The Los Angeles Times, December 26, 2007

Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times SKEPTICAL BELIEVER: Daniel Perez holds a 14.5-inch cast of a footprint from Bluff Creek in Northern California, where a film purporting to show a large primate was made.

Riverside man's dream is as big as his quarry

Daniel Perez [(951) 509-2951] wants to find Bigfoot: 'It might be the biggest scientific discovery the world has ever seen.'

By David Kelly, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
December 26, 2007

The Center for Bigfoot Studies, like the creature itself, is not easy to find.

It hides amid the forest of homes and thickets of Christmas lights on a quiet Riverside street.

No signs or monster-size tracks point the way, but those in the know can pin it down to an upper floor of one unassuming house. There, jammed inside a few small rooms, sits one of the nation's largest repositories of Bigfoot lore.

Rows of books, stuffed filing cabinets, sculptures and plaster casts of overgrown feet compete for space in a cluttered world dedicated to the legendary hulking primate.

Daniel Perez, 44, [May 31, 1963] is curator and director of the center, which doubles as his home. It's not typical Bigfoot habitat, but he couldn't beat the price. And for Perez it's the work, not the location, that matters.

"This isn't about finding some new species of butterfly in South America which would have little impact on your life or mine," he said. "If we ever find this, it might be the biggest scientific discovery the world has ever seen."

Perez is no flake. He's a serious-minded, soft-spoken [union licensed] electrician who let his hobby become his passion and now much of his life. He publishes the monthly Bigfoot Times, circulation 760, and has traveled the country investigating sightings and interviewing witnesses.

A recent newsletter reported a sighting from 1936 in Davistown, Pa. The 81-year-old witness [Ethel Jane Adams, POB 343, Connellsville, PA. 15425] told Perez she had seen an upright animal lurking around her rural home on numerous occasions when she was a girl.

"He must have been 6 feet tall, dark brown, long arms and very hairy," she said. "Gosh, did we run across the fields into the house."

Another article is about two men's claims to have audio recordings of Bigfoot's "breathing, teeth popping and growls."

"But our conclusion was that it was nothing more than wind," a local Bigfoot researcher wrote [Eric Altman from Pennsylvania].

Perez is a believer but also a skeptic.

Hoaxers have tried to con him, and promising leads have unraveled. Critical evidence, such as a hefty ape-like skull allegedly found near Bishop, has had a habit of disappearing. Yet there are the stories that keep him going, the strikingly similar accounts of hairy, stinking, bipedal animals stomping through forests from Canada to California to Ohio.

Tales of ape men leading clandestine lives in the North American backwoods go back centuries. Native Americans called them Sasquatches. But the modern Bigfoot phenomenon really got its start in 1958, Perez said, when workers began finding large footprints while building a road in Oregon [sic; northern California].

"Some guy took the story to the local newspaper, and the word 'Bigfoot' was born," he said.

In 1986, Perez interviewed members of a six-man crew building a bridge 26 miles south of California's Mt. Whitney who reported seeing a large upright creature that left 13-inch footprints in its wake. [They were in sandy soil and when I saw them they were about a week old. I took pictures of the footprints which were somewhat washed away by time and the elements].

"It scared the heebie-jeebies out of them," said Perez, who interviewed the workers at the scene. "One guy told me it sounded like an elephant trumpeting. Another said it was a bloodcurdling scream which resembled a woman being tortured. These were serious, grown men with no reason to lie. It was my first experience with multiple [witness] sightings. I was hooked after that."

Actually, he was hooked before that.

Perez's pursuit of Bigfoot began at age 10 after he watched "The Legend of Boggy Creek" at a Norwalk theater. The documentary-style film dealt with a Bigfoot-like beast frightening rural Fouke, Ark.

"I thought it was just another monster movie, but it turned out to be the paving stone to who I am today," he said. "I was curious but skeptical."He immediately went to the library and withdrew books about Bigfoot and other creatures, including the Loch Ness monster. He wrote letters to Bigfoot experts, who impressed him with their earnestness.

"It was almost like a science project for him," recalled his father, Edward Perez. "It was something to keep him busy and enabled him to figure out what's what."

