SOURCE: Ryan Dube topsecretwriters
If you think that I’m joking when I say that the New Hampshire Supreme Court is going to be hearing a case between Bigfoot and the New Hampshire Division of Parks and Recreation, I’m not.
Two years ago, Jonathan Doyle, a performance artist, bought a Bigfoot costume from iParty, and then headed up to the White Mountains in New Hampshire to parade around in his suit and then interview hikers that witnessed his antics.
Returning home, Jonathan posted the video to his YouTube account.
Jonathan, unlike so many other hoaxters on Youtube, wasn’t simply creating a fake Yeti video and then claiming that it was real.
Instead, he was showing how people react to the surreal – how people respond when something completely out of the ordinary takes place in a setting that is otherwise quite ordinary.
Kicked Out of Monadnock State Park
Upon returning to Monadnock State Park in the White Mountains this year, he and his friends were met by a park manager that told him to leave the mountain with his cameras, and that he would need a permit if he wanted to continue filming in the park.
Jonathan Doyle later went to the New Hampshire Civil Liberties Foundation for help. In his view – he is not a commercial film company, just an independent artist trying to express his free speech rights.
New Hampshire is standing behind the Park Service decision to kick Doyle out of the park, citing park policies that ban commercial filming. According to the NH Attorney General those policies can’t apply only to large commercial film crews – instead they are:
“…narrowly tailored to serve the legitimate, significant, and substantial governmental interests of managing varied and competing uses of park resources, mitigating the impacts of commercial events, protecting and conserving the park, protecting visitors from unwelcome and unwanted interference, annoyance or danger.”
Who Gets to Choose What’s Annoying?
With such a wide range of reasons for kicking someone out of the National Park, the policy appears to provide the Park service with broad rights to remove anyone from NH State Parks that they feel may be causing “unwelcome and unwanted interference, annoyance or danger.”
Apparently, the organization with the power to make the decision regarding what sort of activity is annoying or unwanted is the Park Service.
Both Doyle and the New Hampshire Civil Liberties Foundation feels that the policies are set up in a way where the Park Service may quash Civil Liberties of the public if they so desire.
The Civil Liberties Foundation wants to preserve, “the right of the little guy to express himself artistically.”
According to Doyle, he represents the “little guy” just trying to have some fun on YouTube, not a major commercial interest with expendable cash to buy the freedom to express his opinion.
“I am maintaining the integrity of being real, enjoying day-to-day things, and having fun with your friends. If I let that go, I’ve given up a significant right to the state.”
Jonathan Doyle is described by friends as a free spirit – an artist and futurist that will pack up and head out on an adventure on a whim.
By creating the Bigfoot videos in NH and then interviewing passersby, Jonothan was doing what so many artists across the world do – he was exploring human nature and social behavior.
But above all, he was just having some fun with friends on YouTube.
