Myth 12 | Angel Moroni Stolen from top of Temple by Helicopter
As I first heard it, the story goes like this:
Convinced the Angel Statue atop the Accra Ghana Temple was pure gold, and under the cover of darkness, intrepid thieves scaled the spire in the middle of the night, then, using a welding torch, sliced through the pole on the statue and used a helicopter to steal it away.
Variations of this story often include lines like: ”You see, son, the angel on the temple used to be pure gold. But the statue that is up there now is bronze because…”
A few things to consider in this story:
Most of the statues have the Moroni embedded in such a way that in order to cut through the center pole, you would have to slice off the bottom of the ball. This means that you would find out pretty quickly the statue is fiberglass, as it would most likely start to melt or burn.
Getting physical access to the Moroni statue on pretty much any temple would require scaffolding or a crane. Climbing the steeple without that type of equipment is, in many cases, not just risky, but not even possible. In cases where the temple steeple has been scaled without specialized equipment, the climbing took many days (and still required some scaffolding and many ladders) or was accomplished before the steeple had exterior cladding, meaning the exposed beams were used to climb the structure.
The statues weigh hundreds of pounds at the least, thousands at the most. To accomplish this theft, the helicopter would have to hook up to the statue and hold it steady during the cutting. The downdraft from this, even at a height, would make a cutting torch unusable. The time required to cut the pole with a helicopter hovering overhead would alone make the process untenable.
Outside of the United States, temples commonly have an on-site residence for the President. In many cases, there is an onsite residence for members traveling great distances. A Helicopter hovering over the temple for the time necessary to steal the statue would have summoned the police relatively instantly.
A pure gold statue would be so heavy that it would take an extremely large and heavy-duty helicopter to lift it.
If you have read the rest of this book, you know that none of the statues were ever solid Gold.
So where did this story start? I’ll be honest, I don’t know, but I suspect that the placement of the Idaho Falls temple statue played a part. In 1983, the fiberglass statue of the Angel Moroni was added to the temple after [43] years of operation. The feat was accomplished by lifting the statue by helicopter, and having individuals on scaffolding guide it into a hole pre prepared on the top of the temple. No welding equipment was needed. A similar method was used to attach a statue to the London England temple in 2005.
After extensive research and finding nothing about any theft or attempt, an appeal was made to the Church History Library staff. After finding nothing themselves, a Church Historian over temples and historical sites was consulted over this and another story and confirmed that “There is no truth to either story. Both are fanciful myths and not supported by any credible source.”