On August 22 and 23, 1914 the British Expeditionary Force near Mons was struggling to retreat from the German Army. They were almost surrounded and badly outnumbered. But just when all hope seemed to have been lost, a shimmering angelic apparation appeared in the fog and smoke that hung over the battle field. The British troops staggered towards the figure and discovered that it had shown them an escape route. This remarkable story quickly spread throughout Britain and was widely taken as evidence of divine support for their troops. But in time skeptics began to insist that the entire story was a hoax. The writer Arthur Machen claimed that a fictional story he had published in September, 1914, involving angelic bowmen firing arrows at the Germans, had been mistaken by readers as a true account, thereby leading to the Angel of Mons tale. Stranger still, in 1930 a German officer claimed that the German army had used Zeiss lenses to project an image of an angel into the clouds above the battlefield. It was a psychological warfare trick, he explained, designed to make the British believe that angelic powers were supporting the German forces.
Links:
Fortean Times —
Wikipedia —
The Angel of Mons, by David Clarke.
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