That viral photo of a cloud that looks like a skull was taken from a heavy metal album cover

30 September 2019

What was claimed

An un-edited photo shows a skull-shaped cloud seen in California.

Our verdict

This image is fake and the skull comes from an Iron Maiden album cover.

A photo on Facebook shared over 140,000 times claims to show a “real picture taken in California” of an ominous-looking skull-shaped cloud.

The picture has been edited to include the skull from the cover of Iron Maiden’s 2000 album ‘Brave New World’.

This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false as the image is fake.

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