Last month I made a trip with friends to the other coast of Florida, and our route over there was the Tamiami trail. Guess what’s on that trail? The Skunk Ape Research Headquarters, of course!

It’s tough to express how disappointing this institution is to visit. It’s basically a ramshackle gift shop fronting a petting zoo and a campground area. There are also three large animal statues outside, one of a Florida Panther, the other two of a gorilla and of a lion that were probably appropriated from a put-put course or the like.

The large words above the entrance beckon the travelers inside. What comprises the exhibit? Another gorilla statue, a few shelves split between Skunk Ape merchandise and a some lean Skunk Ape documentary evidence.

And that’s it. It’s hardly worth the stop. The rest of the gift shop is devoted to more standard Florida tchotchkes, and the whole store is festooned with cobwebs and other unmistakable signs of decay. At the back of the store is the entrance to a petting zoo.

The driving force behind the belief in a Skunk Ape living near the everglades was a Mr. David Shealy, who owns the research headquarters. It’s my understanding, at least from anecdotal accounts, that Mr. Shealy has become bored and disillusioned with the whole Skunk Ape thing because it hasn’t made as much money as he hoped. I’m sure there are still hardcore Bigfoot researchers who will hold on to their belief in a Skunk Ape in south Florida, but the Skunk Ape Research Headquarters is a monument to a weird idea whose time looks past.

It happened while I was on vacation, but a local TV station ran a story about a “mysterious sea creature” being spotted off of  Sand Key Park. The incident happened on August 30th, and the news story is quick to connect the monster to the Normandy Nessie flap from last year.

I’ve embedded the entire story below. There’s not much to say about it. The family that spotted the creature isn’t identified, and the cell phone video of the incident shows absolutely no creature at all. I’m sure the witnesses saw something, but there’s no reason presented to explain why we should assume they saw a sea monster and not some normal sea creature, like a manatee or a shark. And yet again the anaconda explanation is trotted out again, because Florida still isn’t over worrying about giant snakes for no reason.

Need something with big teeth to be afraid of? The St. Pete Times has had you covered this last week.

On Sunday they profiled Capt. Bill Goldschmitt, a shark fisherman with a somewhat outdated view of the shark situation in the Gulf of Mexico. In the course of the interview Capt. Goldschmitt claimed to have once almost caught Old Hitler, a giant hammerhead shark that supposedly lives in Tampa Bay.

“I had him once,” Capt. Bill says. But everything went wrong, as they do in the good fishing stories. Old Hitler was just too big — at least 18 feet long. The wind roared and lightning flashed. Capt. Bill howled at the elements. The hook straightened. Old Hitler sank below the waves.

I think we can write that off as a fish story.

In more substantial news, the Times reported today that the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has given a trapper permission to kill a 10-foot long alligator that has been seen in the canals around the Roser Park area. This is a very large gator for such an urban area, and it probably would be best for the local pet population if the trapper finds it.

FlashNews, a service that provides “daily exclusive offbeat pop culture news items for use by radio/TV producers, on-air talent and print/website editors” ran an item today about Skunk Ape mating season. It’s now! The source seems to be Dave Shealy, he of the Skunk Ape Research Headquarters. Other factoids include Shealy’s determination that there are seven to nine Skunk Apes living in the Everglades right now, and that women who are menstruating can attract the alleged primate.

If you hear something about Skunk Ape sex on the radio or on TV in the next couple days, the FlashNews piece will be a the reason. I’m going to contact Shealy and see if he’ll be willing to talk about where he got his population estimate from.

In recent months we’ve been hearing a lot about snakes here in Florida, specifically the Burmese python population that’s threatening to burst out of the Everglades and consume all small children south of Gainesville. I’ve written about it a couple times, if indirectly.

At the beginning of February the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conversation Commission called for a special six week hunt for the pythons supposed to be infesting the Everglades. So how many pythons did the hunters find?

Zero.

I don’t want to minimize the environmental danger of invasive species like Burmese pythons, they certainly can be a problem. But so much of what we’ve been hearing about these pythons in the local media, and even on national shows like MonsterQuest, has been irrational and not really based on the facts. There’s really no reasonable scenario where these snakes become dangerous to humans.

