The Myakka Skunk Ape Photographs

Florida has its own ape legend. The skunk ape. There were the "Bardin Booger" reports of the 1940s and a wave in Broward County from 1971 to 1975. Around the Myakka River alone, a 2014 Sarasota Herald-Tribune article counted at least a dozen sightings between the 1960s and the 1980s.

December 2000. A package reached the Sarasota County Sheriff's Office. Two colour flash prints. A typewritten letter, signed "God Bless. I prefer to remain anonymous."

The writer said she was a grandmother living near I-75, close to the Myakka River. Over several nights, something had come to her back porch for her apples. "Enclosed please find some pictures I took. My husband thinks it is an orangutan. Is someone missing an orangutan?"

She described it carefully. "It is hard to judge from the photos how big this orangutan really is." She judged it at about six and a half to seven feet tall. Kneeling. She reported an awful smell that lasted well after it left her yard, and deep "woomp" noises.

When she took the pictures, it was rising. "It is in a crouching position in the middle of standing up from where it was sitting. It froze as soon as the flash went off." Then it was gone. "I heard the orangutan walk off into the woods."

She was afraid for her grandchildren. She warned it could cause a car accident if it was not caught soon and wrote, "I don't want any fuss or people with guns traipsing around behind our house." Her photos show a large, ape-like creature partially concealed behind saw palmetto leaves, with black fur, a grey chin and upper chest, lower fangs and eyes shining back in the flash.

Cryptozoologist David Barkasy obtained first-generation copies and contacted Loren Coleman that same evening. The prints were traced to the Eckerd photo lab at the intersection of Fruitville and Tuttle Roads in Sarasota. In mid-February 2001 the story broke in Florida newspapers, including a Tampa Tribune column by Steve Otto. Coleman did not commit to a verdict. He noted orangutan-like features and suggested that, if genuine, the animal might be distinct from the Pacific Northwest Bigfoot. Canadian Wildlife Service biologist Tony Scheuhamme also noted features comparable to an orangutan. The sheriff's office published no finding.

Bobbie Short of Bigfoot Encounters reported that more than three veteran sasquatch investigators in Florida judged the figure to be "a masked individual in a baggy-leg costume." In 2006 Mitsuko Choden, described as a primate specialist in Japan, called it a costume sold in "assorted colors," with "plastic teeth molded in the fashion of the great apes." Darren Naish later repeated the point. A local Bigfoot group traced the photos to a Florida man who had asked, the year before, what skunk ape photos might be worth. His wife reportedly said he had made them. He has never been named.

Others weighed the letter itself. A creature seven feet tall while kneeling would stand over ten feet. The largest male orangutans reach about 4'5". On Skeptoid, Brian Dunning listed three features no known ape shows, among them eyeshine. Dunning's conclusion was that the photos are anecdotal and cannot be tested.

The grandmother never came forward. Coleman returned to the case in 2007 as a cold case investigation. The legend lived on. In 2013 a prankster in a skunk ape costume stopped visitors in their tracks at Myakka River State Park. But the two prints from that porch remain the images every skunk ape story comes back to.