Puzzling "Horse Boy" Is The Latest Internet Superstar

One of the most bizarre features of life in the early 21st Century is the rise of the instant Internet celebrity -- a formerly obscure, even marginal figure with an inconsequential claim to fame, who nevertheless suddenly goes viral and becomes an object of fascination for millions of people all over the planet. We've seen this happen to the "Leave Britney Alone!" guy, cyber-pinup Tila Tequila, and even the Dramatic Chipmunk(actually a gopher) that appeared on a Japanese children's television show.

But the latest instant Internet celebrity is even more offbeat than any of these. He's Horse Boy, apparently a young male who, for reasons unknown, is wearing an equine mask. He is seen inexplicably standing in front of a wall at 16 Hardgate in Aberdeen, Scotland in a Google Street View photograph.

Google's team of cars equipped with GPS devices and digital cameras have captured plenty of other unusual sights around the world by chance, including a car covered with sticky notes, and a man carrying a blow-up doll down the sidewalk. (From PC World, here's a slideshow of selected Google Street Views oddities.) But none of these have captured the imagination of Internet users as much as Horse Boy. An Aberdeen Evening Express article reports that the mysterious horse-mask wearer was first spotted by Aberdeen resident Russell Moffatt, 50, who was Googling to find an optician on Aberdeen's Hardgate.

"When I saw him I did a double take." Moffatt told the Evening Express. "I would be interested to find out who Horse Boy is."

News of Moffatt's peculiar discovery spread like kudzu through the UK media, since, after all, it's the sort of weirdness-of-the-day that no feature writer could resist. And readers responded enthusiastically. As this BBC News article details, dozens of people contacted the news organization, claiming either to know Horse Boy's identity or to have recently seen him. One reader from Germany claimed that he had met Horse Boy at a festival the previous weekend, while others insisted that they had seen him shopping in Norway, or playing golf in Spain. A YouTube video subsequently surfaced, showing a young man in a similar horse mask dancing in a fountain in Madrid.

A few people have actually claimed to be Horse Boy himself. An Internet marketer named Ian Wilcox claims on his website that "Horse Boy" is actually his older brother, a delivery driver. "In 2009, he was seeing the Google Astra driving around the streets of Aberdeen and decided to wait in a nearby street with his trademark horse's head! He didn't think it would make the Internet with Google blocking out faces, etc." Wilcox has created a Horse Boy YouTube channel, which includes a video of a man in a horse mask performing Soulja Boy's "Crank Dat."

Regardless of Horse Boy's identity, he's already outlasted Andy Warhol's dictum that in the future, we'd all get 15 minutes of fame. The original BBC News piece on him garnered more than a million page views, and Google already lists 74 news articles on him, including pieces on MSNBC.com and Huffington Post. STV.TV commentator David Coyle has blogged that Horse Boy is "the new Susan Boyle," a joking reference to the dowdy amateur singer who became an international sensation after her performance on a British TV show went viral on YouTube.