget "Are the angels on our side in this great struggle for liberty and honour? For many readers the sky has become as full of visions as the sea of salt."


Indeed, it had; public demand for information describing spectral visions and apparitions during the British retreat ensured a steady supply of publications on the subject. For example, Harold Begbie, a popular writer at the time, wrote On the side of the Angels, a sermon by G.P. Kerry entitled Guardian Angels was then produced in print, and the Theosophical Publishing Society produced Angels, Saints and Bowmen of Mons by I.E Taylor. Periodicals like The Occult Review and Light then took up the story, followed by numerous parish magazines throughout the country.

With such widespread coverage, it was perhaps inevitable that more people should come forward to announce that they too had friends or relatives who were soldiers and who had "seen the Angels of Mons with their own eyes."

It seems that the idea of ‘God on our side’, gave many people consolation and hope for the future. Despite his protests that the tale was purely a figment of his imagination, Machen said "Great numbers of people made up their minds that the story was true from beginning to end." His original article in the Evening News, which had started the whole thing off, was published in an expanded version in a booklet and within a year, 1,000,000 copies had been sold.

Was the tale pure fiction? Of course… and yet… the eminent military historian the late John Terraine said, that as early as 5th September 1914, Brigadier-General John Charteris recorded in a letter that the story of the Angels of Mons was "going strong through the 2nd Corps…how the angel of the lord on the traditional white horse and clad all in white with flaming sword, faced the advancing Germans at Mons and forbade their further progress." This was three weeks before Machen’s story of The Bowmen appeared in print. (bold face from original source The Angel of Mons postcard)

*******
I have often refereed to this experience in my books as
"The Finger of God" My first Prism Mystery book is based on this kind of story....

A mortar round land at your feet - and is the only dud. The RPG that slams into the wall behind you - and you only get covered with dust.
How can you explain this? A simple "my number wasn't up" works for most. Others, well, it's that whole The Finger of God" thing. You either believe it or don't. I choose to believe.

Classic story often seen after the first GW
The media was already wondering if the troops were in a “quagmire” and dire predictions of gloom and doom came from the left wing media. What they didn’t report was that yesterday, after the weather had
cleared, the Marine group that was mired the worst looked out at the plain they were just about to cross. What did they see? Hundreds if not thousands of anti-tank and anti-personnel mines had been uncovered by the wind and then washed off by the rain. If they had proceeded as planned, many lives would have undoubtedly been lost.

As it was, they simply drove around them and let the demolition teams destroy them.
Praises be to His mighty name! Thank you God, for protecting our young men and women!

(same story is repeated elsewhere, only with an armor column. I've sen others as well, all with a sudden storm exposing a minefield - by way of Divine Intervention)

There is this though -
One person once asked George Washington if he thought God was on his side. His reply is reported to be, “It is not that God should be on our side, but that we be on His.”

These stories almost always ends the same way - assistance from a Heavenly being at a time of need. Stories that never seem to make into the media reporting....

Just for the record, while I hope to enjoy Divine Protection, these have been doing a pretty good job in cleaning mines



(M-58, line clearing charge)

 

To further continue the Angels of Mons story...

Perhaps the following card and the description of the picture thereon may give some insight as to why some British soldiers at Mons believed Arthur Machen’s tale The Bowmen to be fact. E. Le Deley, Paris, published the card, which was printed in black and white. The captions are in French and English. The English version reads, "AERIAL WAR – A shower of arrows, Gunners of a German battery decimated by our aeros."





French aviators dropped the arrows or Flechettes which when released on an unsuspecting soldier could piece his body from head to foot. What did a flechette look like? Well, a photograph appeared in The War Illustrated on 23rd January 1915, with a description of one.

"They are pieces of steel rod about six inches long, sharpened at one end like a pencil, and with the four and a half inches or so at the other end machined out so that the whole thing has the section of a cross...which is, of course, very much lighter than the front end, and so acts just as a feather of an arrow."

The steel arrows were packed in boxes of 500 and placed over a hole in the floor of the aircraft. When over the target the flechettes were released in a stream, simply by pulling a string! When they hit the ground, the arrows covered an area of about fifty yards by ten yards.

In 1915, Mr. C. G. Grey the editor of The Aeroplane commented, "A friend of mine was at the military aerodrome at St. Cyr some little time ago, when some of these arrows were being tested, with an unfortunate cow as the enemy, about three arrows struck the cow, and went clean through her into the ground, after which the cow died quite suddenly.’