It reminds me of when I was a kid, I was so worried about killer bees. I saw shows and read in magazines that killer bees were coming, that they were going to be everywhere in the U.S. by 1990, that they’d be killing hundreds of people a year. It never happened. The threat of killer bees loomed large in my psyche for a long time, until I finally read something that explained why africanized honey bees aren’t that much of a problem, and that’s where we are today.

This morning I was looking through the news feeds, minding my own business, and — What’s this? “‘Oriental yeti’ discovered in China”? That’s the headline in the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph. I’m not sure how an “Oriental yeti” is supposed to be different from the regular kind of yeti, but surely this is a momentous occasion! One of the most famous cryptzoological subjects, captured for all to see! And there’s even a picture of the creature!

…

They’re kidding, right? I’m not exactly sure what that is, but by no stretch of the imagination is it a yeti, oriental or otherwise. I’d guess it’s a civet or something similar that lost its hair for some reason. This is worse than those mangy coyotes that were being passed off as chupacabras a few years ago.

I guess the big question here is how did the concept of the yeti get attached to this poor thing. Surely “yeti” isn’t such a general term that it apples to any unknown animal in Asia. As far as I can tell the story originated in the Telegraph, though they don’t really explain where they got and why they think it’s newsworthy. The creature may have been captured near the Himalayas, but that’s still an enormous stretch to call it a yeti. The Daily Mail also ran a story on the creature, though they are probably just repeating what they read in the Telegraph the day before. The Mail does have a useful “Femail” sidebar providing links to all recent stories on their website with slutty pictures of women, so that’s helpful.

If I can find any more about where this story came from and how it got the sensationalist “yeti” label attached to it, I’ll update this post.

This week’s episode of MonsterQuest was the second they’ve done on the subject of werewolves in Wisconsin and the midwest. That may sound ludicrous, but stories about the “Beast of Bray Road” and various “Dogmen” have been part of the folklore up there for the last 80 years or so. The episode was split into two separate investigations. In the first, the show sent three people into a swamp in Michigan to look for evidence of the wolfman. The expedition party was made up of a tracker, a cryptozoologist, and a Native American expert on local werewolf legends. Long story short, the three didn’t find anything, but that’s hardly surprising. The cryptozoologist argued that belief in animal transformations could be a metaphor for moving between dimensions, and spent her time in the woods detecting “primal fear.” The Native American guy ended the expedition looking confused and even a little physically shaken that “Nature” didn’t accept his offering of a seashell wrapped in wool and show him a wolfman.

The other part of the episode had to do with the “Gable film,” an alleged home movie that showed up in 2007. It was given to local Michigan radio DJ Steve Cook, who was promoting a song about the “Michigan Dogman,” and it became quite well known on the internet among cryptozoology enthusiasts. Here’s the entire film. The good stuff doesn’t happen until the end, around the 3:05 mark.

There are of course several things about the film that scream “HOAX!” The lack of provenance. The oddly undetailed creature. The Blair Witch factor, with the cameraman filming his own death. As the movie started to catch on Steve Cook went on the record as saying that the film was an “unintended hoax.” By this he meant that while he still didn’t know where the footage came from exactly he suspected it had been filmed as part of a docudrama movie in the 1970s, but it was being taken as real today. The whole thing was so shady that even Loren Coleman of Crytomundo declared that the film was almost certainly a hoax. In case you’re not familiar with Mr. Coleman, he believes nearly everything. He once published pictures of a purple windsurfing rig someone said was Ogopogo. For him to declare something a hoax you know it has to be burying the needle of the hoax-o-meter. Any lingering credibility the Gable film might have had died when another clip showed up, supposedly showing the police investigating the death in the first film. It was an amateur clip too far.

By the end of this week’s MonsterQuest the full story of the Gable film hoax was told. The clip was created in 2007 by a man named Mike Agrusa, using vintage equipment. The “wolfman” was in fact Mike in a costume that was nothing more than an Army Surplus ghillie suit. A ghillie suit, in case you don’t play Modern Warfare 2, is a camouflage suit made up of strips of cloth or twine, typically used to either hide snipers or needlessly tackle pathetic potential sex offenders. Mike Agrusa didn’t have any particularly strong reason to perpetrate the hoax. It just happened that he had enough vintage vehicles sitting around his backyard to do it, so he did. Steve Cook knew the truth about the film from the beginning.

