Palm Beach County deputies fire on a skunk ape west of Lantana

1974 was a hard year in South Florida. Record drought. Wildfires in the Everglades. Some writers have suggested the dry spell drove wildlife out of the wetlands and toward the groves on the edge of town. It was also the height of the skunk ape years, when Florida's answer to Bigfoot filled newspaper reports across Broward, Dade and Palm Beach counties.

West of Lantana. A grove. Two Palm Beach County Sheriff's deputies, Marvin Lewis and Ernie Milner.

By their account, an ape-like creature stalked them through the grove. It was tall. Later write-ups say it walked upright on two legs. The deputies shot at it with their firearms. The creature grunted, then quickly disappeared into the swamp.

The deputies did not stop there. They followed a trail of footprints. It led to a barbed-wire fence line that had been pushed down. Hair was snagged on the wire.

What happened to that hair is unclear. One account says it was sent for analysis and mysteriously disappeared before conclusive results were published. Another says a Miami lab called it an unknown species, but that result comes from a separate family report filed with the BFRO. No account names a lab, report or date for the deputies' hair. No casts of the footprints, and no photograph or film, are known.

No sheriff's office report, case number or conclusion has surfaced. The closest thing is BFRO Report 414, from a family on a former hog farm west of Lake Worth near Military Trail who described three creatures, a slain 100-lb hog and stolen fruit. An unnamed county deputy reportedly went out with a man called "Buddy" and saw the one the family called the father. Some guides treat that deputy as Lewis or Milner. The report never names either man, and its investigator found that Palm Beach County records did not go back that far.

Later retellings grew. One says the shots struck the creature at close range, that it only rubbed the spot and fled at high speed, and that foot patrols and aerial surveillance found no body. No primary source supports those details.

Sceptics point to the Florida black bear, perhaps with mange. Joe Nickell proposed that explanation for skunk ape sightings in general. The National Park Service treats the skunk ape as a hoax and says no sighting has been verified by its wildlife staff. A drought that pushed animals toward people would fit a bear as well as an ape. Still, no hoax allegation has ever been made about this case in particular.

Lewis did not waver. "I know it exists," he said in 1980, and in later interviews he insisted it was real. No statement from Milner has surfaced.

The case lives on mainly through Eliot Kleinberg's article in The Palm Beach Post on how South Florida skunk ape sightings peaked in the '70s. It sits beside other county reports from those years. In September 1974, a Wellington security guard named Cary Kantor shot a skunk ape that ran wounded into the brush. In 1977, two workers near Delray Beach saw a 7-ft creature drinking from a golf-course lake. The year, the exact site and the fate of the hair remain unverified.