Bigfoot’s biggest buff

Daniel Perez spends his days as an electrician in Riverside, Calif. But when he knocks off, says David Kelly in the Los Angeles Times, he devotes every hour he can to stalking, scrutinizing, and pondering the huge, ape-like biped known as Bigfoot that is rumored to haunt the American wilderness. The publisher of the monthly Bigfoot Times (circulation 760), Perez, 44, has turned the upper floor of his home into the Center for Bigfoot Studies, a makeshift museum cluttered with books, clippings, films, and related detritus. “This is more than just tabloid stuff,” he says, picking up a cast of a large footprint. “As you can see, it’s very man-like. It could be a missing link.” Perez caught the Bigfoot bug when he was 10 and saw The Legend of Boggy Creek, a documentary-style film about a Bigfoot-esque creature in Arkansas. Since then he’s crisscrossed the country, checking out sightings and securing eyewitness accounts. Perez says too many people have seen and heard the wild, hairy creature for it all to be a hoax. In fact, he thinks there could be as many as 100,000 Bigfoots living and hiding in the wilds of North America. “This isn’t about finding some new species of butterfly in South America which would have little impact on your life or mine. If we ever find this, it might be the biggest scientific discovery the world has ever seen.”