So we have an obvious hoax, accomplished with the simplest of materials. No suit built by John Chambers, no experts on animal locomotion. Surely this film clip couldn’t have fooled any of the cryptozoology enthusiasts who are so eager to declare the Patterson-Gimlin film genuine? Let’s see what some of the commentators at Cryptomundo had to say about the Gable film, and just for fun, let’s only look at posts after Coleman declared the film a hoax. (All comments are from this page, or this page.)

First there are people claiming that the “creature” in the film was doing things that were impossible for a person in a suit to do.

If it is a hoax, I still want to know how it was done. Amazing.

This thing runs on all fours and covers distance, FAST! Is there any human that can run on all fours like this, be that speedy and cover that amount of distance? Maybe, but to me it seems that a human would have to be a feral child brought up by wolves that had always been running around on 4 legs. So, a hairy feral human could be the beast in the Gable film.

This film continues to puzzle me. I don’t think it’s a human in a suit. At one point, it appears as if all four legs are off the ground, as if the subject is leaping during its charge. I don’t know if a human being could do that at that speed, especially while wearing a suit.

Fifth, the jump: This, in my opinion, could be the most significant part of the film.I challenge anyone in the world to run and jump, lifting all of your limbs completely off of the ground, land properly, and continue a charge.(On your hands and knees of course, as the above article suggests a hoaxer has done.)

And from what we’ve seen of hoaxes this one seems too elaborate (sort of like the PG film). Yes we can do it with CGI but it is expensive. If someone paid to create this footage artificially then I think such a sizeable project would’ve spilled the beans. People talk.

The genuineness of the creature therefore proven, commenters then went on to spin some remarkable scenarios to explain how the film could appear to be hoax, but still feature a real monster. Some of these comments follow from some of the ones above, as you’ll see from some of the peculiar obsessions.

I don’t believe this is a hoax, but a misinterpretation of a film taken at a drive-through wild animal park. While it does look like a gorilla, I think it’s more probable that it is a large baboon, and that the passenger of the vehicle jumped out to get a closer look. This would also explain why he was filming in a moving vehicle to begin with… to film animals in the park.

.

Perhaps the film was never turned in to the authorities because the film maker knew he wasn’t supposed to be outside of his car in the wild animal park. My guess is that alcohol was involved.

However, in every known case of feral children, they ALL want nothing to do with humans, and all of them run AWAY from anything human. If this was a feral beast, it seems that it would also run away instead of becoming aggressive. So, I have to rule out anything feral and anyone in a costume. It’s just too fast and too agile.

The scenery looks like a typical midwestern clearing in a woodland. It doesn’t look African, or tropical in any way. So, not being tropical means ruling out a gorilla, unless you want to make the standard statement that some Gorilla escaped from a zoo. Yeah, sure.

About the best guess as to anything known, would have to be a silverback. But if you take a close look at the video, and actually take a look at a real silverback running, they just do not look all that familiar. The Gable beast looks very squat, and it appears to have pointy ears, although this is a matter of interpretation of what there is.

So, my opinion is something unknown. It doesn’t fit into anything that is normal, or what we people perceive as normal, anyway. And couple that with the fact that it appears to attack the camera person, that is certainly abnormal behavior indeed! And so it goes.

I don’t mean to pick on the commenters at Cryptomunodo. Well, maybe a little bit. But I think that these comments are instructive in how it’s possible to see proof for your preconceived beliefs in a short, fuzzy clip of film. The fact is that as it was originally presented the Gable film wasn’t proof of anything. Without knowing where it came from or who shot it, it was useless as evidence. While most of the online cryptozoological community was at least cautious about endorsing the film as genuine, there was a lot of weaseling about, saying “the film’s interesting” and “we shouldn’t be too quick to disregard it as evidence.”

