My previous ShukerNature blog article was devoted to fictional green pigs (click here to read it), so now, continuing this colourful theme, the current one presented here is devoted to a (supposedly) factual green chimpanzee.
As regular readers of my blog, books, and articles will know well by now, I've always been attracted to the more unusual, little-known cryptids, and never more so than when they appear to be confined to a single source, and with no apparent follow-ups either. So it was that when, many years ago, I read about the subject of this blog article of mine in just one solitary book and nowhere else, its details stayed in my memory, to fascinate but also frustrate me in equal measure. For in spite of having searched several times down through the years for additional information in other publications and widely online, I've never been able to uncover any further details. Consequently, I've decided to present here in article form on ShukerNature the scant details that I do have concerning what I have dubbed – for reasons explained later – the elf chimp of Florida, in the hope that my article might induce readers who may know more about this very curious cryptid to post their valuable information here.
My original – and only – source of information (not counting, obviously, the numerous paraphrased versions of it that have subsequently appeared in print and online) is John A. Keel's classic book Strange Creatures From Time and Space (USA 1970/UK 1976). A verbatim version of it later appeared in a revised edition of this book, published in 1994 and retitled The Complete Guide to Mysterious Beings.
In both editions of Keel's book, the relevant excerpt appears as Case #15 within the Florida-themed section of a chapter entitled 'Creatures from the Black Lagoon', and reads as follows:
"There's a terrible smell around here. Can't you smell it?" the girl complained. She was one of four teenagers parked in a Lovers' Lane near Elfers, [western] Florida, in January 1967. As the others took deep breaths "an animal about the size of a large chimpanzee" sprang onto the hood [bonnet] of the car.
"Then we panicked!" the driver later told investigator Joan Whritenour. "The thing looked like a big chimp, but it was greenish [Keel's italics] in color, with glowing green eyes. I started the motor and the thing jumped off and ran back into the woods. We tore like blazes back to the dance we were supposed to be attending."
A police officer from New Port Richey later visited the site and found a sticky green substance which remains unidentified.
The investigator named in Keel's account was ufologist Joan Whritenour (who edited the ufological periodical Saucer Scoop). In 1967 she co-authored with famous mysteries researcher/writer Brad Steiger a book entitled Flying Saucers Are Hostile, followed a year later by a second UFO-themed book, Allende Letters. As I've never been a ufological researcher, however, I've never owned a copy of either of these works, nor any issues of Saucer Scoop, so I have no idea whether they contain any mention of this case (although it's more cryptozoology-based than UFO-themed anyway). Consequently, could any ShukerNature readers who do own any or all of these publications please check through them and let me know? Thanks very much! Sadly, neither Steiger nor Whritenour are still alive, otherwise I'd have contacted them to request further details regarding the 1967 Elfers incident.
Keel himself provided no primary source for his above account's information, nor, as seen, did he attempt to assign any kind of identifying moniker to the green chimp (or chimp-like entity). Consequently, in order to make it more readily identifiable to and referable by future researchers, I have chosen to dub this creature the elf chimp – because it was seen near Elfers, and because the traditional elf-associated colour just so happens to be green.
As a lifelong science-fiction movie buff (click here to visit my film review blog, Shuker In MovieLand), when I read about the creature's green colouration and the police officer's discovery of an unidentifiable sticky green substance at the site where the teenagers' encountered it I readily recalled how such a substance, frequently some kind of deadly radioactive spillage and/or of extraterrestrial origin, is a staple ingredient of sci fi-themed B-movies from the 1950s and 1960s. However, I personally doubt that anything so (melo)dramatic was the identity of the green gloop in this reputedly real-life incident.
Shifting my attention to more prosaic possibilities, I recalled the many reported cases down through the years of so-called luminous owls, spied widely around the world, but especially in Europe, North America, and Australia – all regions that just so happen to harbour the pallid-plumaged barn owl Tyto alba. Said to glow with intense brightness, sightings of mystery luminous owls have been discounted by some scientists as observations of normal barn owls that have inadvertently brushed against bioluminescent fungi such as the honey fungus Armillaria mellea (which are sticky to the touch, enhancing their adhesive capabilities) when perching in trees, with these glowing fungi and their spores becoming attached to their feathers. Comparable fungi, including Armillaria once again, also occur on the ground.
However, as swiftly pointed out by skeptics of this proposed solution, the total luminescence exhibited by a colony of such fungi in situ is still nowhere near as intense as has been reported for a fair few luminous owls. This in turns means that even if barn owls did find themselves with some glowing fungal spores attached to their plumage after having perched upon branches bearing them, the combined glow yielded by these spores would obviously be less still than the total glow emitted by the complete colony of bioluminescent fungi on those branches.
Consequently, I consider it highly unlikely that even if it had climbed trees bearing glowing fungi and rolled on the ground where glowing fungi were growing, the elf chimp encountered by the teenagers could have appeared greenish.
No details concerning the nature of the woods from which it had emerged and back into which it had fled were included in Keel's account, but I am wondering whether it contained any kind of large pool, pond, ravine, lake, stream, or some other body of freshwater. For if so, this might explain not only the elf chimp's colour but also its vile smell. Such bodies of freshwater in Florida and in many other localities around the world all too regularly experience, especially during the summer months, the detrimental phenomenon of algal blooms.
An algal bloom is defined as a rapid growth of microscopic true algae or of cyanobacteria in water, which often results in a coloured scum appearing on the water surface. In marine bodies of water, these blooms are often red in colour, are caused by true algae, and some are known as red tides (but green ones also occur, depending upon the algal species involved), whereas in freshwater they are frequently bright green or bluish-green, and are caused by autotrophic gram-negative bacteria correctly referred to as cyanobacteria but which on account of their superficially alga-like outward appearance are popularly albeit inaccurately dubbed blue-green algae.
