Skunk ape in costume in opposition to Miami skyline. {Photograph} by Josh Aronson.
The night earlier than the fourth annual Nice Florida Bigfoot Convention within the north-central horse city of Ocala, I used to be in a buffet line on the VIP dinner, listening to a person describe his first encounter. “I used to be on an airboat close to Turner River Street within the Glades and I noticed it there,” he mentioned. “At first, I confused it with a gator as a result of it was hunched over, however then it stood up. It was most likely eight ft tall. I might scent it too. I froze. It was like one thing had taken management over my physique.” His story contained a typical trope of Bigfoot encounters: awe and worry within the face of a better energy.
I sat down at a convention room spherical desk and gnawed on an undercooked rooster quarter, trying round at my fellow VIPs, or because the convention’s grasp of ceremonies, Ryan “RPG” Golembeske, referred to as us, the Bigfoot Mafia. A lot of the different attendees have been of retirement age. Their hats, tattoos, and automobile bumpers within the parking zone indicated that many have been former navy, police, and/or proud gun house owners. Many have been Trump supporters—beseeching fellow motorists to, as one bumper sticker learn, MAKE THE FOREST GREAT AGAIN, a catchphrase which had been written out over a picture of a Bigfoot on a turquoise background within the pines, rocking a pompadour. The sticker was a small oval on the bigger spare wheel cowl of a mid-aughts Chinook Concourse RV. Above it and under it, in Inspirational Quote Font, was the phrase “As soon as upon a time … is Now!” The couple who owned the RV cemented their identities with a giant home made TRUCKERS FOR TRUMP window decal subsequent to a big handicap sticker. As a thirty-six-year-old progressive, I used to be an outlier on this crowd. However, like many, I used to be a believer.
It bears repeating: I imagine within the existence of the Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Yeti, Wild Man, or, as it’s referred to as in South Florida, the Skunk Ape. There have been too many credible accounts and oral histories handed down over hundreds of years to low cost its/their existence. Throughout my time working as a instructor on the Miccosukee Indian Reservation, I heard from college students and elders very detailed and grave encounters with a big humanlike primate within the swamp. In the midst of publishing Islandia Journal, a periodical of hidden native folklore and historical past, I additionally meet swamp fanatics—historians, hunters, hydrologists, et cetera—who describe encounters clearly. Although I’ve by no means had an encounter myself, I imagine these tales intuitively, informed by those that don’t have anything to achieve from their telling. Sadly, no organic proof helps the concept that Bigfoot exists. Attendees of the convention wax rhapsodically about what the longer term holds because of eDNA. The invention of primate DNA within the water or filth close to an encounter location would rekindle the potential for a organic Bigfoot, however for now, we’re ready.
This absence of tougher proof meant that the convention was, predictably, rife with hypothesis. On the VIP dinner, I sat subsequent to Monica, certainly one of my few fellow thirtysomethings in attendance. She was sunburnt and wore small spherical gold-rimmed glasses. She’d moved to Jacksonville from West Virginia together with her accomplice, Joey, who informed me later that she was simply there to assist Monica’s various pursuits. Whereas trying down and shuffling BBQ beans and mac and cheese round her styrofoam plate, Monica requested if I’d heard concerning the newest paranormal goings-on at Skinwalker Ranch within the Utah desert. Speaking about giant objects beneath mesas and anomalies within the sky, she gestured wildly. This struck me as off-base: we have been at a Bigfoot convention, not storming Space 51. “It’s all linked,” she mentioned, earlier than explaining that Bigfoot tracks disappearing into dry creek beds weren’t the product of hoaxes however fairly as a result of Bigfoot travels utilizing interdimensional portals. I expressed some doubt. “You may both shut your thoughts,” she informed me, “or open it to the very actual risk of infinite dimensions.”
After the VIP dinner, I drove down Ocala’s State Street 200—an asphalt expanse of strip malls—to Gator’s Dockside Restaurant. The particular person behind the favored Instagram account referred to as @florida_bigfoot_hq was internet hosting a pre-conference get-together. The account is run by Brooke Moreland, a self-described “researcher of the unusual and strange,” who posts a mixture of bikini, tattoo, health, and gun content material on her private Instagram. I noticed her the subsequent day on the convention carrying a BIGFOOT SPECIAL FORCES tank prime. In opposition to a setting solar, the tank’s Bigfoot walked holding an assault rifle. “He all the time sees you,” the shirt learn, “However you’ll by no means see him.”
On the comfortable hour, I sat down subsequent to Thomas and Todd, who’d pushed down from Mississippi. In his free time, Todd designs Bigfoot-themed coasters. He doesn’t have an Etsy store and wasn’t a vendor for the convention. “I simply make ‘em for myself and for buddies,” he informed me. “Take one.” He handed me a coaster which learn “Florida Skunk Ape: The Unique Florida Man.” The coaster, disintegrating beneath the ring the place his beer had been, was purple, inexperienced, yellow, and black—the identical colours you would possibly discover on a head store ashtray. Thomas informed me he was an HVAC repairman and heavy steel guitarist with a protracted ponytail who stuffed his time driving between jobs listening to Bigfoot podcasts. His dad obtained him into it. “It’s intergenerational for me,” he mentioned.