Now, compare the Gable film to the famous Patterson-Gimlin film. The P-G film shows almost no detail on the alleged creature, no matter how much “enhancing” Bigfoot enthusiasts do to it. The P-G film is associated with a man (Patterson) who was a liar and con man, even according to his friends, and the provenance of P-G film is fuzzy. The original negative is supposedly lost, making some troubling contradictions about the timeline Patterson claimed in shooting and developing the film impossible to reconcile. In short, the Patterson film should be as suspect as the Gable film. The only difference I can see between the two is that the Gimlin of Patterson-Gimlin, Bob Gimlin, is still around, and his story of how Patterson shot the film has been endorsed as honest by Bigfooters. I would just point out that, as the case of the Gable film shows, people don’t have to have immediately obvious reasons to participate in a hoax.

For a strange sideshow to all this, check out Steve Cook’s blog on the truth about the film coming out. He seems upset that people are calling him a liar, just because he lied. It’s an odd stance to take. As near as I can figure, he thinks that his statement back in 2007 that the film was an “unintended hoax” should have stopped all interest in it, even though that explanation was just ambiguous (and untruthful) enough to keep the story going. Odd that a man so interested in wolfmen would be so unfamiliar with the story of the boy who cried wolf.

It’s often instructive to step back from complicated paranormal claims and just say, “What’s the best evidence the believers have?” I’ve been thinking about the Skunk Ape recently, so I thought I’d take a look at the best evidence for that.

In case you’re not familiar with what the Skunk Ape is, a quick rundown on the cryptid. Basically, Skunk Ape is Bigfoot for the southern part of the United States. It’s called Skunk Ape because it’s supposed to have a rotten egg smell. Of course no specimen has been found and scientifically described, but that hasn’t stopped Bigfooters from declaring that it’s a separate species from the more famous “Sasquatch” type Bigfoot of the Pacific northwest. Loren Colemen, for example, declares in his book Bigfoot: The True Story of Apes in America that Skunk Ape is a partially aquatic ape, as opposed to the more hominid Sasquatch. (Colemen also says there’s a third ape living in America, the aggressive Eastern Bigfoot.)

Perhaps the biggest proponent of the Skunk Ape in Florida is Dave Shealy, who founded the Skunk Ape Research Headquarters in Ochopee. He’s been collecting tracks, sightings, and photos for years, though nothing he has is very convincing to me, and he’s been involved in some outright hoaxes. He’s of the opinion that Skunk Ape is a hominid,  though many of the tracks he’s collected have three toes instead of five. I’ve always wondered if the three-toed tracks could have been left by gators, but I’m not an expert on such things.

The Skunk Ape is not as well represented in pop culture as the forest-dwelling Bigfoot, though one could make the argument that the creature in The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972) was a Skunk Ape.

So what’s the best evidence for the Skunk Ape’s existence? I think most crytozoologists would point to the so-called “Myakka Skunk Ape Photos,” which came to light in 2000. Without further ado, here they are.

So case closed, right? Pictures of the Skunk Ape. What more is there to say?

Quite a bit. Let’s talk about where the pictures came from. They were received, along with a letter, by the Sarasota, FL police department around December 22, 2000. The text of the letter is as follows.

Dear Sir or Madam,

a

Enclosed please find some pictures I took in late September or early Oct of 2000.  My husband says he thinks it is an orangutan.  Is someone missing an orangutan?  It is hard to judge from the photos how big this orangutan really is.  It is in a crouching position in the middle of standing up from where it was sitting.  It froze as soon as the flash sent off.  I didn’t even see it as I took the first picture, because it was so dark.  As soon as the flash sent off for the second time it stood up and started to move.  I then heard the orangutan walk off into the bushes.  From where I was standing, I judge it as being about six and a half to seven feet tall in a kneeling position.  As soon as I realized how close it was I got back to the house.  It had an awful smell that lasted well after it had left my yard.  The orangutan was making deep “woomp” noises.  It sounded much farther away then it turned out to be.  If I had known it was this close to the hedge roll as it was I wouldn’t have walked up as close as I did.  I’m a senior citizen and if this animal had come out of the hedge roll after me there wasn’t a thing I could have done about it.  I was about ten foot away from it when it stood up.  I’m concerned because my grandchildren like to come down and explore in my back yard.  An animal this big could hurt someone seriously.  For two nights prior, it had been taking apples that my daughter brought down from up north, off our back porch.  These pictures were taken on the third night it had raided my apples.  It only came back one more night after that and took some apples that my husband had left out in order to get a better look at it.  We left four apples.  I cut two of them in half.  The orangutan only took the whole apples.  We didn’t see it take them.  We waited up but eventually had to go to bed.  We got a dog back there now and as far as we can tell the orangutan hasn’t come back.