Algal blooms result when algae or cyanobacteria multiply quickly in waterways with an overabundance of nitrogen and phosphorus (often caused by fertilizer having been dumped into them), particularly when the water is warm and the weather is calm. Moreover, they can have harmful effects upon the health of humans and other animals if water containing a bloom is touched, swum in, swallowed, or when airborne droplets are inhaled. They also emit a foul, putrid smell that can irritate, and they clog the gills of fishes swimming in water polluted by them.
Florida's freshwater bodies are particularly prone to algal blooms – indeed, in summer 2023 a toxic cyanobacterial bloom was covering roughly half of Lake Okeechobee, Florida's largest inland lake (click here to access a news report concerning this disturbing turn of events). In short, if the elf chimp had entered a body of freshwater containing a cyanobacterial bloom, whether deliberately or accidentally, it could well appear greenish in colour, with the severe irritation to its skin conceivably explaining its belligerent behaviour, and the stench emitted by the cyanobacterial bloom's scum even explaining this creature's awful stink as noted by the teenagers.
On the negative side of any explanation involving algal blooms is that the encounter took place in January, whereas these blooms are most prominent during the warm, sunny summer months. Furthermore, if the body of water where an algal bloom might potentially develop is ensconced within a dark secluded forest with little sunlight penetrating through the trees, this is far from ideal for a bloom's development, as the latter requires plenty of sunlight to stimulate its growth via photosynthesis. And if the sticky green substance found at the site near Elfers by the police officer were indeed from an algal bloom (or from glowing fungi for that matter), why could it not be identified? Algal blooms (and glowing fungi) were already familiar phenomena, scientifically speaking, back then.
Also needing to be considered is whether, in spite of its eyewitnesses' likening it to, or even directly identifying it as, a chimpanzee, the creature really was a chimp. An absconded exotic pet or an escapee/release from a private collection or menagerie certainly offer plausible explanations for why such a creature might be existing in a woodland near Elfier. However, there is also the intriguing possibility that it may be something truly cryptozoological – possibly a juvenile bigfoot, or, more specifically, a Florida skunk ape.
The reason that I proffer this option for consideration is that in the very same Florida-themed section of his book's 'Creatures from the Black Lagoon' chapter, Keel included as Case #14 another encounter with a hairy green-eyed green-glowing foetid creature of unidentified nature, but much larger than the elf chimp and more suggestive of a typical bigfoot entity. Again, he provided no source for his information, but here is how he described the encounter:
A young woman was changing a tire on a lonely stretch of highway outside Brooksville, [western] Florida, on Wednesday night, November 30, 1966, when she heard a noise in the bushes and became aware of a most unpleasant odor. Then a huge thing with large green eye and an eerie greenish glow on one side of its hairy torso stood up beside the road and studied her. She was terrified. The creature walked off into the woods when another car came along and stopped.
Worth noting here is that Brooksville and Elfers exist in adjacent counties within western Florida, with Brooksville a mere 38.7 miles north of Elfers.
Partial but not full-body contact with an cyanobacterial bloom could explain why only part of the torso of the Brooksville beast was glowing green – as an adult (judging from its huge size), the creature would be more experienced and wary about immersing in bloom-polluted water than a juvenile would be. Of course, as with the elf chimp case, the time of year in which this encounter occurred is outside the peak time for algal blooms, but some can exist all year long. Alternatively, had one side of its thorax simply brushed against some glowing fungi in the undergrowth?
Green glowing eyes have often been reported in bigfoot sightings (so too have red glowing eyes). This suggests that whatever the species responsible, a tapetum lucidum, i.e. a light-reflecting cell layer, is present at the back of each eye, behind the retina, as is commonplace in nocturnal mammals, assisting these creatures to see in dim light (by reflecting incoming light back out again through the retina, thus causing the reported glow or eyeshine).
However, as apes and monkeys are almost exclusively diurnal (only the Central and South American douroucoulis aka night or owl monkeys are habitually nocturnal, as well as lower primates such as lemurs and lorises), their eyes do not possess a tapetum – indicating, therefore, that whatever it was, the elf chimp was not a true chimp.
Having said that: an uncategorised species of ape that has evolved to be nocturnal might be expected, therefore, to have evolved such an adaptation. Again, the douroucoulis provide a precedent here. For although they do not possess a true tapetum, i.e. composed of riboflavin crystals (which nocturnal lemurs have), they do possess an analogous version composed of collagen fibrils, indicating that their nocturnal lifestyle is a secondary adaptation evolved from ancestral species that were diurnal in lifestyle.
In short, glowing green eyeshine at night does not necessarily rule out an ape identity for the bigfoot. Equally, however, those who favour a bear as this famous cryptid's true identity point to the fact that bears' eyes do possess a true tapetum and shine at night, the precise colour varying from red or orange to yellow or green, depending upon a number of different factors (and thereby making conflicting reports of green eyeshine and red eyeshine for the bigfoot less problematic).
As noted at the beginning of this ShukerNature blog article, I am unaware of any sequel to these cases, or the original source material (newspaper reports?) upon which Keel based his accounts. Does any additional coverage exist, for example, that names the teenagers and/or the police officer, which could therefore enable them to be traced and interviewed if still alive? Gathering further first-hand eyewitness testimony from them might yield new, extremely valuable details. Someone with ready access to the archives of local newspapers for Elfers and Brooksville might uncover such source material, which is why I have prepared this article – as a spur for further research by those better-placed geographically to conduct it than I am, living in Britain. It would certainly be fascinating to know whether the elf chimp and its much larger green-furred Brooksville counterpart were ever reported again, rather than being once-witnessed wonders of the kind all-too-frequently found hidden away in the cryptozoological archives.
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