The etymology of the identify “Bigfoot” will be traced to Bluff Creek in California. In 1958, a bulldozer operator working for a logging outfit noticed sixteen-inch footprints subsequent to his car. His crew additionally reported encounters with a innocent space creature. Bigfoot hysteria entered the American psyche extra broadly within the seventies after the discharge of the well-known 1967 Patterson-Gimlin movie, which presupposed to seize Bigfoot strolling throughout Bluff Creek, California, in 16mm glory. Roger Patterson rented out film theaters and screened the documentary which included the footage, and finally bought rights to the BBC to be used in certainly one of their very own TV docudramas. Hastily, folks have been heading into the woods in quest of the creature. In 2019, the FBI launched a trove of paperwork associated to inquiries by Peter Byrne, the director of Oregon’s Bigfoot Info Heart from all the best way again in 1976. He’d been requesting an investigation into space sightings and a particular hair pattern. Fifty years later, he lastly obtained a reply within the information: the hair was from a deer. Many Floridians noticed the doable existence of Bigfoot as a disruption to often scheduled looking and actual property improvement. They needed nothing to do with their resident Skunk Ape and took to the woods in offended mobs, besides as an alternative of pitchforks and torches, they introduced rifles. They discovered clues, together with a sequence of seventeen-inch footprints, however they have been breadcrumbs that led nowhere. In 1977, hoping to quell the hysteria behind these hunts, Florida state consultant Paul Nuckolls sponsored a invoice to guard Skunk Apes from being hunted. The proposed legislation made it a misdemeanor to “take, possess, hurt, or molest the Skunk Ape.” In the end, it didn’t make it by means of the legislature.
In keeping with the Bigfoot Subject Analysis Group, which maintains the most intensive database of reported Bigfoot encounters around the globe, Washington state has probably the most listed encounters and California has the second. These aren’t surprises. The Paterson-Gimlin movie assured Bigfoot’s affiliation with the woods and mountains of the Pacific Northwest. Florida is available in at quantity three. This surprises many. Florida has lengthy marketed itself as a vacation spot for beachgoing and fishing—a spot the place you possibly can take a break from the coast and go see an alligator by the aspect of a highway. The pine woods of Ocala’s Nationwide Forest and the mammal-rich cypress hammocks of the southern a part of the state don’t make it onto postcards as typically.
I requested my new buddies on the @florida_bigfoot_hq occasion about this: Why is Florida a hotbed of Bigfoot encounters? “Plain and easy,” Todd replied, “You’ve obtained year-round freshwater and meals.” He was referring to Florida’s climate, its springs, and a consistently replenishing retailer of untamed turkeys, hogs, and different huntable animals. It was a sober, cheap reply, and possibly the most effective one I obtained the entire weekend, assuming you imagine that Bigfoot is a organic being that requires meals.
Skunk ape in costume. {Photograph} by Josh Aronson.
The subsequent morning I drove to Rainbow Springs to take a dip within the seventy-two-degree water and mull over my very own query. Whereas driving, I’d handed the Villages, a retirement neighborhood with the ability to affect presidential elections. I drove previous swaths of clear-cut forest. I drove previous roadside points of interest just like the Don Garlits Museum of Drag Racing, the Zipline Journey Park, and Gatorland. Florida’s retirement communities and roadside points of interest invite transplants to flee the malaise of a perceived American decline; additionally they typically operate as hotbeds of eccentricity, conspiracy theories, and right-wing politics. In 2021, on the first annual Nice Florida Bigfoot Convention I’d attended, peak pandemic, it was paranoia which held my nostril captive. Masks mandates have been flouted within the merch aisles. Distributors bought SQUATCH LIVES MATTER stickers. One media firm referred to as the Soul Entice performed a loop of a video concerning the Mark of the Beast.
In his lately printed guide The Secret Historical past of Bigfoot, John O’Connor requested the scientist and author Robert Michael Pyle if he thought Bigfooting and Trumpism have been associated. “Sure,” Pyle replied. “There’s lots in widespread. As with the January sixth folks, Bigfooters are all white guys. They usually love their gear and their massive vehicles and their massive weapons and all of their infrared issues. It’s not precisely the identical crowd as January sixth, but it surely’s among the similar folks.”
However the tone was completely different on the 2024 Nice Florida Bigfoot Convention, which came about on June 8. Just one vendor referred to as What the Sas? even actually went there. After I requested them how gross sales have been going for his or her grey tee with an illustration of a Bigfoot holding a LET’S GO BRANDON poster and storming the Capitol, the salesperson shrugged and mentioned, “Inferior to final 12 months.”