a

Please find out where this animal came from and who it belongs to.  It shouldn’t be loose like this, someone will get hurt.  I called a friend that used to work with animal control back up north and he told us to call the police.  I don’t want any fuss or people with guns traipsing around behind our house.  We live near I75 and I’m afraid this orangutan could cause a serious accident if someone hit it.  I once hit a deer that wasn’t even a quarter of the size of this animal and totalled my car. At the very least this animal belongs in a place like Bush Gardens where it can be looked after properly.  Why haven’t people been told that an animal this size is loose?  How are people to know how dangerous this could be? If I had known an animal like this was loose I wouldn’t have approached it. I saw on the news that monkeys that get loose can carry Hepatitis and are very dangerous. Please look after this situation. I don’t want my backyard to turn into someone else’s circus.

a

God Bless

a

I prefer to remain anonymous

So what can we tell about these pictures from all the evidence presented? Is this irrefutable evidence that the Skunk Ape is a real unknown ape of some sort, native to Florida? Or is something else going on here?

Unlike many pictures of cryptids, at lease these are pictures of an actual animal, and not a blob or something else so indistinct as to be unidentifiable. The pictures were taken in the dark, and apparently no more than a couple of seconds apart. The animal looks like a orangutan, but the pictures are just ambiguous enough that it could be unknown large primate, if said primate looks a heck of a lot like a orangutan. Bigfooters have argued that it’s possible the Skunk Ape just happens to look like a orangutan, and I don’t find anything impossible about that assertion, assuming the Skunk Ape exists in the first place.

What about the setting? The vegetation looks like local Florida flora. Could possibly be some other places as well, but there’s not enough information to tell for sure.

Which brings us to the letter. The letter is where I begin to smell a hoax. There are essentially two lines of evidence that point towards that conclusion.

First, the letter writer’s motives are not internally consistent. She voices the concern several times that the animal might be dangerous, and even abrades the authorities for not doing anything about the animal, but then she withholds her name, address, or even the most basic information that might help the police find the animal. The only location she gives is that she lives “near I75″ (I-75), which in Sarasota covers about half the city. (Without much exaggeration I’d say everyone in Sarasota either lives “near the water,” or “near I-75.”) Her explanation that she doesn’t want the police “traipsing around behind [her] house” seems directly at odds with her worry that the animal might attack her grandchildren. If your grandkids are in danger, you put up with a little inconvenience and let the police do their job.

The other thing that makes my nose tingle is that while the letter writer is short on information that might actually help find the creature, she does include a bunch of details that only seem to be there to bolster the identification of  the creature as a Skunk Ape or Bigfoot. The size of “six and a half to seven feet tall” seems overly precise for the circumstances and would make the animal about twice as big as the largest orangutan. The smell she mentions, of course, is the primary characteristic of the Skunk Ape. The deep “whoomp” doesn’t sound much like  the vocalization of the orangutan, nor are orangutans nocturnal, though both attributes have been given to Bigfoot over the years. And finally the creature’s apparent love of apples is something it shares with Bigfoot, at least according to Bigfooters. Right around the time this letter was received in Sarasota the story of the “Skookum Cast” was breaking, and the bait used to lure the alleged Bigfoot in that case was also apples.

So what are we left with? We have pictures that appear to show an orangutan in what might be Florida location, or possibly somewhere else. We don’t know who took the photos, nor when and under what circumstances. That’s it. Add in the suspicious nature of the letter that was received with the letters, and I think it’s most likely these are actual pictures of an orangutan that someone is trying to pass off as a Swamp Ape.

MonsterQuest, the cryptozoology-themed show that runs on the History Channel every Wednesday, started its fourth season last month. I thought I’d take a look at the episodes that have aired, especially since most of them had some connection to Florida.

