There is a strange story circulating on the internet that the Idol was stolen from the museum in 2009 - to quote a site which shall remain nameless:
In November 2009 the idol was stolen by Nigel Bunt, a US Citizen who was born in Dagenham. He claimed that the "Idol spoke to me, as soon as I saw it I felt its power, its hard to describe" and took the idol to his home in San Francisco. In January 2011, San Francisco Police Dept were alerted to a disturbance where Bunt was dancing naked and chanting loudly around a 2m replica of the idol that he had made in his back yard with a chainsaw. Bunt’s wife gave the police the idol and told them it was the source of her husband’s distress; he added "When I came back to San Francisco strange things began to happen, I soon felt my life spinning out of control and I knew it was the power of the Idol."
This entire story is made up - see here
https://dispatchesfromtheformernewworld.com/2016/06/02/the-dagenham-idol/
Source of the made up story
http://botschaftdergotter.blogspot.com/2011/01/missing-neolithic-dagenham-idol-turns.html
Read the made up comments allegedly made by the museum curator - do they ring true?
Something is not right. This message is just to keep things from messing up down the road