Claim: Photograph shows tornado-like storm clouds adjacent to the Statue of Liberty.
Example:[Collected via e-mail, September 2010]
Photo taken 9/16/10 - it may look pretty but it is NYC in the storm that brought torrents of rain and a tornado with it too - lots of trees down everywhere and mass transit (LIRR) at a standstill in a matter of about 10 minutes.
Origins: This image of the Statue of Liberty with storm clouds in the background might be described by viewers using any number of adjectives: beautiful, ominous, prophetic, majestic, etc. For our purposes, however, the single most relevant adjective is ... fake.
The appearance of this image in the latter part of September 2010 was no doubt prompted by the occurrence of a tornado that hit New York City on 16 September 2010, as captured in numerous photographs and the following video clips:
However, the image displayed above isn't a genuine photograph of that storm; it's a digital manipulation created by merging a picture of the Statue of Liberty with a separate photograph of a supercell thunderstorm snapped in Nebraska by photographer Mike Hollingshead on 28 May 2004:
The original storm photo is a familiar one on these pages, as it (along with other examples of Mike Hollingshead's work) has been circulated on the Internet on numerous occasions as depicting a variety of different storms throughout the world, including Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
