I don't know what's more amazing: that it took the Weekly and Huntington Beach Police this long to get to the bottom of something, or that the craze at the center of it (Pokemon Go) has pretty much fizzled out in the meantime.
In July, we were informed that “citizen police” from a homeowner's association was handing out citations to people playing the annoying Pokemon Go cell phone challenges at Huntington Beach's Central Park.
Not wanting to get off our Ditto derrieres to actually check it out in person, we called Huntington Beach Police Department brass, who told us these citizen patrols were news to them and that they'd check it out.
Then, we didn't hearing anything about it again for weeks and weeks.
Then, Pokemon Go's creators shit on Pokemon Go, saying it was lame or something like that.
Then, Pokemon Go shed 10 million users.
I believe Pokemon Go is now wedged under an uneven leg, holding steady a wobbly table.
Anyway, the Weekly received word yesterday from Officer Jennifer Marlatt of the Huntington Beach Police Public Information Office of something she came across while looking for something else online.
“If you hadn’t already been made aware,” she wrote in an email, “the entire thing was a filmed Jack Vale prank and the 'anonymous' caller was Vale himself.”
Ah yes, Jack Vale.
As you'll see by the related articles, the Weekly and Huntington Beach Police Department are already familiar with prankster Vale's YouTube work.
So here it is:
They're on the news!
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.