A Skunk Ape is reportedly a hairy humanoid creature that walks on two legs. It is described as being similar to the legendary Bigfoot, but of slighter build. Skunk Apes grow about seven-feet tall and weigh 200 to 300 pounds, according to witness accounts.

The creature is called a Skunk Ape because of the foul odor accompanying most sightings. The smell is described as being similar to rotten eggs. Skunk Apes reportedly love wooded, swampy areas, and the Skunk Ape legend comes primarily from the Florida Everglades.

While the Skunk Ape ranks among legendary creatures such as Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, the Mothman, and others, numerous Internet sites report witness accounts. Several sites mentioned recent Skunk Ape sightings along the Withlacoochee River between Quitman and Valdosta in Brooks County. This repeated Internet mention to South Georgia led to The Times story last week.

The article led to these subsequent reader accounts. Both sightings occurred prior to the article’s publication, according to these readers. Both readers gave The Valdosta Daily Times their full names. One asked that we not publish his name. We use the first name of the other caller.

Did these folks see a Skunk Ape? We’ll share their stories and you decide.

• Between 10-10:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 21, Joy was driving along Highway 37 in Berrien County. She had a friend on her cell phone.

Outside of Ray City, she had her car’s bright lights on and she saw something hairy, walking away from the road, into the woods.

“I saw the back of something,” Joy says. “It was tall. … I thought it was a bear but a bear don’t walk on its back legs. … Honestly, it looked like an ape.”

Joy said her husband’s about six feet tall and she gauged what she saw to be about the same height as her husband. She didn’t smell anything driving by the creature.

She told her friend on the phone that she thought she saw something like a hairy man walking into the woods. Her friend laughed and asked if Joy had been drinking. “I told her I hadn’t been drinking and, sir, I don’t drink,” Joy told The Times.

Joy continued driving that night. She mentioned what she saw to a few people, but didn’t give it much more thought until her mother told her about the article in The Valdosta Daily Times.

During daylight, Thursday, April 29, the day after The Times story, Joy and her mother traveled to the same part of the road where she claimed to witness a creature. She said the area has numerous trees and is swampy.

Joy believes she saw a Skunk Ape or a creature like it.

— Last Friday, The Times received the phone message from the man in Brooks County who claimed “… I saw it.”

Calling him back, he said earlier this spring, before the leaves returned to the trees, he was smoking a cigar on the back porch of his Brooks County home, three miles outside of Quitman. It was  between 10-11 a.m., when he “saw something walk out of the woods.”

He first thought it a deer but saw that it had no hind quarters. He then thought it “an idiot in a ghillie suit,” a type of camouflage clothing covered in loose strips of cloth or twine designed to look like foliage.

But even then he thought something wasn’t right.

He went inside his house and got a pair of binoculars. He saw a hairy humanoid, with the hair being red, fading to brown and grey. The creature was lean and at least over six-feet tall. The creature was probably about 500 yards away, too far away to smell, he said.

He watched the creature for about eight minutes through the binoculars. During that time, the creature leaned on one arm against a tree, looking around. It scratched its left calf with its right foot. Then it ran away.

“It didn’t walk like a human,” he said. “It’s joints don’t quite move like a human.”

He said if you throw a sheet over a man or a woman, you can tell the gender by the way the person walks despite the sheet. This creature had a strange walk that did not match the movements of a human, he said.

The man thinks the creature is an omnivore, an eater of meats and plants, rather than a vegetarian. A vegetarian has a bigger belly, like a cow, he said.

He believes this creature stays lean from eating meat. What kind of meat? The man says he’s taking no chances.

“If I go out in the woods now,” he says, “I make sure to carry something with me that goes bang.”

He believes he probably isn’t the only person to see the creature.

“If I’m calling, there’s probably nine other people who’ve seen it who haven’t said a word to anyone,” he says, “because they don’t want people thinking they’re crazy.”