The elder Perez questions the whole thing.

"Whenever the subject is broached, I ask him, 'Where are the bodies? Why are there no bodies?' "

In 1979, Perez rushed with a friend [Doug Trapp] to Hemet's Diamond Valley, chasing reports that huge footprints had been found there. He and his friend saw and measured the proof, he said. The prints were 17 inches long. [We followed up on some more reports from Dick and June Putnam and we literally stumbled upon the tracks].

He started interviewing people who claimed to have seen Bigfoot. He dug up newspaper clippings from as far back as 1889 reporting encounters with the creature and other "wild men" of the woods. He researched Native American stories of Sasquatch, Himalayan tales of the Yeti and sightings of the Yowie in Australia.

"I understand that many people are ignorant of the data on the subject, but this is more than just tabloid stuff," he said, picking up a cast of a large footprint. "As you can see, it's very manlike. It walks like us and has feet like us, but it's covered in hair and has gorilla-like features. It could be a missing link."

Perez is writing a book about the Patterson-Gimlin film, a grainy 60-second movie purporting to show a large primate walking through Bluff Creek in Northern California. It was shot by Robert Gimlin and the late Roger Patterson.

The film, shot in 1967, still generates controversy. Believers say it's the best evidence that Bigfoot exists. Others say it's the best proof the whole thing is bogus. The doubters' case was bolstered when Bob Hieronimus of Yakima, Wash., announced in 2004 that he was the film's Bigfoot. He said Patterson offered him $1,000 to don a gorilla suit.

"Why they keep focusing on this film is beyond me," said Robert Kiviat [nice guy, I spoke to him by phone many years ago but as a knowledgeable Bigfooter he is not], producer of "World's Greatest Hoaxes: Secrets Finally Revealed," a Fox Network show that investigated the film.

Kiviat, who appeared with the self-proclaimed hoaxer on MSNBC's "Countdown With Keith Olbermann" when Hieronimus made his claim, said most people laughed at the film. "It is essentially a few brief seconds of what appears to be a man walking in a gorilla suit in the woods," he said. "But I do believe there is a mysterious animal out there. We have some hair, some DNA and some video and photographic evidence that is tantalizing."

Perez doesn't buy the fraud story. He says Hieronimus could never fill an 8-foot [about 7' feet 3" inch tall to be more exacting] gorilla suit, and he says the suit has never been found.

He has analyzed the footage hundreds of times. He has enlarged it and slowed it down. He points out what he sees as telling details of authenticity.

"You can see the breasts on the subject. That tells us it is female," he said. "It would seem if you wanted to fake something, you wouldn't put breasts on it, because it would seem outlandish. You can see the buttocks and the spinal cord. Look how it walks. No human walks like that. Superficially it looks like a man, but when you look closely, it's clearly not."

Perez's views are largely supported by [Dr.] Jeffrey Meldrum, professor of anthropology and anatomy at Idaho State University, who has studied Bigfoot for more than a decade.

"Daniel is a very skilled investigator who goes after details and ties up loose ends," he said. "Correlating evidence is very important in this study."

Meldrum, an expert on primate morphology, says the hoax stories don't hold up under scrutiny.

"If you watch the film as a student of anatomy, primates and locomotion, you can see the movement of the shoulder blade under the skin," he said. "I can see the calf muscles contract at the appropriate moments. When anyone tries to replicate it in any way, it doesn't look like a primate."

His theory?

"You can never be 100% sure of anything, but beyond a reasonable doubt I am convinced it portrays a real animal," he said. "My working hypothesis is they are a species of great ape restricted to the ground but having an arboreal legacy. They would most likely be related to the orangutans."

Meldrum said the lack of Bigfoot corpses is not a mystery given the remote spots where they are believed to live as well as the dampness of the forest and the acidic quality of forest soil, which encourages decomposition.

Upstairs in his office, Perez plays the Patterson-Gimlin film on his computer again and again.

He thinks as many as 100,000 Bigfoots could be roaming North America, but he knows he may never find even one of them. [100,000 North American wide is not even a drop in the bucket. 100,000 is a very small number compared to the inhabitable locations in North America].

