Photo Lab Angel Picture

James Patryck Jordan sent us this angel picture which he developed years ago while working in a photo lab at Walmart. The picture is of two people praying with an angel manifesting above their heads:

"The story and picture I have for you are actually several years old, but I only just now discovered your page. In the past several years I've sent this photo to several places on the net with little or no interest, which truly boggles my mind. This is a first hand account dealing with a photograph that I myself developed from a Fujifilm Quicksnap Flash 400 35mm Disposable Camera while working in a Wal-Mart Fuji photo lab."

More to the Angel Story
"While working as a certified photo technician in a Fuji developing lab, I one evening encountered a very unique roll of film. It had been dropped off for one-hour developing, in the form of a disposable camera. I was alone in the lab that evening as I often was."

"I opened up the sealed housing of the camera, first removing the cardboard cover, then prying open the plastic case. I pulled the very tip of the 35mm film from it’s protective canister and taped it to a card which I then sent into our developer machine to prepares the film for exposure to light. Fifteen minutes later the twenty or so exposures fed from the machine in a long strip of brown celluloid.

I took the negative strip and fed one end into our printer computer which illuminates the images and enlarges them onto a computer screen for our perusal. This is a safety measure of sorts that allows the technician to choose which frames will be printed (or deleted according to lab policy), and how many. It was the last frame which immediately caught my attention.

There was an anomaly. An image, an unexplainable image existed on the negative. With gloved hands I pulled the negative strip from the machine and held it up. The last frame clearly depicted some thing, some image which had been sealed into the actual silver halide of the film, as with any other photo. There were no particles or scratches on the negative. This was not dust. The film was untouched except by my hands alone. I saw it, I held it, I developed it. This was a genuine, no shit, real-deal anomaly.

I slid the negatives back into the computer. The frame should have been deleted, but it wasn't. I allowed it to be printed, and in direct opposition to lab policy, I printed a copy for myself.

When the film’s owner returned an hour later I showed her the photograph in question. She began to cry. I asked if she knew who had taken the photo and under what conditions.

She told me that she had taken the picture of her daughters as they knelt in prayer by a campfire during a recent camping trip. The family had learned from the radio that an escaped convict was loose in the area and the girls had decided to pray for protection.

The anomaly, it would seem, was the answer to that prayer. I asked the woman if I could have a copy of the photo and she agreed, though in truth, I would surely have kept the copy regardless. For two years I saw over five thousand frames per day, five days a week and never did anything like this ever show up, before or after.

Of the two attachments I'm sending, the first is the untouched image which I burned straight to CD from the negatives so as to be completely unaltered in anyway. The second is a darkened version I made to isolate the anomaly."