Source: valdostadailytimes

Bigfoot — or Sasquatch or Skunk Ape or Fouke Monster or whatever name you prefer — would have to be a completely new and specific species, Esteban Sarmiento told attendees at the ninth annual Texas Bigfoot Conference on Sept. 26. “If it’s real, this animal is exceedingly human-like,” Sarmiento said. “It would be our closest relative on earth.”

Sarmiento, though, wouldn’t exactly address the question of whether Bigfoot exists or whether he believes the tales about wild, hairy beasts that have drifted out of dark, wooded river bottoms and foggy rain forests for decades. What Sarmiento did say, though, is that, based on his studies of great apes in Africa, Sumatra and Borneo, whatever Bigfoot is, he’s not an ape.

Sarmiento spoke during the conference about the so-called Patterson-Gimlin film shot in 1967. A touchstone in Bigfoot lore and the believers’ burning bush, the film purports to show a female Bigfoot with pendulous breasts, striding across a rocky area in northern California.

The film has been debated by believers, denounced and debunked by critics, shown on television and dissected and disseminated on YouTube.

Roger Patterson was a would-be filmmaker who had been trying to get funding for a movie about Bigfoot. In early 1967, he rented a quality 16mm camera and convinced Robert Gimlin to travel with him into the wilderness to look for the creature . Amazingly, they found a hairy specimen walking away from them and into heavy timber in the distance. The creature shown in the film is covered in dark hair and walks with a human gait, even turning its head to look back at the camera before it disappears.

Gimlin, who’s still alive and attended the conference, swears the film is real. Patterson maintained its authenticity until his death, which happened in 1972. However, a man named Bob Heironimus has claimed he was paid $1,000 to don the suit and walk in front of the camera and out of sight.

Bigfoot and Sasquatch sightings have been common in the Pacific Northwest for decades. They’ve also been prevalent in East Texas and the surrounding big timber regions of Arkansas, Louisiana and Oklahoma.

Believers think the common traits of a 7- to 9-foot tall, hairy, wild-eyed but super intelligent beast that normally avoids humans but often is spotted walking along roadways or standing close to remote cabins are related to the same species.

Bigfoot is rare enough, they say, that he must move around to find mates and new territory, and that’s why reports have filtered in for at least 150 years.

There have been some obscure and out-of-focus photos taken over the years, and there have been Bigfoot hoaxes and claims of capture and kills, even by respected members of the Bigfoot community. But no one ever has managed a quality photo that comes even close to Patterson’s film.

Bigfoot believers — the serious ones are called researchers to separate themselves from simple believers who seem to have devout faith as well in Atlantis, UFOs, chupacabras and aliens among us — have claimed the film shows a possible descendant of Gigantopithecus blacki, a great ape that migrated across the land bridge to live in North America. Sarmiento isn’t buying that.

“A great ape (chimp, gorilla or orangutuan) can’t do this. I guarantee there’s no great ape that can do this,” Sarmiento says, pointing to the frame in the film when the creature turns in full stride to look over its shoulder at the camera. “A gorilla couldn’t do this. It can’t turn it’s head. An ape would have to stop and turn around to look at the camera.” Apes can walk on two legs, he said, but not with the stride and gait the Patterson Bigfoot uses. That’s a human trait.

“And the breast is covered in hair. Gorillas don’t have hair on their breasts. Apes only have breasts if they’re nursing, but there’s no baby in the film,” Sarmiento said. “Females usually have a baby around, and I don’t think it would leave and not take the baby.” Sarmiento added that the bottom of the Bigfoot’s foot in the film isn’t an ape’s foot with an opposable toe and even noted that it looks somewhat like a padded house shoe.

So what is it? What does the film show? “If I can’t show it either way, why would I make the call,” Saremiento said. “If it’s real it has to be a whole new species. Is it a man in a monkey suit? I don’t know. If I said that and it turned out not to be, then I’d look stupid.”

Source: statesman