The skunk ape, also known as the swamp ape, stink ape, Florida Bigfoot, myakka ape, and myakka skunk ape, is a hominid cryptid said to inhabit the U.S. states of Florida, North Carolina, and Arkansas, although reports from Florida are more common. It is named for its appearance and for the unpleasant odor that is said to accompany it. Reports of the skunk ape were particularly common in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1974, sightings of a large, foul-smelling, hairy, ape-like creature, which ran upright on two legs were reported in suburban neighborhoods of Dade County, Florida. Stories relating to Skunk Ape encounters may go back to early Indian legends, which speak of giants living along the Kissimmee River, and the “Sand People” and “Mangrove People.” Some believe these legends were describing skunk apes. Worthy of consideration is the historical account of Henry Tanner, an early pioneer in Orange County, who told about “finding Indian graves on the St. Johns River with skeletons as big as giants and skulls that would fit over a normal man’s head.” In 1935, workers excavating shell from an Indian mound unearthed “a human thigh bone that was as long as a man’s whole leg.” Were these skeletal remains of very big humans, or perhaps an unknown bipedal creature? In 1959, three boy scouts emerged in a panic from the Ocala National Forest with a wild tale of having been routed from their camp by a big, hairy monster. They said the thing had a human face and the body of an ape. Now this might be easy to dismiss as a boyish yarn if not for hundreds of similar stories. Take the case of a long-distance trucker that pulled into a rest stop along I-75 one night to catch a few winks. The trucker recounted how he was pulled from the cab of his truck by a hairy, Bigfoot creature. “It came right out of the dark and tried to get in the truck.” The thing carried him under one arm for several yards. “My face was pressed into its hair” the man told a reporter. “It smelled awful.” The trucker was able to kick himself free and made it back to his truck. The ape creature began pounding on the truck but after the driver gave a few blasts on his air horn the thing ran off into the woods. Perhaps the best skunk report was the one made in February 1971 by five archaeologists excavating an Indian mound deep in the Big Cypress Swamp one of the most isolated areas of Florida. I favor this one because it involved multiple witnesses, and presumably credible scholars in anthropology. The five men told of an unwelcome beast that crashed into their camp in the middle of the night and generally wrecked the place before running off into the swamp. The intruder was described as a large biped primate, without a neck, being 7 to 8 feet tall, about 700 pounds, and covered with shaggy white fur. The team later found footprints measuring 18 inches by 11 inches wide. Typical of other encounters, the witnesses complained about a sickening odor that lingered long after the creature had departed. Dave Shealy saw a skunk ape when he was ten years old. It was 1974, a few years after his father had come upon a set of footprints left by the creature. Dave was out deer hunting with his older brother, Jack, in the swamp behind his house, in what’s now Big Cypress National Preserve, when he encountered the ape. “It was walking across the swamp, and my brother spotted it first. But I couldn’t see it over the grass—I wasn’t tall enough,” Shealy says. “My brother picked me up, and I saw it, about 100 yards away. We were just kids, but we’d heard about it, and knew for sure what we were looking at. It looked like a man, but completely covered with hair.” In 2000, two photographs said to be of the skunk ape were taken by an anonymous woman and mailed to the Sheriffs Department of Sarasota County, Florida. The photographs were accompanied by a letter from the woman in which she claimed to have photographed an ape in her backyard.The woman wrote that on three different nights, an ape had entered her backyard to take apples left on her back porch. She was convinced the ape was an escaped orangutan. The pictures have become known to Bigfoot enthusiasts as the skunk ape photos. Loren Coleman is the primary researcher on the photographs, having helped track down the two photographs to an Eckerd photo lab at the intersection of Fruitville and Tuttle Roads in Sarasota, Florida. According to Chester Moore, Jr., the photographs were taken in Sarasota County near the Myakka River.
Posted on: Sun, 25 Jan 2015 04:32:32 +0000