Florida researcher Pat Rance with a cast he made in Green Swamp in April of 2006.
Chasing the myth of Bigfoot
The grainy, shaky footage captured the world’s attention and sparked debate that still rages. But in Florida, Patterson’s film caused barely a ripple of interest among old-timers.
Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Yeti, Skunk Ape, Wookie, Abominable Snowman, Swamp Ape, Shaawanoki, Shadow People — whatever you want to call it — was old news.
Very old news.
“I trace reports of hairy men back to the age of the Seminoles and the Miccosukee Indians meeting the Spaniards. The Indians had a long history throughout North America, but first in what is now Florida. We can probably say safely the 1600s,” says Bobbie Short, an independent Bigfoot researcher since 1985 and owner/editor of Bigfootencounters.com.
“Old-timers living on the edge of the Green Swamp tell stories of Mudwamps that came through the sugarcane fields,” says Dan Jackson, venomous snake expert from Lithia who claims to have encountered the Skunk Ape three times during 20 years of searching for the mysterious creature. “An old woman I talked to remembers her daddy telling her, ‘Don’t ever go into the sugarcane fields at night because the Mudwamps will cry like a baby to get you to go in there and they’ll take you.’”
Mudwamps?
“When I asked her, ‘What is a Mudwamp?’ she said, ‘A big old hairy thing that stunk something terrible,’” Jackson said. “She called it a Mudwamp; we call it Bigfoot or Skunk Ape. According to her, these things were known by man to exist.”
We’ll call it Bigfoot.
According to The Bigfoot Casebook (Granada Publishing 1982) and researchers Ramona Clark Hibner and Short, there were at least 60 Bigfoot sightings in Florida 1947 to 1977.
That’s a conservative estimate.
“A lot of people who saw the creature never reported it. And you can’t blame them. People take enough crap for saying they saw a Bigfoot,” said Diane Stocking, who heads Stocking Hominid Research Inc. from her home outside Mims, Fla. “For every report we hear, there might be 15 that don’t get reported.”
Evidently, Dean Averrick wasn’t afraid of ridicule. He told people he saw one wading in water near Miami in 1954. Neither was a group of hunters who reported seeing one in the Big Cypress Swamp in 1957.
Interestingly, the aforementioned Florida sightings occurred before Bigfoot drew national attention in a December 1959 True magazine article describing discovery of large, mysterious footprints in Bluff Creek, Calif., where Patterson would make his famous film nearly eight years later.
Bigfoot was here
While searchers traipsed through the woods of the Pacific Northwest trying to find the creature with huge feet, sightings continued in Florida.
And — hold on to your hats — much of the evidence that Bigfoot exists came from the north- central part of the state.
The same Green Swamp believed to be inhabited by Mudwamps around the turn of the century — a 110,000-acre labyrinth of wetlands, flatwoods and cypress domes stretching across Lake, Sumter and Polk counties — continues to intrigue Bigfoot searchers.
“We were finding dozens of footprints,” says Pat Rance, an independent primate researcher from Longwood who says he briefly saw a Bigfoot in the Green Swamp.
Stocking, who has been researching Bigfoot (she and Short prefer the term Sasquatch) for 36 years, says one of the most credible reports happened in October 1977 in the Ocala National Forest when S.L. Whatley, a 67-year-old Baptist minister allegedly stood eye-to-eye for 30 seconds with a “great, hairy creature.”
Whatley told a Marion County newspaper that he was cutting wood when he saw the creature, “… standing upright, in the middle of some palmetto bushes, and that sapsucker was at least 7 1/2, maybe 8 feet tall.” According to Whatley, the creature had “dark, lighter-than-black hair on its head and chest, not much on its arms, and none on its face. It had kind of a flat face, a flat nose. Its eyes were sunk in its sockets.”
Verifying Whatley’s story is impossible, but many people in that neck of the woods believe.
“Most of the people who have been around here a long time do. They sure do,” says Gary Roberts, who works at Fort McCoy Hardware. “Bay Swamp. That’s where he’s at. My buddy, who been hunting out there for 16 years, he swears it’s out there.”
In summer 1980, Jim Bliss, who was then living in Umatilla, claims to have found giant footprints in the Ocala National Forest about five miles northwest of Alexander Springs.
“When I saw the footprints, I was just flabbergasted. These prints were six feet apart. This thing was huge,” says Bliss, who now lives in Ocklawaha.
Bliss learned of the footprints from a Lake County Sheriff’s Office deputy he was friendly with.
“A guy operating a road grader saw something in the road. He thought it was a man, but as he got closer he could see it was a large bipedal creature. He stopped the grader, ran to his car and got out of there,” Bliss says.
According to a newspaper report, sheriff’s deputies made casts of 17-inch-by-6-1/2-inch footprints found near a bulldozer. In the story, Sgt. Dee Kirby speculates that if the prints were real they were made by a creature “10- to 12-feet tall” and weighing “close to 1,000 pounds.”
Bliss also made plaster casts of prints deputies overlooked beyond a shallow creek. Those prints started Bliss on a two-year search for Bigfoot in the wooded, swampy area. He was unsuccessful, but remains convinced Bigfoot exists.
“I believe it wholeheartedly. There’s something there,” Bliss said. “I know where he lives, but I can’t convince anyone to go there with me. He lives in Billy’s Bay, back behind Alexander Springs. There’s no doubt in my mind there is one. There’s been tons of people that’s seen them.”
He’ll get no argument from the Bigfoot Research Organization. The BFRO Web site lists a handful of sightings in Lake and Marion counties, including:
June 1990 — Man in woods west of Tarrytown sees something with reddish-brown hair, long arms, oval head and “kinda blurry” squatting in a tree line 300 to 400 feet away. Stocking, a former BFRO curator, says most reports don’t hold up under scrutiny. “In 35 years, I’ve probably interviewed 150 people who claim to have seen a Bigfoot, a Florida Skunk Ape, a creature they couldn’t explain. Of that number, I’d say five were credible. Definitely less than 10,” Stocking said. Short is quick to dismiss BFRO reports of recent Bigfoot activity in Florida. “Not much has happened in Florida since the 1970s; nothing credible, anyway, but there have been a lot of misidentifications and so forth,” Short says. “Most of us in ‘serious’ research believe nothing credible has happened in Florida in 30 years. It is my opinion they have moved north into the swamps of Georgia, where there are yearly reports.” Perhaps the Bigfoot did head north, but you’ll never convince Jackson, who spent years of trial and error tracking a creature he happened upon while hunting wild boars. Jackson says he found the elusive Skunk Ape in 2002 — and survived a face-to-face encounter so terrifying that he will never again seek the creature. Tomorrow: The encounter. Gary Corsair is a senior writer with the Daily Sun. He can be reached at 753-1119 or gary.corsair@thevillagesmedia.com. |
http://www.thevillagesdailysun.com/articles/2007/12/27/news/news01.txt
No comments:
Post a Comment