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Lair of the Beasts: Hoaxing of the Bigfoot Kind

Monsters and Jokers

By Nick Redfern November 21, 2009

THERE'S SOMETHING IN THE WOODS by Monster Hunter, Nick Redfern(2008).
© Anomalist Books

Although I’m personally convinced that the overwhelming majority of all the people I have spoken with about their alleged experiences with, and sightings of, strange creatures were utterly genuine and honest, it’s pretty much inevitable that just occasionally some joker will come along who attempts to perpetrate an outrageous and audacious hoax upon those of us who pursue such mysterious and unknown beasts.

Certainly, for me at least, the absolute strangest story of all surfaced in the early part of 2006.

It all began on March 23, of that year, when England’s Chase Post newspaper included in its pages a story with the jaw-dropping title of Bigfoot Almost Caused Me To Lose My Baby! The story at issue followed in the immediate wake of a spate of very mysterious Bigfoot-like sightings in the nearby dark and dense woods of the sprawling Cannock Chase.

The Post stated to its readers: “Police chiefs have hit out at the dangers posed by the spoof ‘Bigfoot’ craze after a teenager almost lost her baby when a joker clad in a gorilla suit jumped in front of her car. And the concerns have been echoed by a leading councilor and conservationist, who fears the “irresponsible idiots” are causing harm to wildlife as well as people.”

The story was a deeply bizarre one, to say the absolute very least.

The incident in question had apparently occurred around 11.00 p.m. the previous weekend, in a dimly-lit woodland road in the village of Brocton, as the 19-year-old girl and her family drove home after they had dined at a restaurant in the pleasant, nearby locale of Milford. The girl said, as she recounted her story, that: “We noticed a BMW parked in the road. Suddenly it flashed its lights. Just then, out of nowhere, this person dressed in a gorilla suit jumped out in front of our car, flailing their arms like mad. Then they started running at the car like mad. It was terrifying.”

She continued: “Looking back it was obviously a fake suit, but late at night, in an isolated area like that, it was a very scary experience. I broad daylight, I suppose it could be quite funny, but this was 11 o’clock at night with no-one around. It’s very lonely there. If that had been someone with a heart condition, they could’ve had a heart attack. I screamed so loud. It was a real scare. It left me with fears that the trauma of it could have fatally harmed my baby.”

The girl’s highly irate father firmly and concisely told the Chase Post: “If I’d have caught the idiots, I’d have pasted them.” For American readers who may be wondering, “pasted them” is good old English terminology for “beaten the hell out of them”!

And the local police were hardly in a mood for laughter, either.

A spokesperson for Staffordshire Police Headquarters said at the time: ‘We take it very seriously because it may result in a Public Order Offence. The person [in the gorilla suit] may very well be in high spirits, but this would be viewed as a criminal offense.”

Local councillor John Burnett was determined to have his say on the admittedly bizarre affair, too: “This is the behaviour of an irresponsible idiot. At this time of year, there are all manner of ground-nesting birds in that area; the partridge, the pheasant, woodlarks, skylarks – many rare birds whose habitat and nesting could be destroyed by this kind of activity.”

Although the event in question was apparently quickly forgotten by the local media, this case is a very instructive one, and it firmly serves as a definite warning to those of us that spend much of our time pursuing lake-monsters, Bigfoot, werewolves and the Chupacabras,

We should always remember that although the overwhelming majority of all people are honest when it comes to reporting their sightings of unknown animals – there is always someone who wants to try and deceive both the cryptozoological research community and the media and get their fifteen-minutes of fame - or, maybe, their fifteen-minutes of infamy would be a better way of putting it.

Nick Redfern’s new book, Contactees: A History of Alien-Human Interaction has just been published