The Golden Yeti 2021 Goes To Daniel Perez

Cryptozoologist of the 12 months:

The Golden Yeti 2021 Goes To Daniel Perez

by Loren Coleman

Worldwide Cryptozoology Museum

 

This previous Could 31, 2021 was Daniel Perez’s 58th birthday. After a lifetime of Bigfoot analysis, Bigfoot writings, and the editorship of Bigfoot Instances, Perez is lengthy overdue for recognition as “The Cryptozoologist of the 12 months,” for 2021.

For virtually 5 a long time, Perez has held a deep curiosity in Bigfoot, touring far and extensive, moderating conferences, and placing himself proper in the course of debates and persona conflicts within the subject.

Daniel Perez is a folks particular person. He’s as well-known for in search of in-depth private details about the pursuers of bushy unknown hominoids as he’s for gathering long-forgotten details about Bigfoot itself.

Within the Nineties, Perez was recognized to many because the “Jerry Springer” of Bigfootry for the rumors he printed in his Bigfoot Instances publication and the fights he’s refereed at pre-pandemic conferences. He’s been known as a saint, a skeptic, a Bigfoot journalist, and a Bluff Creek professional. A mixture of Dan Reasonably, Chris Wallace, and Rachel Maddow. A gossip. An investigative reporter. A man that stirs up the pot. An emcee, a silent observer, a heckler. 

 

Perez has the consideration of being known as the “Historian of the Digicam” for the background knowledge he has found on the filmmaking gear utilized by Roger Patterson at Bluff Creek, California, on October 20, 1967. He is named a element man who has at all times been concerned with wanting deeply to right the accepted historical past of the “movie” with the details. For instance, Daniel Perez remarked in correspondence to me that he was the particular person “who found out who wrote the primary newspaper article on the P-G movie: Al Tostado. And it was [Daniel Perez] who carried out the one videotaped deposition with the late Richard Henry, the person who drove Jim McClarin to the filmsite on November 5, 1967. And it was [Daniel Perez] who identified the common web/ebook error: Paul Freeman’s Bigfoot video was shot in 1992, not 1994.”

There nonetheless are a lot of folks, who name Daniel Perez, particularly behind his again, affectionately “Danny,” from his early, youthful, excited, starting days. Nevertheless, these days don’t publicly deal with him as “Danny,” any longer, or the following time he writes about you, he’ll pointedly use your total identify, together with your center identify, even after you ask him to not.  That’s Daniel.

Daniel Perez has been concerned in writing three prolonged works for the literature: Bigfoot at Bluff Creek (1994), Massive Footnotes: A Complete Bibliography Regarding Bigfoot, the Abominable Snowman and Associated Beings (1998), and Bigfoot: Encounters Previous and Current (2012).

Perez’s foldout, The Patterson-Gimlin Filmsite: 1968-2012, even included a packet of soil from the placement.

Don’t trouble Daniel with making an attempt to persuade him he ought to name the unknown hominoids “Sasquatch” to sound extra scientific. He received’t hear it. To Daniel Perez, it’s “Bigfoot” and we occur to dwell in fascinating “Bigfoot occasions.”

About many grassroots issues, Daniel could also be really right. Perez is a singular member of the Bigfoot group, a vibrant and dynamic self-made man and Bigfootry is fortunate to have him.

Beginnings

All of it started for Daniel Perez, when, in 1973, he was taken to a Bigfoot film by his household. Reporter Daniel de Vise wrote concerning the expertise in The Lengthy Seashore Press Telegram on Monday, July 11, 1994:

Perez’s first publicity to Bigfoot got here at age 10, when he went with the household to see the movie The Legend of Boggy Creek. The film’s paranormal implications baffled a boy whose psychological curiosity had led him towards math, science and different fields the place, as he says, “issues have so as to add up.”

“The film hit me like a ton of bricks,” Perez recalled. “I completely couldn’t imagine that these folks had been claiming to see these creatures. You’re taught to imagine that the bogeyman and all these creatures don’t exist. So I pooh-poohed it.”

“As I learn extra, although, I began to appreciate that some extremely credible folks from all walks of life had been having sightings. I began taking a look at it objectively, and considering, ‘There could be one thing to this.”’ Perez started corresponding with fellow Bigfoot seekers in 1978, as he was ending highschool.

David Kelly interviewed Daniel Perez in 2007, and wrote within the Los Angeles Instances of December 26, 2007:  

“Perez’s pursuit of Bigfoot started at age 10 after he watched The Legend of Boggy Creek (1973) at a Norwalk [California] theater. The documentary-style movie handled a Bigfoot-like beast horrifying rural Fouke, Ark. [people].

“I believed it was simply one other monster film, nevertheless it turned out to be the paving stone to who I’m at the moment,” he mentioned.

He instantly went to the library and withdrew books about Bigfoot and different creatures, together with the Loch Ness monster. He wrote letters to Bigfoot consultants, who impressed him with their earnestness.

“It was virtually like a science venture for him,” recalled his father, Edward. “It was one thing to maintain him busy and enabled him to determine what’s what.”

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“I believe my mother for certain thought this was going to be a part that I might develop out of,” Perez mentioned. “But it surely wasn’t. That is what makes me tick.” Perez was the third of 4 kids born right into a middle-class Norwalk house.

His father was {an electrical} check engineer for Rockwell Worldwide Corp., his mom a homemaker. Danny was an A scholar and cross-country runner at Santa Fe Excessive Faculty in Santa Fe Springs. All three of Perez’s siblings at the moment are married, however Danny stays single. “I fell in love at a really early age with the sphere of Bigfooting,” Perez mentioned. “So I suppose you might say I bought married earlier than any of them.”

Again to the 1994 article,

He based the Heart for Bigfoot Research in 1984. Because the pile of clippings and letters grew, he moved it from a JCPenney shoe field to a file cupboard after which a pc. Perez splits his time between properties in Norwalk and Riverside, the place he works as an electrician. He’s had the day job…, however considers Bigfooting way over a pastime. “Individuals inform me it is a interest,” Perez mentioned. “This isn’t a interest. It’s a scientific endeavor.”’

Daniel Perez, from 1979 by means of 1986, revealed his first variation of his publication, which he entitled BigfooTimes (as one phrase). He additionally bought Bigfoot plaster casts.

Then in late 1997, utilizing his first laptop computer pc, he started publishing Bigfoot Instances (two phrases). Regardless of the web altering the panorama of the web world, Perez continued printing out his four-page publication, then sending it out by way of the U.S. mail, as near as soon as a month as he might. 

On his web site, Perez displays on this historical past:

I quietly continued with a 4 web page publication that was as old style as they get: it’s mailed to readers in an envelope. The  publication is printed on  sunburst yellow paper and the format was booklet: 11″ inches by 17″ inches.

 As I wrote within the first version of the Bigfoot Instances. ”As common, there are not any floor guidelines and nothing is to[o] sacred to be mentioned right here.” A easy system that I nonetheless embrace. Wanting again but additionally wanting forward I believe one more reason for the longevity of the Bigfoot Instances is  I used to be at all times prepared to jot down what others had been solely considering.  It’s that remark in dialog,  ”…inform us what you actually suppose.” Effectively, simply go to the Bigfoot Instances.   The publication is mailed out each month and I’ve been doing so since our premiere concern got here out final century, in January 1998. 

Perez bought to be often known as the one to ask arduous questions and criticize anybody. Writing of Perez on the “Worldwide Bigfoot Symposium” in Willow Creek, California, September 12-14, 2003, Paul Vella, utilizing notes by Jerry Riedel, noticed Perez talking up on the Q&A session: