Viral Weather Photo Doctored With Iron Maiden Album Cover Imagery
We've all pictured animals or other shapes forming within clouds, but one weather image that's been circulated on multiple occasions in recent years has a metal tie even though it may not be totally legit. According to USA Today, a stormy weather shot that appears to show a skull face forming in the clouds has been doctored with the album art from Iron Maiden's Brave New World album.
Maiden have famously worked the imagery of their skull-faced mascot Eddie into numerous album covers over the years and the album cover of 2000's Brave New World album had Eddie's visage forming in the dark clouds over a city.
With the recent severe weather sweeping across midwestern and southern states in the U.S. earlier this month, one poster on social media shared an image that appeared to be a skull face forming within the clouds.
The Facebook poster offered that his sister had taken the picture in Lake Village, Arkansas, noting the detail that it was a sign that it was Jesus and "y'all better get right with the lord."
Since the posting on Dec. 10, it's been shared just shy of 6,000 times on Facebook. However, the social media site tagged it as an altered photo that could mislead people, citing USA Today fact checkers who had combined the Iron Maiden artwork with an image from a 2019 storm in Pennsylvania.
As it turns out, this image had circulated once before in 2019. The initial weather imagery came from clouds that had formed during a storm in a photo published by The Patriot-News in Mechanicsburg, Pa. "Storm clouds as they appeared over Kutztown University on Wednesday," cited the initial caption.
That photo was then doctored less than a month later with the Maiden Eddie imagery added into the clouds and shared on Facebook with the poster claiming it was "a real picture taken in California" with "no editing." That post had been shared 164,000 times.
According to the USA Today fact checkers, "Based on our research, we rate ALTERED an image that claims to show a skull-like cloud formation in the sky in Arkansas. The image combines cover art from an Iron Maiden album with a photo of a 2019 storm in Pennsylvania."
As stated, "Eddie" has become one of the most popular mascots in metal, and you can get a closer look at how he's been used within Iron Maiden's artwork over the years in the gallery below.