AHOY Comics’ Project: Cryptid Story #8, “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 swamp of the modern world. The story presumes that Florida’s legendary Skunk Ape (a regional cryptid that resembles or is identical to Bigfoot) is in such danger of being discovered by humans that he makes a fateful decision: He will shave the shaggy fur from his body and try to “join society.”
“How hard can it be to pass as a Floridian?” he asks himself, before finding out the hard way later in the story. The Skunk Ape’s attempts to fit in… don’t 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 disasters.
Naturally, these disasters make headlines. “Shocking news tonight as a Florida man has apparently done an unlikely series of outlandish things. Our simple swamp dweller is unable to escape these misadventures until an ending reminiscent of Chauncey Gardner’s fate in Peter Sellers’ 1979 satirical comedy “The 40th Anniversary.” To be there. The joke that “Florida Man” and “Skunk Ape” are one and the same person is apt, since the true cryptid legend is based on newspaper stories that state, “The Florida Man says.”
Birth of a legend
For monster enthusiasts, the Skunk Ape is a little obscure. For normal people, it is 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’s so much wild shit going on in Florida that a random cryptid barely registers on the radar.”
The legend of the Skunk Ape began in 1971, when a widely popular 1967 film was made showing “Bigfoot” (or a guy in a Bigfoot costume) walking through a riverbed in California. Reports of a large, hairy hominid began appearing across the country, and the Sunshine State was no exception. According to Florida native Homer Clay “Buzz” Osbon, he and his friends encountered a foul-smelling, “7-foot tall, 700-pound creature” in the Big Cypress swamp. Osbon appears to have coined the name “Skunk Ape” himself, although he claimed to have learned it from old trappers and fishermen.
It may be significant—this was not very clearly reported at the time and has apparently been forgotten since—that Osbon and his friends were in the Florida swamp. in search of the ruins of Atlantisand claimed they had found mysterious pyramids and walls covered in hieroglyphs! They wouldn’t reveal the location, but apparently Skunk Apes were constantly lurking near the site. (In an extremely Florida Man twist, a member of the group was convicted in 1992 of destroying a real, culturally priceless Native American archaeological site with “bulldozers, excavators and dynamite” while searching for buried pirate treasure.)
The story grows
When a new monster trend really takes off in the media, like the Skunk Ape in 1971, it quickly gets a fictional backstory. Inspired by news reports, other “eyewitnesses” come forward with copycat stories of sightings “years ago,” while monster fans scour old books and newspapers for anything that resembles the legend of the newborn monster. Project: CryptidThe case file’s home page repeats the widely held claim that the creature was first sighted in Apalachicola, Florida, in 1818. Cryptozoology sources confidently believe the legend dates back centuries and is recorded in Native American lore.
These claims are… quite questionable. I could find no trace of this alleged 1818 sighting report, and neither could any other researcher. (There is a newspaper report of an unnamed “gentleman” who allegedly saw a “beast resembling the Wild Man of the Woods” that same year, but that superficial story occurred in upstate New York, near the Canadian border.)
Claims of Native American support were denied before they were even made. “I have never heard of such a thing in our legends,” declared Betty Mae Jumper, then-chairwoman of the Seminole Tribe of Florida, in the first round of news reports in 1971. “I lived out there in Big Cypress… and I never heard an Indian talk about an ape man.” She later wrote the book Legends of the Seminoles. (Another book of Oklahoma Seminole stories actually describes a supernatural being called the “Tall Man,” which may sound like Bigfoot to modern readers, but the meaning of Native American stories can require expert interpretation; moreover, they vary by tradition, language, and time.)
It’s not a good idea to lump previous news reports about Florida “monsters” together with the Skunk Ape, either. For example, in 1966, a teenager claimed he saw something that looked like a gorilla. Another teenager claimed the same monster broke into a house and wreaked havoc. “He couldn’t remember whose house it was, though.” This story was a one-off local excitement and not part of a larger legend that didn’t yet exist. A third teenager even suggested a solution at the time – maybe it was a bear? Black bears live in Florida. They sometimes break into houses, too.
This was also immediately suggested as an explanation for Osbon’s first Skunk Ape sighting in 1971! “Under the right circumstances, the Florida black bear could be mistaken for an ape,” noted a veteran Everglades photographer. “Of course, when it stands on its hind legs, it is only about five feet tall, but if the circumstances are terrifying enough, it can look twenty feet tall.”
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The legend lives on
Whatever Osbon and his buddies did or did not see in the swamp, a good monster legend has a life of its own. The Skunk Ape served as a template for the hoaxers to copy and as a ready explanation for any dubious sighting of, well, bears or anything else, really. As one sensible mother said when her son and some other children reported sightings in 1974, “These kids have heard of the Skunk Ape, and they have very vivid imaginations. It shows that kids go through mass hysteria just as much as adults.”
In recent decades, the legend has been kept alive almost single-handedly by a Florida man named Dave Shealy, who says he not only saw the monster but caught it on video in 2000. (The figure in the video is a typically distant and indistinct “blobsquatch,” but still looks like a guy in a suit.) Shealy runs a campground and tour company in the Everglades, where his Skunk Ape Research Headquarters is located. It doubles as a gift shop and roadside attraction.
AIPT Science is presented jointly by AIPT and the New York City Skeptics.