"A lot of early researchers thought we would solve the mystery in a few years, but we haven't," he said. "I can't prove Bigfoot exists, but either someone has been fabricating tracks for over a hundred years or there is a real animal out there."

[All comments and clarifications in brackets [ ] were made by Daniel Perez].

david.kelly@latimes.com

Wally Hersom Financing Matt Moneymaker

Bob Gimlin (hat), Matt Moneymaker and Dmitri Bayanov in Bluff Creek, California, September 2003. Click on this photo for a larger view. Photograph copyright by Daniel Perez, 2003. ///TOP photograph by Orange County , California, Register.


Hunters of Sasquatch undaunted by failure
Mcclatchy-tribune
December 16, 2007
DEVIL PEAK, EL DORADO NATIONAL FOREST, Calif.



Wally Hersom is an intuitive man, with an instinct for when opportunity might knock.
It's not knocking now.
The soft-spoken, white-maned Hersom is standing in the dark on a remote mountaintop in Northern California listening to the eerily quiet rustling of leaves.
"It's too quiet," he says. "It doesn't feel right."
Below him in the pitch-black hollows of this remote forest area, groups of men and a few women sit crouched, pointing $9,000 thermal imaging cameras at the darkness.
Every so often, one of them emits a blood-curdling shriek.
They are searching for a monster.
Hersom, 72, is the reason why. Over the past year, the part-time resident of San Juan Capistrano, Calif., (Hersom's primary home is in Henderson, Nev.) has pumped tens of thousands of dollars into the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, an Orange County-based group of Sasquatch-hunters.
Hersom pays the salary of Matt Moneymaker, the BFRO's director. He has outfitted the group with 10 thermal imaging cameras, as well as video recorders and night-vision devices. Total cost: more than $100,000.
In the process, Hersom hopes to change the popular conception of Bigfoot believers from wooly-eyed weirdos to heroic hominoid hunters.
Hersom, like the more than 2 dozen people who have joined him on this expedition to the El Dorado National Forest, believes that Bigfoot is a yet-undiscovered species of immensely strong, craftily intelligent and highly elusive great ape.
"I think the timing's right," Hersom says. "In the next 12 months, this thing is going to break wide open."
Hersom is the former owner of HC Power, an Irvine, Calif.-based company that manufactured power conversion equipment for cell phone towers and industrial facilities. The company flourished, Moneymaker says, in large part because Hersom foresaw the importance of gadgets like cell phones and computers and created technologies to serve them.
"He's an engineering genius, and ... he's got this almost spooky sense of when it's the right time to do something," Moneymaker says.
That sense convinced Hersom to sell his company in 2000, before the dot-com bust. He reaped $110 million and decided to indulge a lifelong fascination: Bigfoot.
"My broker - when I told him what I was doing he couldn't stop laughing," Hersom says. "He thought I was crazy. But I think we have a unique opportunity because nobody believes us. Once [it's] proven that Bigfoot is out there, ... I think this is going to be the biggest discovery of the century."
Hersom stumbled on Moneymaker's BFRO Web site, one of many such sites that track and list Bigfoot sightings around the country. He went on an expedition in Wisconsin.
Nothing happened.
Hersom tried again on a second expedition. This time he says he heard howls in the night and had rocks thrown at him - typical Bigfoot behavior, according to Moneymaker.
"I heard three distinct steps near my tent," Hersom recalls. "I thought 'Oh, my God, here it is.'"
The experience sold him. He joined the BFRO and went on four more expeditions. He collected photographs and plaster casts of 15-inch-long Bigfoot tracks, which he displays in his stately San Juan Capistrano hilltop-home. He bought cameras and other equipment in hopes of generating photographic proof for the naysayers - and lucrative film footage for himself.
Moneymaker and Hersom speculate that Bigfoot has a nocturnal animal's acute night vision. The key to "discovering" Bigfoot, if such a creature exists, is to mimic that ability.
"The only way we're going to [prove] it is if we can film in the dark," Moneymaker says. Hersom has enabled the BFRO "to bring some technology to bear that has been out of reach of Bigfoot researchers."
On the mountain, Hersom stands silently while Moneymaker and his group of volunteers put the equipment to use. Through the camera's glowing scope, the darkness transforms into a silvery landscape. But there is no Bigfoot to be seen.
Moneymaker tips his head and emits a piercing scream. Over the radio, the scattered group of BFRO members is instructed to do the same and to knock baseball bats against trees. The screams and knocks are meant to mimic the alleged noises of a "real" Bigfoot. The hope, Moneymaker says, is to trick the creatures into coming within filming range.
Does Hersom ever feel ... er ... a bit ridiculous?
"I'm just going to play it by ear," Hersom says. "I'm going to go as long as it feels right for me."
Hersom says he has only heard Bigfoot, but many within the group report more intimate encounters. They describe a giant apelike creature that walks on two feet and appears to have its own language (called "Samurai" for its sing-song resemblance to un-dubbed ninja warrior movies).
Bigfoot also is, some say, capable of projecting a paralyzing telepathic feeling of fear that stuns humans and animals alike. Moneymaker uses the term "infrasound" and calls the experience being "zapped."
Why then, would anyone pursue an encounter?
Moneymaker describes the discovery of Bigfoot as a "historical prize." But for many members of this (mostly male) group of enthusiasts, the quest is the lure.
"Part of me really like the mystery of it - the not knowing, the seeking," says Robert Leiterman, who works as a park ranger in Humboldt County, Calif.
Leiterman is one of a half-dozen past and current Orange County residents who have joined Hersom and Moneymaker on this expedition to Northern California.
Among the group: two employees from an architectural design company, an advertising executive and the director of security for a hotel.
"I just have to know the truth," says Kathy Lammens, 43.
Lammens is on the expedition with friend and office-mate, Brooke Sharon, 54. Like many members of the BFRO, they are captivated by their obsession and capable of laughing at it.
"I am one of these people who have an open mind," Sharon says. "I love the idea of Bigfoot, of UFOs, of Nessie. Why not? Who's to say it's not true?"
Does it bother BFRO members that nothing will come of this night spent in the cold mountains of California - or the next two nights to follow?
"I'm a little bit discouraged that we didn't hear anything," Hersom says. "They're not everywhere all the time."
Good timing is Hersom's stock in trade. But even he acknowledges that "there's some luck involved."
"Some people say: Bigfoot will find us, we can't find Bigfoot," Hersom says.


