Every few weeks like clockwork, someone claims they’ve seen an image of Jesus or the Virgin Mary, and if it’s a slow press day and the art is good enough, the sighting goes viral. Our favorite examples of these, by far, are the astounding Griddle Virgin™ of May 2009, which narrowly edges the miraculous Connecticut Calf born in December of the same year. And what the hell, as long as we’re dispensing kudos, let’s not forget the uncanny, two-headed El-ganzoury calf born in Egypt in 2010.
However, yesterday’s sighting of Jesus on the side of the Cliffs of Moher in Clare County, Ireland, has all the hallmarks of a frontrunner. After American tourist Sandra Clifford snapped the above image during an aerial sightseeing tour, she declared, “To me it was Jesus Christ straightaway.” Which leads us to ask, rather inconveniently we suspect, “How do you know what he looked like?” Also, in every other Jesus sighting of which we’ve heard, identification was helped by the fact that the image wore robes, or a cowl, or maybe even a crown of thorns.
But to declare the vaguely simian rock formation above to be Jesus strikes us as overreaching a bit. And if it is him, we’re worried that he manifested in a place where only people who can afford sightseeing flights can see him. That doesn’t seem like a very Christ-like move. But then we breathed a sigh of relief, because we finally realized the image in the Moher rocks isn’t Jesus—it’s Jesus Christ Superstar, as played by actor Ted Neeley in the 1973 blockbuster musical. It’s all just a run-of-the-mill case of mistaken identity.
