Daniel Perez is One of the Most Important People in Bigfoot Research

Daniel Perez is one of the leading scholars of bigfootery. Founder of the Center for Bigfoot Studies, and creator of the Bigfoot Times newsletter, Perez is known for telling it exactly how he sees it, regardless of what or who he is talking about. The following is an interview with Daniel that's well worth the read.

"JMT:
Your excellent and truly skeptical book Bigfoot At Bluff Creek (which I'm thankful to have an inscribed and signed copy of), makes a great case for a real animal by weighing the pros and cons and demonstrating that the pros far surpass the doubts that this is a primate of undiscovered origin.

Furthermore, I think the film analysis of Bill Munns (who worked for 35 years making monsters for films, museums, and wildlife exhibits), coupled with his experimental work trying to build a Bigfoot costume to match the 1967 film. And his co-authorship of a peer-reviewed paper with Dr. Jeff Meldrum showing it couldn't have been a costume, should have silenced the anecdotal objections by now.

But sites like Science.HowStuffWorks.com with their authoritative URL still present arguments such as this one: Several Hollywood insiders, including "An American Werewolf in London" director John Landis, have claimed that the film shows a man dressed in an ape suit. According to Landis, the suit was designed by John Chambers, the special-effects master who created the costumes for the original "Planet of the Apes" movies. Chambers denies any involvement, but the rumor persists. Your response.

Perez:
John Landis can say what he wants but my only question to him is that if he is so talented why can't Landis and Company duplicate the film, apples to apples. And why throw in the tired John Chambers argument, as that was settled long ago, even before the late Bobbie Short went to visit him. Robert and Frances Guenette talked with him for their book, The Mysterious Monsters, page 117 and they wrote about him, "He concluded that if the creature is a man in a suit, then it is no ordinary gorilla suit." Yet then and later he never claimed he designed any suit for Patterson and Gimlin. That was just a rumor someone attached to him and it stuck but has no merit.

As a note, the Robert and Frances have been dead for a long time.

But while we are on the subject, if the P-G film is fake, as skeptics and debunkers insist, why beat a dead horse. Why don't they argue the merits of another film shot just a few years later, around 1972 by the late Ivan Marx? There is no need to argue because one look and fake is written all over it. So why start with the P-G film?. Why not start with the Ivan Marx film from 1970 or 1972 and he claimed several films of Bigfoot. Yet NO ONE, to my knowledge, is debating back and forth on the merits of any Marx film.

JMT:
Of the anecdotal skeptic arguments, the one I find a bit intriguing is that it's too coincidental that Patterson drew a Bigfoot showing similarities to the one he later filmed, including breasts. Your thoughts?

Perez:
I brought this very issue up in 1995 at the Sasquatch Symposium in my Devil's Advocate speech on the matter. Yes, it is indeed interesting, but when you are talking about a hair covered primate with two legs and two arms I wold suppose there are just so many ways you can draw it, so in a way, it would have to resemble the subject in the P-G film. If you look at all the bicycles in the world and all the different makers, at the end of the day, they share that similarity in that they all have two wheels and generally spokes in between the rims.

On the Patterson sketch the breast are very, very droopy, unlike the subject in the film, which appear to be very, very firm, so that is a specific difference. But if jr. skeptic Loxton wrote about it, it is likely he would write something like "the breasts are exactly the same, and that proves the film was faked."

To read the rest of this fantastic interview, click here.