Copyright © 2007, The Baltimore Sun

Bigfoot Songs

Mary-Anne with husband in Willow Creek, California, October 20, 2007

"Bigfoot Song"

There’s a bipedal primate, debuted on film in 1967, It’s possibly nonexistent, but possibly it’s not. Oh, is it a blob or is it a guy? Or did it just visit from space? Was somebody’s grandma’s fur coat missing? When I say ”creature”, should I use air quotes? Speculation will never cease And once again you hear the words “case closed”...
Crook and Murphy found a bell clasp, Greg Long saw a butt crack painted on. John Landis told us who made the suit- could it be Roddy MacDowell in there? But Bob Heironimus (no, the other one) Said it was him in a gorilla suit made by a magician. No one can agree, and the stories keep changing...
Ray Wallace made a bunch of fake footprints, But Grover Krantz could tell the difference. A lot of people side with the Russians, but about as many don’t. Is it Gigantopithecus, or should we have no more bull crap about Giganto, And try to establish a telepathic link?

No!

I’ve got a much simpler way to find out, Once and for all- I’m posting a letter, When I figure out where to send it. It says...

“Dear Bigfoot, Please write me back. I just want to know Are you real? Check ‘yes’ in the box if you are and check ‘no’ if you’re not, And please send it back ASAP.

Thanks, signed your friend, Mary-Anne”

By Mary-Anne McTrowe, Lethbridge, Canada

My letter to Scientific American

Scientific American
415 Madison Avenue
New York, New York 10017-1111

Dear Editor:

First of all, it's about time a respectable magazine like Scientific American covers a major mystery here in North America that has been largely relegated to the tabloids for one reason: readers buy those publications. Mainstream periodicals have for the most part stood clear, thinking all the while the subject is more fancy than fact. Dr. Don Jeffrey Meldrum is a fully qualified scientist and his opinion is well worth listening to in my opinion. It was Dr. Meldrum, we should note, who was the first to notice a midtarsal break in some footprint castings taken from the famous Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot film site from 1967. One might openly wonder why (if the situation were fabricated) someone would incorporate subtle signatures of reality into fake Bigfoot tracks. As noted in your article by Dr. David R. Begun, "he does do state-of- the-art footprint analysis," so Dr. Meldrum's assessments should be viewed with high regard.

