The Brown Thermal Footage: Torreya State Park Skunk Ape

Florida has its own name for Bigfoot. The skunk ape. Stacy Brown Jr. and his father, Stacy Brown Sr., went looking for it. Together they ran a website called The Sasquatch Hunters. The son describes his father as a retired army ranger.

May 8, 2012. Sometime between midnight and 1 am. The two men were camping. In the son's words, "I had some White Zombie playing, some metal music and we're cooking some ribs, I believe."

Then came a knock, and the father put it down to the wind. Then "another knock happened and another knock." A grunt came before one of them. They turned the radio up and went toward the sound. Every time they heard noises, it seemed to be just a little ahead of them.

Then "we heard something run down this ridge." The father thought he saw a raccoon on a tree. Then two raccoons. Something was "sticking out of both sides of the tree."

He pointed his FLIR Scout thermal camera at it. A large, man-shaped figure stepped briefly into the open, took one long step and disappeared into the brush. "Get your gun, get your gun!" the father yelled. His son had never seen him so shaken. "We gotta go."

Only Stacy Sr. saw the figure. His son heard the sounds but never saw it. The group later described another night, when something pushed down on the top of their tent. "I woke up and we heard it run off on two legs," Brown Jr. said. Of the figure behind the tree, another member said: "It was watching us."

Cliff Barackman of Animal Planet's Finding Bigfoot came to the site. He measured the tree, the gap between the two trees and the distance to the camera, though his figures have not resurfaced. Bobo walked the route for a re-enactment. The case aired in the episode "Best Evidence Yet" on November 24, 2013. The synopsis says the team was "convinced of the evidence."

The record has loose ends. Brown Jr. later placed the encounter in Torreya State Park, near Bristol in Liberty County. Barackman put it in the Florida panhandle "around the town of Quincy," between "the property where the Bridges have their ongoing encounters" and the place where he had recorded a "whoop" vocalization. One podcast blurb dates the filming to 2011. No height estimate was ever published, and no tracks, hair or casts were reported.

No one has published a specific hoax allegation or a rival explanation. The only alternative on record is the father's own first guess, raccoons, which he dropped once he saw the figure's size. A 2014 Reddit thread on thermal clips called every one of them "technically inconclusive." Brown Jr. is blunt. "There's no flaws on this," he says, though he considers most Bigfoot videos, the Patterson-Gimlin film included, to be hoaxes.

Stacy Brown Sr. has since died. His son kept going. In 2020 Brown Jr. produced and directed The Skunk Ape Lives, built around the FLIR footage, with his father and Barackman in the cast. Then came the docuseries The Skunk Ape Experiments, in which he tries to convince the sceptical filmmaker Joseph Badia. Wikipedia's Bigfoot article now lists the encounter among its alleged encounters.