According to The War Illustrated, the Royal Flying Corps refused to use flechettes against the Germans because, "Our aviators think arrow-dropping dirty work…because the enemy cannot hear the things coming, and because they make such nasty wounds. Also it was not possible to drop them with sufficient accuracy." The paper then conceded, "nevertheless against cavalry or infantry in any thing like close formation they certainly are effective, as the French have proved."

The editor of The Aeroplane also told his readers about a "German surgical paper", which had devoted a long article about the effect of the flechette on troops. The report said. "If one hits a man on the head it will go straight through his helmet into his brain." However, just as fatal was a hit on the shoulder by one of the steel arrows. The report continued, "it will probably glance off the shoulder blade and go straight through the lungs, and get mixed up with other parts of the anatomy."

One German soldier, who had been on the receiving end of a steel arrow attack said, "that if there was any arrow-dropping going on it was actually safer to be flat on the ground, because although one covers a greater area the area the arrow which does hit home will have less chance of going through several organs."

In early 1915, Mr Grey said that in view of the uncertainly of hitting a man with the much larger missile, the bomb, it was hardly likely that the flechette will prove a weapon of "any serious consequence in the war." As the conflict progressed, little more was heard of the flechette. However, its use was recorded on a postcard by an artist’s impression.

Did the French drop flechettes on German troops in August 1914? There were reports that during the retreat from Mons British soldiers had seen "dead Prussians wounded by arrows…on the battlefield." If the stories were believed, they would certainly have added credence to Machen’s tale of The Bowmen and the subsequent story of The Angels of Mons.


These were revisited in WWII as "Lazy Dog Bombs".

The weapons were designed to be dropped from an aircraft. They contained no explosive charge but as they fell they would develop significant kinetic energy[2] making them lethal and able to easily penetrate soft cover such as jungle canopy, several inches of sand or light armor.[3] Lazy Dog munitions were simple and cheap; they could be dropped in huge numbers in a single pass.[3] Like many other weapons, however, their effects were often gruesome and indiscriminate.

Lazy Dog projectiles were used primarily during the Korean and the Vietnam Wars.

 

what we don't know... ??? there is so much that we don't know... as someone said everyday we learn something new...

how about a new mineral?

Mineral never seen on Earth found inside Russian meteorite

Mineral never seen on Earth found inside Russian meteorite

 

1. Agreed....but it isn't justified to attribute immaterial / supernatural causes to material things / phenomena, simply because the cause or the origin of the material thing or phenomenon is unknown, or not well understood. It isn't justified in proclaiming...'we don't know....therefore goddidit'. I am not suggesting that you are making that particular claim with respect to the meteorite, but filling gaps in our knowledge of the cosmos by appealing to the god of the gaps fallacy God of the gaps - RationalWiki is not a sound way of enquiring, and discovering true facts about natural phenomena.




2. That may be true of some people, some of the time...however, Some prefer to deny new knowledge based on the evidence gained by methodological naturalism Methodological naturalism - RationalWiki , in favour of beliefs based on comforting myths and tribal just-so-stories.

3. How about it? Why is the discovery of a new mineral remarkable in the context of a universe that we know many things about, and that there are many things that we don't know about (yet). It would be remarkable if no new discoveries were made in a universe that is largely unexplored by humanity. Certainly the discovery is interesting, and it will answer a number of questions; and it will undoubtedly stimulate many further questions, the the answers to which may or may not be eventually discoverable by humans.

 

Nay sayers reminds of this stump I have ,
The illusion of a angry lion, but all he is is empty dead wood .
Angry at God with no hope no future.


One that has hope and works toward that hope, tend to find it ,in small ways and in big ways, both positively and negatively motivated . He will ignore all evidence to the contrary that might darken that hope yet brighten even the most faint to support has hope. Atheist do exactly that ,even after their favorite scientist have abandoned their previous theories for new findings a bind love for any theory that they hope in.
I personally put no stock in second hand information no matter who it comes from .
Most things people say, I take with a grain of salt.
What I do know is what I have experienced my self the evidence of my own findings and experiences .
I know that God is real, and that His angels have intervened in my behalf in actual contact, not feelings.
I have also dealt with demons in actual contact, not feelings or supposition .
As an educated man you might sway the ignorant of what life is about, but this man cannot be swayed by lies atheists invent to resist faith in God.

 

Sit in a foxhole with heavy incoming,,,,that'll bring on some religion !!
There ain't no atheist in a foxhole.

 

Uh oh. Not again.