News of a strange “muck monster” has residents of West Palm Beach, Florida, buzzing… but true to Fortean factoid fame, there is a unique bit of synchronicity going on here also, involving a strange Bigfoot-like creature witnessed decades ago in a different locale bearing the same name.

At the website LagoonKeepers.org, several videos have been posted that depict what is being dubbed a “Muck Monster” (click here to visit the site and view the videos). “This appears to be one animal moving in this direction,” said Thomas Reinert, a Marine Biologist with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. “Nothing’s breaking the surface. Typically dolphins break the surface, sea turtles, manatee, a large school of fish… if it were a shark at that level you would see a fin.” Is the “Muck Monster” indeed a bizarre cryptozoological mystery, or is it more likely to be something a bit less glamorous?

Rick Stokes, News Editor for The Anomalist, commented earlier today that “The problem is the video doesn’t show anything breaking the water, so it could be anything, most likely something rather mundane.” Grey Reynolds of LagoonKeepers.org says he cant say with certainty what it is in his videos either. “We spend a lot of time out here on the water and (have) seen a lot of different creatures out here. This is the first time in three and half years that I’ve ever seen anything out here that didn’t know what it was,” Reynolds told WPTV News 5 out of West Palm Beach.

Although Nessie’s new US cousin (do we call it “Muckie”?) has caused a stir near the Lake Worth lagoon in Florida, decades ago in the summer of 69, amidst all the free love and music that proliferated, Lake Worth, Texas residents were being terrified by sightings of an alleged “Goat Man”.

Bud Kennedy, a reporter with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, outlined the story in his 2006 article “Lake Monster May be Myth, but Exhibit is Real”:

If you’re new around here, back in summer 1969, a lot of people were seeing things. Some people thought they saw flying saucers. Some people thought they saw Soviet spies. And some people thought they saw a 7-foot-tall half-man, half-goat threatening motorists near Lake Worth.

John Reichert of South Henderson Street was quoted in the Star-Telegram as saying it scratched his car. Jack Harris of Sansom Park said he saw it throw a tire 500 feet. Allen Plaster of Fort Worth, who owned women’s wear shops, shot a photo of a large, furry-looking, light-colored blob.

That fall, Charles Buchanan said he saw a gorillalike creature. He threw a bag of leftover chicken at it, and it swam off toward Greer Island, where it has apparently lived ever since in an undisclosed location.

Police said later that Brewer High School students were found with a glow-in-the-dark mask and a gorilla costume. Experts back then said the first sightings were probably of a bobcat, and the guess was that the teenagers wanted to scare the curious crowds searching the lake. If so, they not only scared the crowds but also wrote Bigfoot history.

Interesting how sightings of a seven-foot tall bipedal proto-human-goat-thing can be explained away as bobcats and teenagers with glow in the dark monkey masks. Less conveniently explained away by the theories above are some of the stranger aspects of the story that were indicative of an aquatic link to the creature (which, I must note, aren’t mentioned here specifically with interest in drawing parallels to “the muck monster” mentioned earlier). These features include frequent reports that the creature had “scales” on its skin, in addition to hair and ape-like attributes. This seems reminiscent of reports of another southern ‘squatch, referred to as “The Lizard Man” of Scape Ore Swamp, South Carolina. Also, the fact that the creature was witnessed swimming on at least one occasion is interesting, since most primates outside humans and, recently, some island-dwelling chimpanzees aren’t known to be swimmers.

Another unique parallel I noticed was that my good friend, conspiracy writer Jim Marrs, was apparently the journalist who broke the story back in 1969 (although the Wikipedia entry on the Lake Worth Monster states the journalist who wrote the original Star-Telegram article was named Jerry Baker. This seems incorrect, so I’ve asked Jim if he knew who Baker was, and if he may have also been writing about the creature around the same time. Response is awaited as I type this).

In the image at right, you can enjoy seeing Jim and I give our best impressions of what the Lake Worth monster may have looked like.

What are these strange cryptozoological monsters? Was there really a “Goat Man” at Lake Worth Texas? Similarly, is the creature videotaped in Florida recently anything anomalous, or is it a known creature, disguised by the murky depths? Who knows…