In keeping with the host, Collect Up Occasions, there have been greater than two thousand folks at Ocala’s World Equestrian Heart for the 2024 convention. The occasion was held in a large, white warehouse with fifty-foot ceilings. Traces have been twenty-deep at concession stands alongside one aspect of the room, the place big pretzels formed like massive ft have been bought. Jovial attendees dipped their toes in cups of mustard. The middle a part of the corridor was cut up in half. On one aspect have been all of the distributors, together with a firm referred to as Space 52 Media Group, which supplied a full suite of video enhancing and posting companies for Bigfooters on expedition. Different tables bought evening scopes, customized looking knives, garden indicators, and marketed their YouTube channels and podcasts. A fifty-foot-wide display hung above the stage on the opposite aspect of the room the place lectures and panel discussions came about. The edges of the room have been cut up by a wall of step-and-repeat head-in-hole boards, an area the place, for a couple of minutes, you might grow to be Bigfoot.
Most of the attendees have been within the crowd to see a keynote deal with by Ranae Holland, the self-proclaimed “Skeptical Scientist” of the Bigfooting world. Holland doesn’t imagine in a organic Bigfoot. She was a star of Animal Planet’s Discovering Bigfoot, a present which ran for 100 episodes between 2011 and 2018. The present was a low funds, high-ad-dollar documentary-style and personality-driven program. The names of her costars nonetheless echo as refrains by means of the communities, like a Mount Rushmore of a Bigfooters. Spend time at a convention and also you’ll hear them: Bobo Fay, Cliff Barackman, Matt Moneymaker, Ranae Holland. The solid by no means discovered a Bigfoot, however that they had actual, mysterious encounters and gave airtime to hundreds of witnesses and native Bigfooting organizations. The present helped set up an trade which is prospering in the present day.
Regardless of some scoffs from the gang, Holland used her time on the Florida stage to champion LGBTQ rights within the Bigfooting world, espouse the virtues of indigenous land stewardship, and likewise revile her trolls, the so-called “Ranaesayers” of a really on-line neighborhood. Holland doesn’t imagine in a organic Bigfoot however fairly an beautiful corpse of a celestial Bigfoot aggregated from numerous indigenous oral histories all through the Pacific Northwest. The phrase Sasquatch, in spite of everything, is believed to derive from the Salish phrase Sasq’ets, which interprets to “furry man.”
When it got here time for the Q&A, I stood up and requested Holland my enduring query: “Why Florida?” At first, she equivocated, however finally got here to a philosophical reply of kinds. “Florida,” she mentioned. “It appears folks in Florida are extra open to sharing their experiences than somewhere else, for some cause.”
The rationale intersects in some methods with conspiracy, definitely, and the state authorities’s motion towards freedom-cloaked fascism. However to funnel all Florida Bigfooters into an Erlenmeyer flask of non secular fanaticism and conspiracy idea doesn’t do the topic justice. Bigfooters abound on all sides of the political spectrum, and our ranks embrace Peter Matthiessen, a left-wing political activist, environmental champion, and founding editor of The Paris Overview. Matthiessen’s nephew Jeff Wheelwright has written extensively about his uncle’s ardour. Throughout his time in Nepal, researching a guide that may grow to be The Snow Leopard, Matthiessen claimed to identify “a darkish form” soar behind a boulder close to a creek in a canyon. Bigfoot!
On my approach out of the convention, I bumped into the grasp of ceremonies and requested him how he felt. “It’s simply so good,” he mentioned, “for folks to have an occasion like this the place they’ll speak about their experiences with out feeling judged.”
Throughout her keynote deal with, Holland talked about probably the most optimistic impacts of all this Bigfooting: that extra persons are getting outdoors and into the woods. Past that, possibly, folks want to expertise an awestruck, body-freezing encounter out in no matter wilderness is accessible. After I first obtained my driver’s license, I’d use the liberty to gentle out of Miami and velocity on the Tamiami Path into the Everglades. My buddies and I might park at trailheads and hike within the ever-unfolding swamp, questioning if we would see one thing completely different this time. On one such journey, we pulled onto a dust highway close to the Massive Cypress to shoot scenes for a brief movie a couple of legendary golden alligator of the Everglades. We stopped the automobile, rolled down the home windows, and took within the sound of the wind within the timber. We each heard the crackle of branches and agreed there was a shadowy form alongside the highway’s tree line. We ran out after it however discovered nothing in its wake however extra timber, and solitude.
Somewhat than a worry of their fellow man, it may be that Florida Bigfooters are as an alternative petrified of a world the place the potential for a Bigfoot doesn’t exist, that we reside in a world which has been so overdeveloped that the numinous is relegated to performs of sunshine and shadows. O’Connor writes in his Secret Historical past concerning the 2009 Texas Bigfoot Convention, the place Peter Matthiessen was satisfied to present a keynote deal with. Speaking to an area reporter about his curiosity within the topic, he waxed concerning the human want for story and delusion. He ended his remarks by saying, “You already know, stranger issues have occurred than Bigfoot.”
Jason Katz is the founding editor of Islandia Journal, a Miami-based periodical of subtropical delusion, folklore, ecology, and cryptozoology.
