Brooklyn Bigfoot Hoax
Posted by: Craig Woolheater on February 18th, 2015
The hoaxer of the Brooklyn Bigfoot footage has come forward.
The man behind a recent video purporting to show a Bigfoot sighting in Prospect Park is the same attention-seeker who disseminated images of himself skulking around Green-Wood Cemetery last summer dressed as a clown.
Fort Greene performance artist Brian Whiteley said he carried out the stunts — and e-mailed the documentation to reporters — as artistic acts that were supposed to provoke a reaction, not for laughs.
“I’m not trying to gain notoriety for a prank,” he said. “I want to do something that combines people on a universal level.”
The artist statement on his website is more blunt:
“I am not asking you to look, I am forcing you to pay attention.”
Whiteley shot and starred in the video, and sent it out to local news publications in late January using the pseudonym Russell Strark. He claimed to have been recording a time-lapse video of a snowstorm and discovering the Sasquatch when reviewing the footage. He came clean to legendary reporter on the paranormal Lee Spiegel, of the Huffington Post, the following week.
Whiteley said he has a longstanding a fascination with Bigfoot that has led him to dress up as the mythical creature in staged videos shot across the country, and to conduct interviews with Bigfoot “experts” and conspiracy theorists. In early videos, he said he walked too much like a human, but over time, driven by critiques from Bigfoot fans, he honed his hunched lurching.
Whiteley’s Prospect Park video was not the first time he has attempted to use the press to spread fake Bigfoot sightings, but it garnered more notice than videos past, and he said he began to worry that true believers would misconstrue his intentions.
“I’m not really interested in pissing off the Bigfoot community,” he said. “My end goal is to get a wide variety of people’s opinions. I’m interested in the reaction to mystery.”
#BigfootinBrooklyn
Co-founder of Cryptomundo in 2005.
I have appeared in or contributed to the following TV programs, documentaries and films:
OLN's Mysterious Encounters: "Caddo Critter", Southern Fried Bigfoot, Travel Channel's Weird Travels: "Bigfoot", History Channel's MonsterQuest: "Swamp Stalker", The Wild Man of the Navidad, Destination America's Monsters and Mysteries in America: Texas Terror - Lake Worth Monster, Animal Planet's Finding Bigfoot: Return to Boggy Creek and Beast of the Bayou.
“I’m not really interested in pissing off the Bigfoot community,” he said. “My end goal is to get a wide variety of people’s opinions. I’m interested in the reaction to mystery.” If you want people’s opinions, all you have to do is ask for them. People are all too happy to share their opinions, especially concerning Bigfoot. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, and, whether or not he is not interested in pissing off the Bigfoot community, that’s what he’s done, or, they should be pissed, because hoaxes like this, hurt the credibility of the whole community, and credibility is a very hard thing to regain, once it’s been lost. I hope this hoaxer gets lost, from the Bigfoot “community”.
A person with too much time on his hands, fooling around. As I mentioned before in the original post, I went to art school in NYC and used to go to Prospect Park over in Brooklyn with friends. It’s a nice place, but no place for a Bigfoot.