AHOY Comics’ Project: Cryptid #8 story “Florida Man: The Passion of the Skunk Ape,” by Matt Ligeti and Steve Yeowell, takes us deep into the Everglades — and then immediately out into the absurd quagmire of the modern world. The story imagines that Florida’s legendary Skunk Ape (a regional cryptid similar or identical to Bigfoot) has become so at-risk of discovery by humans that he reaches a fateful decision: he’ll shave the shaggy pelt from his body and attempt to “join society.”
“How hard could it be to pass for a Floridian, anyway?” he wonders, before spending the rest of the tale finding out. The Skunk Ape’s attempts to fit in … do not go well. Yeowell’s expressive line work perfectly captures the dismay on his disheveled, Neanderthal-like face, as curiosity and ignorance lead to repeated, worsening calamities.
Naturally, these catastrophes make headlines. “Shocking news tonight as a Florida man appears to have” done an improbable series of outlandish things. Our simple swamp dweller finds himself unable to outrun these misadventures, until an ending reminiscent of Chauncey Gardner’s fate in the 1979 Peter Sellers satirical comedy film Being There. The gag that “Florida Man” and “Skunk Ape” are one and the same is apt, as the real cryptid legend was built on “Florida man says” newspaper stories.
Birth of a legend
By monster enthusiast standards, the Skunk Ape is bit obscure. By normal person standards, it’s practically unknown. “I am from Florida,” writes Project: Cryptid editor Sara Litt. “But here’s the thing: I had NEVER heard of the Skunk Ape. I mean, there is so much wild sh*t that goes on in Florida that one random cryptid barely even hits the radar.”
The Skunk Ape legend was born in 1971, in the wake of widely publicized 1967 film footage depicting “Bigfoot” (or a guy in a Bigfoot suit) walking across a creek bed in California. Reports of a large, hairy hominid began popping up all over the country, and the Sunshine State was no exception. According to Florida man Homer Clay “Buzz” Osbon, he and his friends confronted a foul-smelling, “7-foot-high, 700-pound creature” in the Big Cypress swamp. Osbon appears to have coined the “Skunk Ape” name himself, though he claimed he learned it from old trappers and fishermen.
It might be relevant—this was not very clearly reported at the time, and apparently forgotten since—that Osbon and his pals were in the Florida swamp looking for the ruins of Atlantis, and claimed they’d found mysterious pyramids and walls covered in hieroglyphics! They wouldn’t disclose the location, but apparently Skunk Apes were constantly lurking around the site. (In an extremely Florida Man twist, one member of the group was convicted in 1992 for destroying a genuine, culturally priceless Native American archeological site with “with bulldozers, backhoes and dynamite” while searching for buried pirate treasure.)
The story grows
When a new monster craze really takes off in the media, as the Skunk Ape did in 1971, it quickly acquires a fictional prehistory. Inspired by news reports, other “eyewitnesses” come forward with copycat stories of sightings “years ago,” while monster fans search old books and newspapers for anything that sounds similar to the newborn legend. Project: Cryptid’s case file splash page repeats a common claim that the creature was first reported in Apalachicola, Florida, as far back as 1818. Cryptozoology sources confidently claim the legend goes back centuries, recorded in Native American lore.
These claims are … pretty questionable. I’ve been unable to find any trace of that supposed 1818 sighting report, nor have any other researchers. (There’s a newspaper report of an unnamed “gentleman” who supposedly spotted an “animal resembling the Wild Man of the Woods” that same year, but that paper-thin story took place in New York State, near the Canadian border.)
Claims of Native American support were denied before they were even raised. “I’ve never heard of anything like it in our legends,” declared then-recent chair of the Seminole Tribe of Florida, Betty Mae Jumper, in the first round of 1971 news reports. “I’ve lived out there in the Big Cypress … for a long time, and I never heard any Indian talking about any ape man.” She later wrote the book Legends of the Seminoles. (A different book of Oklahoma Seminole stories does describe a supernatural being called “Tall Man,” which may sound Bigfoot-like to modern readers, but Indigenous stories may have meanings that require expert interpretation; they also vary across traditions, languages, and time.)
It’s a bad idea to lump even previous Florida news reports of “monsters” in with the Skunk Ape. In 1966, for example, one teenager claimed to have spotted something like a gorilla. Another teen claimed that same monster broke into a house and trashed the place. “He couldn’t recall whose home it was,” however. This yarn was a one-off local flap, not part of a wider legend that didn’t exist yet. A third teen even proposed a solution at the time — maybe it was a bear? Black bears do live in Florida. Sometimes they break into houses, too.
This was also immediately proposed as an explanation for Osbon’s original 1971 Skunk Ape sighting! “The Florida black bear might be mistaken for an ape under the right combination of circumstances,” observed one experienced Everglades photographer. “Of course when it stands on its hind legs it’s only about five feet tall, but they can look 20 feet tall if the circumstances are scary enough.”
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The legend continues
Whatever Osbon and his buddies may or may not have seen in the swamp, a good monster legend has a life of its own. The Skunk Ape provided a template for hoaxers to copy, and an available explanation for any ambiguous sighting of, well, bears or anything else, really. As one sensible mom said when her son and some other children reported sightings in 1974, “These kids have heard about the skunk ape and they have very vivid imaginations. It shows you how kids will go through mass hysteria just like grown-ups.”
In recent decades, the legend has been kept alive almost single-handedly by a Florida man named Dave Shealy, who says he’s not only seen the monster, but even captured it on video in 2000. (The figure in the video is a typically distant and indistinct “blobsquatch,” and nevertheless still looks like a guy in a suit.) Shealy runs an Everglades campsite and tour business, which is home to his Skunk Ape Research Headquarters. It doubles as a gift shop and roadside attraction.
AIPT Science is co-presented by AIPT and the New York City Skeptics.
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