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.
