Elizabeth Gould said a strange sensation overwhelmed her while she was eating from a bag of potato chips during a flight from New York to Florida.

She paused, stopped eating and looked at the potato chip in her hand.

It looked familiar. The chip bears the image of the Virgin Mary, Gould said, and passengers on the flight agreed.

She spread out the remainder of the chips on her tray, but none looked like anything more than, well, a potato chip. So she wrapped the roughly quarter-sized chip in a napkin, tucked it in the bag and held on to it.

A friend she showed the chip to said it looks kind of like a painting of the blue Madonna displayed at the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota. Gould brought the chip to The Herald recently along with the other remaining chips, still in the original bag.

The chip does have an image of a head and partial body. The head is slightly tilted and the shape is surrounded by a white substance, resembling a robe of sorts.

Some of the other chips have traces of the white, but not as pronounced as the “holy” chip.

“When I saw this,” Gould said, “I felt like she was looking at me.”

Gould, a Palmetto resident, flew JetBlue Airways to New York over Martin Luther King Jr. weekend to visit her sister, she said. She got the bag of Terra Blue chips from a passenger sitting next to her. The Terra Blue chips are the official chips of JetBlue Airways, according to Terra Blue and JetBlue Web sites.

While touring New York City, Gould said an indescribable feeling swept over her as she neared the remains of the World Trade Center towers. She said she encountered the same feeling while on the plane eating JetBlue’s complimentary bag of blue-colored potato chips.

“That’s what made me look at the potato chip,” she said, “I think my words were, ‘This looks like the Virgin Mary!’ ”

This isn’t the first story of claims of holy images appearing on food and other items, according to the Web site en.wikipedia.org.

Some recent reports include a Nebraska couple claiming to have found a pretzel bearing the image of Mary holding baby Jesus. Mary’s image again appeared on an emergency turnoff underneath Chicago’s Kennedy Expressway. Both occurred in 2005.

Probably the most famous case happened about two years ago. GoldenPalace.com, an online casino, paid $28,000 for a grilled cheese sandwich bearing an image that resembled Mary.

When asked, Gould said she would consider putting the chip up for sale on eBay.
Religious icons have also shown up closer to home.

In May 2000, The Herald covered a story about an image resembling Jesus appearing on the wall of the Palma Sola Presbyterian Church in Bradenton after a pressure wash. The image appeared whenever the wall got wet and continued to draw crowds for most of the year.

In 1996, an image that some described as Mary appeared on the side of a mirrored office building in Clearwater. The image was partially damaged in 2004 when a teenager shot out parts of the glass with a slingshot, according to The St. Petersburg Times