Skunk Ape Sightings: Florida Bigfoot

Among the hundreds of bigfoot sightings in the United States, Florida can lay claim to at least a couple dozen bigfoot sightings. That's right. Florida has its own bigfoot and it's known as the Skunk Ape (also known as the Stink Ape). The Skunk Ape sightings have been stinking up the Florida swamplands since as early as the 1960's; this is when the first sighting was documented of the elusive Florida Bigfoot.

What is a Skunk Ape and how many Skunk Ape sightings have there been? The Skunk Ape is thought to be a type of Bigfoot or Sasquatch resident to the state of Florida, but has been seen in other Southern states in the US such as Alabama and the Carolinas. This Florida bigfoot creature is called the Skunk Ape because it has been said to give off a foul odor from its large, furry body.

There have been quite a few Skunk Ape sightings, the first documented Skunk Ape sighting being in the year of 2000. A set of Skunk Ape photos were mailed into the Sheriff's Department in Dade County, FL from a woman who claimed that the Skunk Ape was stealing apples out of a basket laying on her back porch. The woman didn't actually call it the Skunk Ape but was convinced that a large monkey or gorilla had escaped from the zoo and was living in the swamplands of Florida...terrorizing her backyard.

More recently, the new show "Finding Bigfoot" playing on the Animal Planet channel consisted of a team of Bigfoot investigators/hunters that visited a home in Florida due to a series of Skunk Ape sightings. The woman claimed to have photographed a couple of extremely large handprints on her backdoor. The team analyzed the size of the handprints and the different ways they could have been faked but determined in the end that the handprints could have very well been genuine.

A man named David Shealy has been studying the Skunk Ape since he was quite young, as he claims to have seen the Skunk Ape as a child while out and about in the Florida Everglades. Since that time, David has done numerous interviews with people who have had Skunk Ape sightings and he has even snapped some pictures of what he claims is the Skunk Ape. The pictures have been analyzed by scientists and all came back "inconclusive". David has even learned that the Native American tribes who lived in the Florida Everglades' region had a name for a creature that translated to mean "tall, hairy man of the forest".

The first picture to the right was not snapped by David, but actually snapped by the woman who had claimed that this "monkey" was stealing apples off of her back porch. This picture of the Skunk Ape is the clearest and nearest shot to date. It has not been proven as falsified.

So are these skunk ape sightings real or just the imagination of the people who have experienced them? Is the Skunk Ape indeed a real creature that lives in the Florida Everglades? Is there such thing as the Florida Bigfoot? I'm sure if you came face to face with a stinky, huge ape-man you might start believing too.