Large, Shaggy, And A Foul Odor: What Is This "Florida Skunk Ape" People Keep Seeing?

On July 8, 2000, Dave Shealy captured a creature on camera he had been tracking for decades: the Florida skunk ape. Few believed the state’s answer to Bigfoot existed, but here it was out walking in the swamp.

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Shealy first saw the skunk ape when he was just 10 years old. “It looked like a man, but completely covered with hair,” he told Smithsonian Magazine. He’s since become a self-proclaimed expert in the field, but beyond a grainy video (admittedly filmed before the regrettable rise of AI-generated imagery) what evidence is there that the Florida skunk ape exists?

Florida skunk ape sightings

In 1971, Fort Lauderdale News ran a segment called Giant Skunk Ape claimed to live in Big Cypress. The report gives an account from amateur archaeologist H. C. Osbon, who saw the creature whilst out walking with friends.

He described it as 2 meters (7 feet) tall and weighing 318 kilograms (700 pounds). It’s no secret that Body Mass Index is a lousy metric, but that would give the skunk ape a life-shortening score of around 70, were it as human-like as everyone says. Still, it’s curious that Osbon should give the same approximate height as another person who claimed to have seen “sasquatch” in Gainesville, Florida, eight years earlier.

Repeated descriptions of the skunk ape suggest it’s very tall with shaggy hair all over its body, and smells so bad it was known by scent alone to trappers in the 1920s. Osbon even claims to have found prints that he made plaster casts of, showing the mysterious animal to have a foot 44.5 centimeters (17.5 inches) long and 29.2 centimeters (11.5 inches) wide. Bigfoot, indeed.

Bigfoot, or a big bear?

The phenomenon of pareidolia teaches us that humans are primed to see human-like things. Belief in the paranormal has also been associated with certain conditions like ADHD and depression, but were we to extend to these “sightings” the assumption that these people were indeed seeing something, what could it have been?

One suggestion is that what they were actually seeing was a Florida black bear. As the state's largest land mammal they occupy all of the Florida mainland and – curiously – can reach around 2 meters long as adults. 

If you need convincing that a bear could be mistaken for a human, might I direct you towards these uncannily playful bears that, I think we can all agree, look like two blokes in bear suits. And anyway, it would hardly be the weirdest case of mistaken identity – after all, there’s a theory that Scotland’s Loch Ness Monster was just a few “super” eels.

“But the footage!” I hear you cry. Doesn’t Shealy have the Florida skunk ape made? Well, while it’s surely a real piece of footage, we can only be as confident that the creature on screen is the skunk ape as we can be sure that a gorilla was once onboard the International Space Station.

Until we capture something in the way of skunk ape DNA or, better yet, an actual skunk ape, Florida’s Bigfoot can likely join the other legends that fall under the banner of cryptozoology. Still, the repeated “sightings” raise interesting questions about what we humans can believe we’ve seen in a time when seeing is no longer believing. Just ask magicians.