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 Might 31, 2021 was Daniel Perez’s 58th birthday. After a lifetime of Bigfoot analysis, Bigfoot writings, and the editorship of Bigfoot Occasions, 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 vast, moderating conferences, and placing himself proper in the midst of debates and character conflicts within the subject.

Daniel Perez is a folks individual. He’s as well-known for searching for in-depth private details about the pursuers of furry unknown hominoids as he’s for gathering long-forgotten information about Bigfoot itself.

Within the Nineties, Perez was identified to many because the “Jerry Springer” of Bigfootry for the rumors he printed in his Bigfoot Occasions e-newsletter 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 skilled. A mixture of Dan Relatively, 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 distinction of being known as the “Historian of the Digicam” for the background information he has found on the filmmaking tools utilized by Roger Patterson at Bluff Creek, California, on October 20, 1967. He is called a element man who has all the time been desirous about wanting deeply to right the accepted historical past of the “movie” with the information. For instance, Daniel Perez remarked in correspondence to me that he was the individual “who discovered who wrote the primary newspaper article on the P-G movie: Al Tostado. And it was [Daniel Perez] who performed 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 plenty 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 handle him as “Danny,” any longer, or the following time he writes about you, he’ll pointedly use your whole 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), Huge 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 situation.

Don’t hassle Daniel with making an attempt to persuade him he ought to name the unknown hominoids “Sasquatch” to sound extra scientific. He gained’t hear it. To Daniel Perez, it’s “Bigfoot” and we occur to reside in attention-grabbing “Bigfoot instances.”

About many grassroots issues, Daniel could also be actually right. Perez is a novel member of the Bigfoot neighborhood, 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 in regards to 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 consider that these folks had been claiming to see these creatures. You’re taught to consider that the bogeyman and all these creatures don’t exist. So I pooh-poohed it.”

“As I learn extra, although, I began to understand that some extremely credible folks from all walks of life had been having sightings. I began it objectively, and considering, ‘There may 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 Occasions 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, however it turned out to be the paving stone to who I’m as we speak,” he stated.

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 challenge 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 positive thought this was going to be a section that I might develop out of,” Perez stated. “But it surely wasn’t. That is what makes me tick.” Perez was the third of 4 youngsters 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 pupil and cross-country runner at Santa Fe Excessive College 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 sector of Bigfooting,” Perez stated. “So I assume you may say I obtained married earlier than any of them.”

Again to the 1994 article,

He based the Middle 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 houses in Norwalk and Riverside, the place he works as an electrician. He’s had the day job…, however considers Bigfooting excess of a pastime. “Individuals inform me it is a pastime,” Perez stated. “This isn’t a pastime. It’s a scientific endeavor.”’

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

Then in late 1997, utilizing his first laptop computer laptop, he started publishing Bigfoot Occasions (two phrases). Regardless of the web altering the panorama of the web world, Perez continued printing out his four-page e-newsletter, then sending it out through 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 persevered with a 4 web page e-newsletter that was as old school as they get: it’s mailed to readers in an envelope. The  e-newsletter 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 Occasions. ”As standard, there are not any floor guidelines and nothing is to[o] sacred to be mentioned right here.” A easy components that I nonetheless embrace. Trying again but additionally wanting forward I believe another excuse for the longevity of the Bigfoot Occasions is  I used to be all the time keen to write down what others had been solely considering.  It’s that remark in dialog,  ”…inform us what you actually assume.” Properly, simply go to the Bigfoot Occasions.   The e-newsletter is mailed out each month and I’ve been doing so since our premiere subject got here out final century, in January 1998. 

Perez obtained to be often known as the one to ask onerous 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: