The Skunk Ape Photos: An Anonymous Letter to a Florida Sheriff (2000)

ARCHIVE FILE · Event year: 2000. This happened in 2000 and is not breaking news. It’s part of the Redacted Weekly evergreen archive.

What happened

Florida has its own version of Bigfoot, and it’s said to smell terrible. The “skunk ape” is a hairy, upright creature reported in the state’s swamps and scrub for decades, and its name comes from its claimed odor. In 2000 it got its most famous evidence, from an anonymous source.

The Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office received two photographs showing a large, hairy, ape-like animal. A letter came with them. The writer said she was an elderly woman whose apples had been disappearing from her back porch near I-75. When she surprised the culprit with a camera, she became afraid it was an escaped orangutan that might hurt her family, per Wikipedia’s sourced article. The writer gave no name or address. The letter, dated 22 December 2000, was signed “God Bless. I prefer to remain anonymous,” per the copy cryptozoologist Loren Coleman published.

The footage

There is no video of the Myakka animal; the evidence is two still photographs. We haven’t reproduced them because their copyright is held by others. Coleman’s site hosts enlargements marked “Copyright 2001 by David Barkasy and Loren Coleman.” If you publish them, link to a source that hosts them and don’t upload copies.

The best-known Florida skunk ape video is a separate case. Smithsonian reports that Ochopee attraction owner Dave Shealy filmed grainy daytime footage in July 2000, “shot from hundreds of feet away.” Smithsonian embeds it, and its writer said it was hard to see “anything but a guy in a gorilla suit.”

Timeline

• 1818: Newspapers report a “man-sized monkey” near present-day Apalachicola.
• 1929: A claimed sighting at the new Perky Bat Tower in the Florida Keys.
• 1940s onward: “Bardin Booger” stories in Putnam County.
• 1960s: A cluster of reports in Alachua and Marion counties.
• 1971–1975: A Broward County wave popularizes the name “skunk ape.”
• 1977: A bill to protect “anthropoids or humanoid animals” fails in the Florida legislature.
• July 1997: An Ochopee fire official photographs a dark upright figure; over fifty sighting reports follow within two weeks.
• July 2000: Shealy films his video.
• 22 December 2000: The date on the anonymous letter.
• Mid-February 2001: Florida newspapers and radio, including the Art Bell show, publicize the photos.
• 12 July 2001: The East County Observer reports the search for the photographer.

What witnesses reported

The only witness account is the letter itself: apples disappearing from a back porch near I-75, and an encounter with an ape-like animal she feared was an escaped orangutan. According to the East County Observer, as reprinted by Coleman, the writer said she didn’t “want any fuss or people with guns traipsing around” her house. She has never been identified, and we don’t speculate about who she was.

What the research found

How the photos went public. Coleman wrote that the photos surfaced through a Sarasota animal-welfare specialist who scanned first-generation color prints of the sheriff’s originals. Coleman’s enlargements highlighted forehead lines, yellow canines, fingernails and hair. The East County Observer reported in July 2001 that the prints had been processed in December 2000 at a local Eckerd photo lab, and that local searchers had made more than 30 night trips without finding the animal.