Skunk Ape Other mysterious primates of the world may more famous, and more fearsome, and more celebrated in tantalizingly indistinct frames of 16mm film, but only one big hairy monster can rightfully claim to be the stinkiest: the Skunk Ape of the Florida Everglades. The creature is generally described as being about seven feet tall and 300 pounds, covered in a dark fur the color of mud, and bearing a distinct and far-ranging aroma redolent of an unholy mixture of skunk, rotten eggs and cow manure. "It stunk awful, like a dog that hasn't been bathed in a year and suddenly gets rained on," Charlie Stoeckman said in an evocative account of his Skunk Ape sighting in the Florida Keys in 1977. Some accounts indicate that the Skunk Ape has been a part of Everglades lore for decades, but the swamp beast only became widely reported in the cultural aftermath of the 1967 Patterson Bigfoot film. In addition to being an era of Bigfoot mania, the 1970s were also the period when developers began a concerted foray into the Everglades. This led to large numbers of out-of-towners being exposed to the colorful legends of the local folk, who may have been willing to spin extravagant tall tales of the Skunk Ape just to fool the city slickers. Early stories of the Skunk Ape contained a conspiratorial edge, as it was rumored that the government had captured a living specimen and the Army held it captive in a secret vault at Everglades National Park, until the Skunk Ape smashed through a concrete wall and escaped. There are dozens of sightings on record from throughout the '70s, almost all of them containing a specification of the creature's pungent odor. And on the whole, the tales are more tongue-in-cheek than most monster sightings usually are -- the Skunk Ape is regarded as an old buddy rather than a terror of the wild, and in some cases, you can almost see the eyewitness winking at you in the words of his report. "Sometimes, sitting by the fire, I'd hear him walking in the brush," Jim Spink said in describing a Skunk Ape encounter from 1975. "He'd approach, standing there in the jungle. I knew he was there. I'd say, 'Hi, come on in. Have some coffee.' But he never did." Although Skunk Ape sightings have slacked off in recent years, the creature enjoyed something of a comeback in 1997. A guided tour group in Ochopee saw a large, ape-like animal ambling through the outskirts of a swamp. Soon afterward, Ochopee fire chief Vince Doerr saw a similar creature cross the road near his home and rush into the swamp. Doerr managed to take a distant snapshot of the supposed Skunk Ape (shown on this page) before it disappeared. This "first ever photograph" of the Everglades monster stirred a great deal of publicity, but Doerr himself denied that he had captured proof of anything extraordinary. The fire chief believed it was simply a prankster in a gorilla suit. "I just think someone's playing games. I just looked at it and laughed," Doerr said. "If I thought it was real, I would have run in there, beat it to death and sold it to the National Enquirer."

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