Bigfoot might live in Prospect Park!
A Fort Greene videographer claims to have shot footage showing the legendary Sasquatch lumbering around a wooded area of Brooklyn’s backyard near the Prospect Park Zoo during Tuesday’s snowstorm.
“I don’t know what it is, but it looks like Bigfoot,” a man going by the name Russell Strark said. “I don’t know what to say, man, I’ve never seen something like this.”
Strark said he was working to launch a YouTube channel featuring time-lapse videos of Brooklyn and had set up several cameras to catch the snowfall on Monday night. But he said he never bargained for what turned up on one of the memory cards.
The clip shows a still forest scene with snow falling around 7 am on Tuesday, Strark said. Enter a tall, dark figure on the left side of the screen. It crouches to dig in the snow for a moment, then walks down a hill in the center of the frame and out of sight.
The bipedal beast walks with a distinct hunch, and Strark said the way it scoops up the snow reminds him of an animal digging for nuts, or a rodent digging a hole. It is unclear if the humanoid-or-simian creature is wearing clothes, but Strark said he takes the dark material covering its body to be hair. He rejected the notion that the being might be a homeless person, or his buddy dressed up in a Bigfoot costume.
“I think it’s his posture, and the way he doesn’t have on anything that looks like a mask or a jacket,” he said. “He’s covered in hair and looks like he’s scavenging around. I don’t think it’s just some bum.”
Strark said he is far from a conspiracy theorist, but has no other explanation for the figure his camera recorded.
“I don’t believe in the horoscope let alone a f—— bigfoot,” he said.
Strark is a bit of a mystery himself. The video is the first on his YouTube account, and profile photos accompanying that account and his e-mail address picture NBC News investigative reporter Jeff Rossen. Searches for “Russell Strark” on Facebook, Twitter, and whitepages.com did not yield any results, and Strark declined to provide further proof of his identity.
Upon publication of this story online, Strark changed his Gmail profile photo to a mugshot of Martin Scorcese’s nephew Frank.
The supposed Bigfoot sighting comes on the heels of two coyote incursions into the distant island of Manhattan.
Sightings of large, hair-covered, humanoid animals have occurred in the wilderness areas of North America for more than 400 years, according to the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization.
A spokesman for the Prospect Park Alliance, which manages the park, declined to comment. The Prospect Park Zoo and the Field Researchers did not respond to requests for comment.
Bigfoot isn’t the only animal — living or dead — that can be found in Prospect Park. Brooklyn’s backyard is also home to squirrels (both gray and white), goats, turtles, ducks, possums, swans, red-tailed hawks, raccoons, and most famously, Canadian geese — which are frowned upon by the government.
It is unclear how the illusive Sasquatch — which is believed to be about eight-feet tall — could have made it to Brooklyn undetected, but there were 101 supposed sightings of the beast in New York state in 2011, and it is plausible that it took a taxi from Manhattan on Halloween, provided it had the cab fare, of course.
