The Clearwater Monster: Florida's Giant Penguin (Old Three-Toes)

February 1948. Clearwater Beach, on Florida's Gulf coast. Someone walking the sand found tracks. Three toes. A narrow heel. Each print about 14 inches long and 11 inches across. They came up out of the Gulf. They followed the shore for nearly two miles. Then they went back into the water.

Police Chief Jefferson Elliott took the first reports. The prints looked a little like a sea turtle's. But they were too far apart. Elliott remarked that he had never heard of a sea turtle with such a stride.

Through 1948 more tracks turned up along the Pinellas and Tampa Bay coast. Indian Rocks Beach. St. Petersburg Beach. Caladesi Island. The Anclote River near Tarpon Springs. They sank deep enough to suggest an animal of about 2,000 lb. Then people began to see something. A couple described a "huge, furry beast waddling along the beach and then disappearing into the surf." In late July, flyers from a Dunedin flying school, George Orfanides and John Milner, reported a shape in the water near Clearwater Bridge and Hog Island. "A furry log with a head shaped like a hog's."

Press reports described a sea animal 10 to 15 feet long, with a "hairy body," a "blunt head" and "alligator-like legs," seen "swimming rapidly." In October 1948 a line of 240 footprints appeared on the banks of the Suwannee River at Old Town. Almost 40 miles inland from the Gulf.

In November 1948 naturalist Ivan T. Sanderson came south for the New York Herald Tribune and NBC. Based at Suwannee Gables with reporters John O'Reilly and Dick Bothwell, the team measured and cast the tracks. Among those invited along was a local man named Al Williams.

The expedition reached a unanimous verdict. The tracks were a hoax. Sanderson said: "I can state categorically that these tracks could not be made by some unknown animal." When 15-inch tracks appeared on Caladesi Island on 27 November, he added: "As far as I'm concerned, the case is closed."

It did not stay closed. In his 1969 book More Things, Sanderson told a different story. The tracks, he wrote, were "definitely not a hoax." He named the maker "Florida Three-Toes" and proposed a giant penguin, kin to extinct species such as Pachydyptes ponderosus. "A thick-billed penguin, 15 feet long, on the coast of Florida is admittedly pretty horrid, but I don't think we can legitimately any longer laugh it out of court." Tracks were reported until 1958.

In 1988 Tony Signorini spoke to St. Petersburg Times reporter Jan Kirby. He and his boss, Al Williams, had made the tracks. Williams had been inspired by a National Geographic photo of fossil dinosaur tracks. A friend's machine shop cast feet in iron, about 30 lb each, bolted to high-top tennis shoes. At night the pair rowed to a beach. Signorini hopped ashore while Williams kept pace in the boat. The next day, friends would "find" the tracks. Signorini showed Kirby the feet. His family still has them. His obituary said: "Tony was famous for being 'The Clearwater Monster,' a hoax that made national news."

Archival work by Daniel Loxton, published in Skeptic in 2021, compared drafts of More Things with Sanderson's private papers. In red pencil, Sanderson had deleted the hoax verdict, all discussion of suspected hoaxers including Williams, and a page and a half of scientific objections. Loxton concluded that neither Sanderson's "stated opinions nor his factual claims can be taken at face value." Writing in Skeptical Inquirer in 2025, Mark West read the case as a study in how market forces shaped modern pseudoscience. One 2011 blog still argued that the confession does not fit everything on record, pointing to the far-flung Suwannee prints.