What Ebert writes

I like what Ebert researched here. Finding nothing on this very news worthy topic:

As a newspaperman, I wondered: How could a 30-something stockbroker live and work for several years in New York in both the financial and photography worlds, disappear, have his picture appear in the papers and on TV, and not be recognized by someone?

That led me to Nexis-Lexis, a database search engine that prowls the complete texts of newspapers. I wanted to read the original news stories about Doug Bruce’s discovery in Coney Island and the search for his identity.

I couldn’t find any. Searching both American and British papers for 2003, and then for the past five years, I found no news items at all about Doug or Douglas Bruce, amnesiac, with or without the keywords Coney Island. Nor any stories about Coney Island and amnesia in 2003 without Bruce’s name. Nothing at all. Separate searches of the New York Times and London Telegraph files also failed to turn up anything. All the stories on Google and Google News deal with the movie.

I think it was a grand hoax. Something like this would have been picked up by the news media. He would have friends in New York who would have been concerned about his disappearance and gone to the police. His pets were taken care of by someone. Hmmmmm.