Flying Bigfoot of Florida

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The Flying Bigfoot of Florida - simply called "Bigfoot" at the time - was a hoax in west central Florida which was most active between the years 1973 and 1975, and was reported periodically in the St. Petersburg Times newspaper. In the late 1990s, one of the perpetrators of the hoax came forward, admitting his actions and debunking the entire legend, most of which had already been forgotten by that time.

In the spring of 1973, tracks of large, three-toed footprints began appearing on Clearwater Beach. These were spaced like a seabird would walk, but the prints suggested the creature lacked webbing between the toes. Many people (including the hoaxters themselves) reported fleeting sightings of the creature which the local press quickly dubbed "Bigfoot," based on the size of its feet, and despite the fact that the name "Bigfoot" was already commonly known and associated with the Sasquatch or Skunk Ape, also periodically reported in rural areas of Florida at the time.

The creature was described in the Clearwater Sun as being somewhat reptilian, with a long serpentine neck and a large head similar to a pit viper. It was said to have leathery wings like a bat or a Pterodactyl. Other eyewitnesses merely described it as being a very large bird.

No pictures were ever taken, although numerous people claimed to have seen it walking on the beach or taking off. Bigfoot's tracks were only found on Clearwater Beach early in the morning; it evidently never bothered to visit the much larger and less-crowded Sand Key beach just a half mile to the south. Over time, tracks and sightings became scarcer, and disappeared by the middle of the decade.

Perhaps due to the transitory nature of the town's inhabitants, the story quickly faded away and was mostly forgotten until the Sun published a short interview with one of the hoaxters more than twenty years later.

According to the story, two students at Clearwater High School were bored, and decided to play a prank. After watching an episode of the TV show My Three Sons in which an elephant's foot umbrella stand is used to make fake elephant tracks and fool people into thinking there was an elephant on the loose, they decided to make a large bird's foot in shop class. They then regularly took the foot to Clearwater Beach late at night to make the tracks. There was never any attempt to fake a full body for the monster, nor to attempt to fake photographs of it. The various descriptions from various sightings were products of the public imagination or outright lies.