Is the hoax campaign to concrete over NYC’s favourite green space and build an airport a satire on incompetent transport policy or another product viral? Watch this space

“Environmentalists rally in support of Manhattan airport”. That got your attention, didn’t it? And that was precisely the intention of the Manhattan Airport Foundation, a mysterious organisation that has outlaid its proposals to bulldoze Central Park in New York city and build an airport instead.

The foundation put out a press release earlier this week saying that the “Triborough Association for Fair Treatment” – a group it says lobbies to get legislation drafted to help protect migratory birds from aircraft strikes – was putting its full support behind the building of a new airport in the heart of Manhattan as it would reduce the kind of bird-related incidents that brought down US Airways Flight 1549 back in January causing it to bellyflop into the Hudson.

It’s all nonsense, of course. The whole thing is a hoax – one that’s been getting plenty of attention all week and managing to snare a few suckers along the way, too. The Manhattan Airport Foundation is pure fiction, as are its plans for an airport. Only a few nanoseconds of consideration lead you to realise the last place on earth that would ever be concreted over to make way for an airport would be Central Park.

But who is behind the hoax? And why have they spent a considerable amount of time and effort (and, presumably, money) creating such a professional-looking website? Chances are the site will soon morph into an advert for something or other, as has happened with other web hoaxes in the past. Or it could be some web-savvy comedians looking for some viral marketing?

No one yet, though, seems to have undercovered the real identity of those behind the Manhattan Airport Foundation, or their motive. The website’s domain name was registered back in April (even though the foundation claims to have been founded in 2006), but the identity of the domain’s owner has been withheld. The foundation’s Twitter page has only been live since 8 June, and its address is listed as being on the 58th floor, 233 Broadway. Yet the building only has 57 floors.

A press release dated April of this year says the foundation is to receive “significant financial backing over the next five years” from the “Waalwijk Charitable Trust”. In addition to this, the “Tokyo-based holding company Yamanote Ltd” will be making a “substantial gift”. Again, both these organisations are fictional – Waalwijk is the name of a town in the Netherlands and Yamanote is an affluent area in Tokyo.

The only person’s name mentioned anywhere on the site is a press officer called “Audrey Cortlandt”. Again, nothing of note shows up online for that name, although it does throw up some interesting anagrams – “Lady Dancer Tutor” being one of them. Not that this really helps us, though.

The plot thickens.