Dave Shealy's 2000 Skunk Ape Footage

The skunk ape, also known as the Swamp Cabbage Man, Swamp Ape, Stink ape, Florida Bigfoot, Louisiana Bigfoot, Myakka ape, Swampsquatch, 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 most 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. Skeptical investigator Joe Nickell has written that some of the reports may represent sightings of the black bear (Ursus americanus) and it is likely that other sightings are hoaxes or misidentification of wildlife. The United States National Park Service considers the skunk ape to be a hoax.

Skunk Ape

The first time Dave Shealy saw a skunk ape at the age of ten. It was 1974, a few years after his father had come upon a set of footprints left by the creature an Everglades version of Bigfoot named for its supposedly pungent odor. 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 incarnate.

“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.”

He and his brother stared at the creature, mouths agape, but almost at the same time, as he tells it, the skies opened and rain poured down. The ape hurried away, into the cypress hummocks scattered amongst the marsh. “Holy crap,” he remembers thinking. “I finally saw this damn thing, and it got away, just like that.”

Shealy's Skunk Ape Research Headquarters (Photo by Joseph Stromberg)

But the fleeting moment left an indelible impression on young Shealy, who’s now 50 years old. In the decades since, he’s relentlessly pursued skunk apes and seen them, he says, on three other occasions. He’s written a field guide, made TV appearances, continually investigated reported sightings and established a Skunk Ape Research Headquarters on his property, where tourists can learn all about the legendary creature. He bills himself as the Jane Goodall of skunk apes. “I am the expert,” he told a Bigfoot website last year, “the state and county expert on the Florida skunk ape, and have been for years.”

Shealy set up a few trees stands on his 30-acre property, and spent the next year sitting in them, baiting the area and watching for the skunk ape, or trekking across the Everglades, trying to find the creature’s trail. Finally, on September 8, 1998, he says, he was rewarded with his second sighting. Perched in a tree and half asleep, “I heard something splashing in the water: splash, splash, splash,” he told me. “At first, I thought it was a person, but then from around 100 yards away, I saw it coming toward me. It was a skunk ape, the same as I saw when I was a kid.” As it walked by, unaware of being observed, he shot several photos of it, watching it disappear into the nearby tree hummock. Later, he returned and made a concrete cast of its footprint, which still sits in the gift shop.

One of Shealy's 1998 photos of the alleged skunk ape. (Photo courtesy Dave Shealy)

He still searches for the skunk ape, concentrating his work mostly in March and April—when the dried-out swampland allows for easier hiking and preserves track better—and investigating the dozen or so sightings that are called into him annually. He’s boiled his findings down into a field guide, available for $4.95 at his gift shop (the skunk apes stand six to seven feet tall, spend about half their lives in the trees, and might pick up their awful odor from their time in underground alligator caves, it says), and mapped the most recent sightings. He was even filmed for an episode of “Finding Bigfoot,” the Animal Planet reality show, although he was infuriated when the producers balked at the logistical difficulties of traveling into the swamp to investigate a sighting and asked him to “fake it” in his backyard instead.

In July 2000, he captured one of his encounters on video. In the grainy daytime footage, shot from hundreds of feet away, the creature spends a minute or so moseying around in a hummock of palm trees. Then, shortly after it begins striding across the open swamp (at about 1:48 in the video below), it breaks into a long-limbed run—as though suddenly aware it’s being watched—escaping into a grove of palm trees.

Shealy notes that, at the time, the swamp was covered by over a foot of water, making the animal’s speed (which he estimates to be 22 miles per hour) impossible for any human to achieve. But it’s extremely hard to watch this video and see anything but a guy in a gorilla suit, hurrying across the swamp:

A clip from Shealy's 2000 skunk ape video. (From video courtesy Dave Shealy)

This impression is especially concerning because, according to any respected biologist, the skunk ape does not exist. “People report seeing this mythical creature from time to time,” says Bob DeGross, a public affairs officer with the preserve. “But there has never been a substantiated sighting of the skunk ape that was verified by National Park Service wildlife staff.” Critics point out that, despite the dozens of unrelated ongoing research projects conducted in the Everglades that use motion-activated trail cameras, no one has ever captured indisputable proof of the skunk ape or come upon the remains of one.  “The empirical evidence is extremely weak,” says Sharon Hill, a researcher, and columnist for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry who’s written about Bigfoot, the skunk ape, and other mythical creatures. “It’s almost entirely eyewitnessed testimony, which is the most unreliable evidence you can have.”

Shealy responds by observing that things decompose quickly in the swamp, and that, at 2.2 million acres, it’s the largest area of protected land east of the Mississippi, most of it rarely visited (both true). It’s easy to imagine, he argues, that a handful of reclusive animals could live in it essentially unnoticed and leave virtually no evidence. “I know what I’ve seen,” he says. “For someone who hasn’t come here and put in the time to say otherwise doesn’t really matter to me.”

A Pond On Shealy's Property (Photo by Joseph Stromberg)

SKUNK APE’S LONG HISTORY

“Local Native American groups from around here, the Seminoles and the Miccosukee tribe, they’ve known and told stories about the skunk ape for centuries,” he said. Over the past 60 years or so, Floridians of all stripes began reporting that they were seeing the creature. (A similar pattern happened in the Pacific Northwest, where indigenous beliefs in the Sasquatch eventually led to the skunk ape’s better-known cousin, Bigfoot.)


In one of the earliest well-publicized sightings, a pair of hunters claimed the ape invaded their camp in 1957. It’s unclear who coined the name skunk ape, but it appears to have surfaced sometime during the '60s. During the 1960s and '70s, the period when Shealy had his first sighting, more and more reports trickled in, as far north as the Florida panhandle, but most often in the Everglades. The skunk ape eventually attracted mainstream attention, including a bill introduced (but not passed) in the Florida legislature in 1977 that would have made it illegal to “take, possess, harm or molest anthropoid or humanoid animals.” It was around this time that Shealy, a teenager, spotted evidence of the creature for the second time, in the form of enormous four-toed footprints left at night near his hunting camp deep in the Big Cypress interior.

Vince Doerr's July 1997 photo of an alleged skunk ape (photo courtesy Vince Doerr)

Occasional sightings continued for years, and the skunk ape hit the news again in 1997 when passengers on a tour bus traveling through the preserve claimed they spotted the animal. “This was 30, 40 people, all saying they saw the same thing,” Shealy says, “a seven-foot, red-haired ape.” After decades of idle interest in the creature, he decided to get serious about finding it, baiting the area with lima beans (the story goes that the omnivorous apes loved the legume). He repeatedly found the beans missing in the morning, along with tracks left in the night. Then, just two miles away, a pair of local residents—Jan Brock, a real estate agent, and Vince Doerr, chief of the Ochopee Fire Control District—separately spotted a large, hairy biped minutes apart while driving through the preserve one morning in July. “The thing just ran in front of my car,” Brock told me when I called her after my visit. “It was shaggy-looking, and very tall, maybe six-and-a-half or seven feet tall.” Doerr, who told that he’d never believed in the skunk ape before seeing it cross the road about a half-mile in front of his car, snapped a photo of it just before it vanished into the swamp.

* * *