Dr. David Daegling, who was a classmate of Meldrum's, mentions on page 112 of his Bigfoot Exposed book, "The only legitimate way to prove the film is of a real Sasquatch is to demonstrate beyond any doubt that what [Roger] Patterson filmed was beyond the ability of human fabrication."

Using that statement as a take-off point, we should remind ourselves of the Fleischmann-Pons "cold fusion" experimental results from March 1989. After attempts to replicate what Fleischman and Pons claimed proved unsuccessful, cold fusion was quickly disregarded.

Replication is the business of science and it is with that maxim we should ask: if the Patterson-Gilmlin Bigfoot film is simply a costumed man, why, after more than forty years and great advancements in science and technology, can't anyone from the halls of science or Hollywood...if I may...replicate that movie film? That should speak volumes. As a footnote, the Patterson-Gimlin film is widely regarded as the strongest piece of evidence in favor of the existence of an unknown species of primate in North America.

Gorillas were once the stuff of African lore and legend. Today they are simply facts. Perhaps the late anthropologist Margaret Mead said it best, "The whole history of scientific advance is full of scientist investigating phenomena that the Establishment did not think were there."

Daniel Perez
Norwalk, California


SEE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, DECEMBER 2007, VOLUME 297, NUMBER 6, UNDER "DEPARTMENTS." THE ARTICLE IS BY MARGUERITE HOLLOWAY AND IS CALLED "BIGFOOT ANATOMY," PAGES 50, 53. ARTICLE IS LARGELY ABOUT THE WORK ON THE SASQUATCH DONE BY DR. JEFF MELDRUM. THREE PICTURES OF HIM IN THE ARTICLE. GO TO: www.SciAm.com

Footprints Seen Around Mr. Everest Stoke Yeti Mystery

KATHMANDU (Reuters) - A U.S.-based television channel investigating the existence of the legendary Yeti in Nepal has found footprints similar to those said to be that of the abominable snowman, the company said on Friday.

By Gopal Sharma (thanks to Ian Clampitt for passing this news item along)

A team of nine producers from Destination Truth, armed with infrared cameras, spent a week in the icy Khumbu region where Mount Everest is located and found the footprints on the bank of Manju river at a height of 2,850 meters (9,350 feet).

One of the three footprints discovered on Wednesday is about one foot long, or is of similar size and appearance as shown in sketches of the mystical ape-like creature believed to live in snowy caves, the TV company said.

"It is very very similar," Josh Gates, host of the weekly travel adventure television series, told Reuters in Kathmandu after returning from the mountain.

"I don't believe it to be (that of) a bear. It is something of a mystery for us," said Gates, 30, an archaeologist by training.

Tales by sherpa porters and guides about the wild and hairy creatures lurking in the Himalayas have seized the imagination of foreign mountain climbers going to Mount Everest since the 1920s.

Several teams have searched for it and some have even claimed to have discovered footprints.

But no one has actually seen the creature nor has it been scientifically established that the Yeti exists.

Gates said the footprints on lumps of sandy soil, which would be sent to experts in the United States for analysis, were "relatively fresh left some 24 hours before we found them."

"This print is so pristine, so good that I am very intrigued by this," Gates, flanked by his team members, said adding the findings would prompt more investigation into the Yeti.

Destination Truth chronicles some of the world's notorious crypto-zoological creatures and unexplained phenomena.

Some local sherpas believe that the Himalayas are abodes of strange creatures and consider the Yeti as a protector while others say it is a destroyer.

"There is a kind of mysterious creature that lives in the Himalayas," said Ang Tshering Sherpa, chief of Nepal Mountaineering Association in Kathmandu, who hails from the Khumbhu region were Mount Everest is located.

(Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)

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