The Skunkape Roundtable, dead dogs in the woods, and I almost find the citation I’m looking for only to be foiled again!

All researchers like to think they look like Gandalf, the truth is sometimes, disappointing…

    Shortly after Dr. Meldrum’s presentation the people of the Skunkape round table took the stage. Being a Florida person, and having an interest in the skunkape I settled in to hear this round table discussion. It was a panel of 5 people, orchestrated by Stacey Brown, a somewhat notable skunkape investigator who appeared on Finding Bigfoot back in the day. I was not able to get the names of everyone on the panel, but it was made up of Ryan Golembeske  (RPG), the MC of the day’s festivities, Conner Flynn an amateur investigator and filmmaker and Mark Muncy, author of books like Eerie Florida and a part of the Eerie Travels podcast. I had not seen the other people on stage, and unfortunately I was not able to get their names. One of the  big questions they tackled from the audience was whether Bigfoot/Skunkape was natural or not. RPG had the answer I still consider to be most ‘off the wall’. He says that he believes that we live on some big game preserve and we are kept separate from the other things on the game preserve and  sometimes we catch a glimpse of things we shouldn’t see. Bigfoot, Skunkape, orbs, whatever. So there is that. Connor Flynn said he believes that bigfoot is not an ape, but another species of Human, and that we are all paranormal. Mark Muncy stated that it was something we don’t understand yet, a phrase he calls preternatural, not sure how to spell that. He also mentioned how Spanish Conquistadors talked about a ‘man of the woods’ which peaked my interest, but more on that in a minute. Of the 6 speakers on stage only one outright rejected paranormal and ‘woo’ oriented explanations. Another sort of dodged the question saying’ document,document,document.’ The whole day was full of a lot of weirdness, but that just seems to be the way the wind is blowing in the bigfoot world these days.

Next up was some questions from the audience, I wont go into a lot of detail with these, but one man had a story that sort of captured my interest.  A man came up to the mic and asked ‘why don’t they like dogs?” In a sort of slow,low southern drawl. The panel began listing the ways and reasons a Skunkape would not Ike dogs, then he dropped the bombshell that something killed his dogs. He told the panel how something in the woods growled at him, and his dogs went in after it to protect him and they didn’t come back. The panel sort of got quiet, then expressed they were sorry for his loss and basically reiterated a Skunkape would not like dogs, especially hunting dogs.  He asked if it would have attacked him if his dogs weren’t there, they all sort of shrugged. This guy reminded me of these sort of very stoic country guys I have met all my life in Florida. He seemed a simple, no flourishes type guy, and definitely did not strike me as the kind that would make up a story. He did not at all seem comfortable speaking publicly,and  he did not strike me as someone who had something to gain from telling a lie like this. That’s always the way it is with these stories without evidence. Are you convinced or aren’t you? Because as sad as it is, without a body or photographs, a story about dead dogs is just that, a story. I am pretty convinced that something happened to this man, what? I am not sure at all. But I am certain something did.

Lastly, I have to mention the quote dropped by Mark Muncy. During the round table he mentioned  a quote  how Spanish Conquistadores told about a man the woods, and naturally that piqued my interest. Longtime readers of the blog will know that I have been toying with this history of the Skunkape idea for a while now, and you would know that I am frustrated by the lack of historical sources for the skunkape. IF it is a real animal, then it will have historical sightings dating back the days of the earliest Florida explorers in the 1500s. Remember, between Ponce De Leon,Tristian De Luna, Panfilo de Navareaz, a few others and eventually Pedro Menendez  himself, there would be Spanish sightings of the beast. As mentioned in previous articles, the Spanish (eventually the British too) crisscrossed and explored Florida for almost 200 years before the Americans came onto the scene.  I have been looking for a citation like this for a while now,so I was excited. After the presentation I made a bee line to Muncy’s table and talked with him about it, asking him where the information came from. Mark Muncy is such a nice guy, he seems always jolly and is approachable and is happy to answer questions from guests. Anyway, I asked him where the information in question came from,and he answered that he got the information from a book that the late Scott Marlowe had, and since Scott Marlowe has unfortunately passed the information is now lost. My silly self confused Scott Marlow with the ‘Champ guy’ Scott Mardis who is also passed. In any case, Muncy took the time to explain that the information in question came from a book from Spain that Marlowe had the passages highlighted. He mentioned how it was from a letter or documents sent to the crown detailing the travels an exploits of these conquistadores that also detailed fire breathing salamanders and other potential monsters of the Florida ecosystems.  This gives me a direction to look in, but unfortunately for my purposes the citation of ‘a book passage in Spanish that Scott Marlowe had highlighted and showed to Mark Muncy once” wont exactly cut it. That is ok though. The search continues, and that is probably the fun in this anyway. 

Next time I plan on tackling the rest of the high strangeness in the afternoon, before I culminate with a discussion of the one bizarre  thing that Skeptics and David Paulides might actually agree on, but that’s for next time!