The season opened with the double episode “Monster Sharks,” which was about great white sharks allegedly becoming more dangerous along America’s coasts. I’m not an expert on sharks so I have no idea if we should be more worried about sharks now than in the past, but I do question the use of the term “monster” in this context. While “monster” is a somewhat fuzzy term, I don’t think it should be applied to completely normal animals living in their known ranges. If an animal was unusually large or unusually aggressive I might call it “monster,” or if it’s something unknown to science I might call it “a monster,” but the whole episode dealt with great whites of regular size doing what great whites usually do where they usually do it. Beyond that, “Monster Sharks” struck me as a lot of scaremongering. It’s even possible this episode contributed to the speculation, ultimately unfounded, that a shark attack victim in Stuart earlier this month had been killed by great whites.

The second episode of the season was “Hillbilly Beast,” which was about Bigfoot sightings in Kentucky. A big part of the episode was devoted to the photo that appears to the right, taken by a Kentucky man using a surveillance camera in his back yard last September. While the photo made waves briefly, it was soon revealed to be a picture of a black bird in flight. This obvious explanation was not offered until the very end of the episode, and was downplayed. It’s a shame, because the whole, sad episode shows how wishful thinking can find things in photos that aren’t really there.

“Giant Pythons in America” was entirely about the Burmese python population in the Florida Everglades. The episode opened with a dramatization of the tragic death of  Shaiunna Hare, a toddler who was killed by a pet python last summer. The MonsterQuest team then went into the Everglades and found some pythons, and there was a lot more scaremongering even though there’s no evidence that wild pythons have hurt anybody. The snakes are certainly an ecological hazard, but to imply that they attack people, as the show did, simply isn’t true. The show also made the completely irresponsible suggestion that the pythons might hybridize with local poisonous snakes, even though incompatible genitalia make that impossible. I also have big issues with the language employed in “Giant Pythons in America.” “Giant” should describe an animal significantly larger than normal, but, as far as I know, none of the wild pythons are particularly large for pythons. The term “taking over” was also used, which is also not correct.

My language gripes reached a crescendo with the next episode, “Giant Killer Bees.” Even if I grant calling Africanized honey bees “killer bees,” where the hell does “giant” come from? In fact, Africanized honey bees are slightly smaller than regular honey bees! The episode also threw around terms like “murderous rampage” to describe the Africanized population’s spread through the southern United States, which is a funny way to talk about one or two deaths a year. Far more people are killed by wasps and regular honey bees, and I don’t think we’d say they were on a “murderous rampage.” The episode was yet more scaremongering, with MonsterQuest people looking around Las Vegas for places killer bees might possibly live (though none were found), and there was a pretty neat demonstration that if you repeatedly poke your hand into a wild hive the bees will be really, really mad. That Africanized honey bees are often domesticated was completely glossed over.

This week’s episode, “Mothman,” might be the most unexpected episode of MonsterQuest yet. Why? Because it was almost… skeptical. Sure, the episode trotted out the usual silliness about Mothman sightings presaging the collapse of the Silver Bridge over the Ohio River even though there’s no connection between the two events that would make sense to anybody but delusional paranoiacs. The rest of the episode, though, gave a lot of play to Joe Nickell’s theory that many of the famous Mothman and Jersey Devil sightings may be people startled by barn owls. Nickell did a perception experiment that proved that people are bad observers of how large objects are in the dark, and another team demonstrated how striking eye-shine can be from even well-known animals. Someone who came into the episode with no knowledge of the Mothman would probably come away with the impression that the witnesses were seeing birds at night. As of this writing you can see the whole episode here.

Is this new skeptical angle an anomaly? Probably, but I have a little hope. I think MonsterQuest is running out of cryptozoological subjects to tackle (only two of the five episodes so far this season were cryptozoological at all), and the usual formula of looking for a creature for an hour and not finding anything is probably starting to get a little old, even to credulous audiences. Maybe bringing some of the searches to a conclusion, even if that conclusion is that the creature doesn’t exist, will be employed as a way to add drama to MonsterQuest going forward.

Over at BBC Earth they have some of the first footage ever of an oarfish swimming in it’s natural habitat. This rarely seen fish lives in deep water, and is only seen at the surface at when it’s dying or dead. Its large size and odd appearance has inspired reports of sea serpents for hundreds of years.

While the oarfish is large, I’m not quite sure where the BBC got the measurement of 17m for the maximum length of the animal. The largest confirmed specimens are about 11m long.