The Myakka Whatever.

Near the northern border of Florida, one county over from the east coast of the state, is the small community of Glen St. Mary. It is a town in Baker County, Florida, with a population of 473 in the 2000 census, and 489, as of 2004. The people in Glen St. Mary live in 181 households in 131 families. Ninety-eight percent of the people in town identify themselves as Caucasian Americans.

The little town of Glen St. Mary is in the middle of a bit of uproar. A cryptid is the talk of the town. A mystery ape seems to be about.

Needless to say, Florida is the land of accounts of the Skunk Ape, the Myakka unknown, and boogers. There are over a hundred years of reports of this kind coming from this part of America’s subtropical South.

Click on the comparison between images above ~ Myakka cryptid on the left, an orangutan on the right ~ for a larger view.

Also, in November 2006, news video was taken of an “escaped chimp” and I posted on this report here, “Chimp Sighting = Skunk Ape?”.

The following are video captures from that 2006 Florida tape. This “chimp” was never caught. Who is to say it wasn’t a Skunk Ape? It seems to be a report that is all but forgotten.

But the mystery of cryptid apes in Florida continues. The following complete article is from the First Coast News for November 13, 2007:

Folks who live there say nothing much happens in Glen St. Mary. But some excitement came to the little North Florida town — in the form of an escaped ape. Or did it?

Downtown Glen St. Mary has all you’d expect from a small North Florida town: one traffic signal, one gas station and one big mystery.

Screeches in the night. A creature in the trees.

Stories of sightings echo on every corner. The local newspaper even ran a story about it. Eric Lawson’s heard the tales.

“There is kinda that ‘I’ve seen a Bigfoot’ type of feel to it,” he said. “They said it made a nest in that tree, so it’s probably somewhere here in the area.”

What’s got Glen St. Mary howling? It’s a monkey.

Well, actually — an ape. Specifically, an orangutan.

A handful of folks say they’ve heard the call of an escaped ape.

One family even found the grand prize: what looked to be an orange ape, nesting high in a tree.

We talked on the phone with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission investigator who actually answered the original complaint call.

He said there was definitely something up in the top of the tree, but he really couldn’t be sure what it was.

So, he took a pack of jelly donuts and left it right at the bottom of the tree, hoping to lure the creature to the ground.

He hasn’t heard anything since.

Well, orangutans really love fruit. So, hungry for answers, we went to “Ed” — a neighbor who hears all the gossip from his produce stand.

But Ed had boarded up his stand and beat it out of town. Why did he decide to split? It’s not clear, but the sign he left behind prominently features a bunch of bananas as one of his top-selling products.

Ed took off, and so did the mystery creature.

“The next morning, the people came out and it was — it was gone,” Lawson remembered from the story he’d heard from his father.

If it is an ape, where did it come from? The state says no one in Baker County is even licensed to own an orangutan. It seems like that’s part of the mystery.

In the end, the evidence of any, umm, monkey business — is still up in the air.“Great Ape Mystery is Talk of First Coast Town,” November 13, 2007, First Coast News, Florida.

Thanks to Chad Arment for sharing this article.