THIS BEAR STORY IS GETTING MORE AND MORE PECULIAR

Yet another press release has come out from the Red Rose Chain Theatre Company which is staging an outdoor production of A Winter's Tale in the forest in August. It begins: "A 'bear' spotted roaming a Suffolk forest was actually an actor in costume promoting an outdoor production of Shakespeare."

This is actually the third different explanation for events in as many days. First we were told that the thespian bods had faked a video, then that they had made up the eyewitness sightings, and now that the sightings were provoked by a bloke in a costume.

This is rather odd. :

Actor and designer Jimmy Grimes said: "We didn't want to scare anyone. The idea is to get kids interested and excited about the play. We want to create a family-friendly, fairytale feel for the production.

Jimmy dude, you are certainly doing that, because now - in the best traditions of fortean investigation- nobody quite knows what was going wrong. According to all the stories:

The 'bear' was spotted by three people including Jenny Pearce who saw it as she finished a picnic with her three-year-old son. She said: "It was really big, moving through the trees. I picked up my son and went back to the car."

Now, no-one at the CFZ is disputing that the whole thing is an elaborate, and furthermore a well-staged hoax. But what exactly did happen. Did Jenny Pearce actually exist? Was she a figment of the imagination? Was she a friend or associate of the theatre company who just joined in for the lulz? Or did she see something?

If she did see something, did she see the shadowy figure of some bloke in a bear costume wandering about in the woods? If so, it must have been a good 'un! Even in these intellectually impoverished days when no-one seems to know ow't about the natural world, one would have thought that an eyewitness could have distinguished between a dude in a bear costume and a bipedal member of the family ursidae.

Or has the cutesy cartoon ethic which has so permeated society to the extent that intelligent, attractive, and otherwise seemingly together young people like the ones that I met at the Royal Academy back in January, call themselves members of a `furry fandom`, put on childish costumes, and have turned to recreating their childhood TV cartoon favourites to get their sexual jollies, permeated society to such an extent, that witnesses truly think that bears waalk bipedally all the time? If this is the case then Jenny probably ran back to her car in order to protect her picnic basket from Yogi and Boo Boo.

This is all very peculiar.

As I said above, nobody here is disputing the fact that the story is basically a hoax, but like all stories in the fortean ominiverse, it has developed a life of its own. Twice so far this year (the seal carcass in January, and the `Devil's Footprints` in March) the CFZ has become involved in a news story which balooned out of all control, and became far more important than it actually deserved. Darren naish also noted the same thing in connection with the absurd fuss made over a dead racoon last year, that was so banal that we ignored it to our detriment. Those who commented on it, had enormous amounts of media attention and tens of thousands of visitors to their websites.

I have a sneaking suspicion that this `Montauk Monster Syndrome` is an increasingly important phenomenon as far as cryptozoology is concerned, and in the current era of mass, and almost instantaeneous, communication it is only going to become more important.

So watch this space, and examine the aetiology of the next nonsensensical crypto-story as diligently as you can.