17. The Florida Skunk Ape was caught on camera in 2001, and has been haunting dreams ever since
Like Arkansas, Florida has its own Bigfoot which seems to thrive in its humid climate. Known as the Skunk Ape, owing to its unbearable body odor, accounts in the Sunshine State appeared since the 1960s. Unconvincing video footage and the usual accounts of encounters were ably topped by the astonishing photos (above) which surfaced in 2001. That year, an anonymous woman found that apples kept going missing at her property, and managed to take a photo of the creature responsible. Sending them to the police with an accompanying letter, she pondered, ‘is someone missing an orangutan [sic]?’
The national media eventually got hold of them, and the Skunk Ape became of great interest beyond Myakka County, where the pictures were taken. Believers point to the photographer’s naivety about the creature’s identity and apparently pure motives in contacting the police: ‘why haven’t people been told that an animal this size is loose?’ The accompanying details about the creature’s behavior and ‘awful smell that lasted well after it had left my yard’ tally with accepted wisdom on the Skunk Ape, and so many in the Bigfoot community hail the Myakka photographs as conclusive proof of their existence.
The Skunk Ape is a controversial beast, and not without its critics even amongst the usually credulous Squatchers. As well as some Squatchers believing that Bigfoot could not survive on a biological basis in the Everglades, the man at the centre of Skunk Ape research, Dave Shealy, is a known hoaxer with a financial stake in people’s belief in the creature. As for the pictures, skeptics believe they show a man in a monkey suit, and gain credence from their grainy footage, which precludes forensic examination. But that won’t help you sleep at night after looking into the monster’s soulless eyes…
