Man Convinced People Of A Giant Penguin For 40 Years

It’s 1948 and the police chief in the small town of Clearwater, Florida receives a strange phone call. The caller insisted that there was something strange going on at the beach.

As local residents started to wake up they came across a peculiar sight; giant monster-like footprints across the sand. That is where the rumour began circulating that Clearwater Beach had a sea monster.

However what they didn’t even imagine was that it was actually a local prankster who wore 30-pound, three-toed iron shoes and stomped around the beach at night. To make it look like big stride he would jump on one foot to another to space the prints out and make they look authentic.

Over the next 10 years mysterious tracks appeared on other beaches, from Honeymoon Island to St. Pete Beach. The local papers ran stories about the mystery. The footprints lead people to believe there was a giant, 15-foot penguin roaming their lands.

Then in 1958 as suddenly as it started they just stopped and from then on was never seen again.

Thirty years passed.

It wasn’t until April 11, 1988, that finally the mystery was solved when a St. Petersburg Times reporter revealed that the giant penguin was actually Tony Signorini. He had admitted he had made them with the help of a friend.

What is amazing is that Signorini managed to keep the prank a secret for 40 years!

When Signorini died at age 91 in 2013, his family made sure to mention in his obituary that, along with being a World War II flight engineer and a pillar of the St. Cecilia Catholic Church, “Tony was famous for being ‘The Clearwater Monster,’ a hoax that made national news.”

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