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.

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.

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.

Last night I got around to watching Sunday’s episode of American Paranormal, featuring Bigfoot. There was nothing groundbreaking, and it was obviously biased towards the Bigfoot being real. There were a couple of howlers, in particular when it came to the famous Patterson-Gimlin movie. Looking around the web though, I am finding a lot of comments about the TV show on the Bigfoot believers sites along the lines of, “Well, I guess that settles it, Bigfoot is real.”

The Patterson-Gimlin movie is the famous one of Bigfoot walking away from the cameraman, shot in 1968 by Roger Patterson, with Bob Gimlin nearby.  American Paranormal did a 3D scan of the Bluff Creek site, then tried to use what was known about the camera and the distance from the subject to determine how big the subject was. They came up with height for “Patty” (the cutsey name Bigfooters have given the subject in the film) of 4’8″. Oops. That’s not nearly large enough to qualify as Bigfoot. So the American Paranormal people assumed that Patterson was using a different lens (though not the lens known to be on the camera), and with that unsupported assumption in place the height of Patty was determined to be over 7 feet. What struck me about this whole part of the show was that there was another variable that American Paranormal never questioned, and that’s the distance from the camera to subject. Apparently Bob Gimlin estimated that Patterson was 100 feet from Patty when he was shooting, and I guess because Bigfooters are so invested in the honesty of Bob Gimlin they refuse to even acknowledge that he could be wrong about any aspect of the sighting. But if the 100 foot estimate is incorrect, either because of an honest mistake on Gimlin’s part or some deception, then the height of “Patty” could be almost anything. I’m also not sure why, if you believe in the truth of Patterson’s film, you’d need to do all this fussing with camera lenses and filming distances. Patterson made casts of the prints “Patty” allegedly made, and they’re 14.5 inches long. From that you should be able figure out how tall Patty is. While the calculation has been done in the past (estimating Patty to be 8 feet tall), I think that even most Bigfooters are a little leery of Patterson’s reputation for dishonesty. For example, we know so much about the camera he used because it was a rental and he never returned it, causing a criminal complaint. Therefore, the tracks Patterson cast are considered questionable.

One claim made about the Patterson film on American Paranormal seemed to be refuted by the very footage they showed. It was in the section of the show about Patty’s shambling gait. When a human walks, the heel strikes the ground first, but Bigfooters have claimed that Patty’s feet land flat on the ground. Yet in the stabilized footage from the Patterson film shown in the episode, it’s clearer than ever that, when you can see Patty’s feet, she walked with the heel striking first, perhaps even a little exaggeratedly so. It was only in the “reconstruction” of Patty’s movements after the point her feet stop being visible in the film that the flat-footed walking is supposed to be happening.

There’s another aspect of the Patterson film that isn’t directly related to the American Paranormal episode, but I think it should get highlighted more often. In 1957, when interest in Sasquatch was ramping up and just before the initial incidents that created Bigfoot (yes, initially Sasquatch and Bigfoot were different things), a man by the name of William Roe swore out an affidavit that he saw a Sasquatch “Indian” in 1955 on Mica Mountain in British Columbia. You can read his entire statement here. The most striking thing about his account is that the Sasquatch he saw was female, and had large hairy breasts. Roe also specifically mentions that the creature he saw walked heel first, something that he, I guess,  incorrectly thought was different from humans. Several other features of Roe’s sighting are similar to the Patterson film, including the way it ends: the Sasquatch walks away quickly, and even looks over its shoulder.

Even more interesting, in 1960, True magazine ran an article by Ivan T. Sanderson titled “A New Look at America’s Mystery Giant,” illustrated with an artist’s interpretation of the Roe sighting. I couldn’t find a good reproduction of the painting on the web, so I had to capture it from the Kindle version of Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend, an excellent book by Joshua Blu Buhs.

Compare that image to an iconic image from the Patterson film.

I find the resemblance striking. I suppose Bigfooters could say these are just two reports of the same creature, but that doesn’t quite wash. The elements that are most similar in the two images, like the bent-leg gait, the slumping posture, and swinging arms, are not included in Roe’s statement, so must be products of the illustrator’s imagination. Though we may never know exactly the circumstances of the Patterson film ‘s creation, I think it’s safe to say the hoaxers used the Roe sighting and the True illustration as a model for their encounter.

There’s a new special about Bigfoot coming to the National Geographic TV. You can see a couple clips here.

I wonder how the Bigfoot community is going to take Dr. Jeff Meldrum being described as “the world’s leading expert on Bigfoot.”

Today’s pop quiz comes from this article about a Bigfoot convention in Felton, CA. At the end one of the attendees is quoted as saying:

“All the stories about Bigfoot are so similar,” said [Jay] Bietz. “And to simply believe that the tens of thousands of people who say they have seen it are complete liars is insane.”

To find out the answer, highlight the redacted text below.

This is an excellent example of a false dichotomy. Mr. Bietz’s statement assumes that there are only two possibilities; either there really is a hairy biped sharing North America with humanity, or everyone who claims to have seen that hairy biped is lying. In fact, there are other possibilities, including the one that best fits the evidence, that the Bigfoot phenomenon contains some hoaxes and outright lies, but the vast majority of people who claim to have seen (or heard) a Bigfoot are sincere but mistaken.

Yesterday the following video was posted on the Tampa Taxi Shots, by Tim Fasano. No, a Skunk Ape didn’t try to take the taxi, though that would have been cool.

I’m going to let this run without comment for right now, though I’ll be returning to the subject of Tim Fasano soon. For right now I’ll just point out the odd fact that as of this writing Mr. Fasano has posted this video on his personal site, but not on the Florida Bigfoot Hunter blog, which he also runs.