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New episode out now! DB Cooper was the Elsinore Ghost with Patricia Boland. Enjoy! https://thecoopervortex.podbean.com/e/db-cooper-was-the-elsinore-ghost-patricia-boland/

As I try to figure out true retirement (all play - no work), I am trying to locate someplace to live / have a base. I want to be close to a DZ, major airport, SCUBA, hang gliding, etc. It seems I need Google Earth layers to show me where the stuff I want is located so I can figure out where I want to live. Anyone know of a layer or database showing where DZs are in the US? Or a significant effort to create one? The function we have here does not appear to translate to a map well. If I could get access to the underlying database, I might could create a layer. Not sure. Appreciate any help. David

Just so you can forever banish this thought from your mind :-) • ⁠Mccoy’s photos were shown to all 10 eyewitnesses to Cooper and all 10 said it wasn't the same guy who hijacked their plane. • ⁠McCoy had blue eyes • ⁠McCoy didn't smoke (no one fake smokes). He ate candy during his hijacking due to his nerves...not smoking. • ⁠McCoy was believed to have gone to his class at BYU on the MORNING of the hijacking. • ⁠McCoy knew about Cooper so well because he wrote a term paper on Cooper in the spring of 72 (he was a criminal justice major) • ⁠McCoy constantly talked to friends about how he could do a skyjacking better than Cooper. • FBI are confident they have Cooper’s palm print. McCoy’s was compared and was no match. • ⁠Cooper spoke intelligentially and clearly with no accent. McCoy had a birth defect that gave him a lisp and he was from the south and possessed a southern accent. He had a high pitched voice. He was also a bit of a hillbilly. His voice was so odd that the pilots told the FBI that they thought he was disguising his voice. Turns out that was his actual voice. • ⁠McCoy was an absolute nervous wreck during his hijacking and even left his ransom note in the airport terminal where he had been sitting and accidentally locked himself inside the bathroom and had to be let out by a stewardess. • ⁠McCoy wore a disguise. Cooper (evidentially did not) • ⁠Their MO's were different: Cooper used a fake bomb whereas McCoy used a pistol and fake grenade. • ⁠Cooper kept the passengers in the dark. McCoy did not. it goes on and on and on.

I have a chapter in my book on the Elsinore Ghost, and while I don't believe that Cooper was the ghost, I don't think Cameron was lying. He was a do-gooder. He had been an LAPD officer in the 1950s and spent 15 years as an officer in the military. The FBI had previously vetted him in the mid-60's and he was cleared to be an informant. In Jan 72, he was ousted as the National Director of the USPA by a 17-2 vote of their Board of Directors. He had found himself in hot water after making accusations that the U.S. Parachute Team were involved in illegal narcotics and were all drug users. The Board also voted to strip him of his ranking as an international skydiving judge. Doesn't seem like the type of individual who would go commit a felony by lying to the FBI. I strongly disagree with your assertion that he was trying to promote his publication because he wouldn't have even been allowed to publicize it. The FBI would have directed him not to disseminate it lest it compromise the investigation into the tip. And again, how could him making up the story have benefited him? He was already the National Director of the USPA and the biggest swinging dick in the entire skydiving community. If anything, providing the tip would have hurt his stock. Skydiving in that era was full of outlaws. Doing something that brought a bunch of feds around to your DZ would have been massively frowned upon, especially for someone about to be ousted by the community for snitching. I've tried like hell to find the early 72 issues of Sky Diver magazine to see if he actually promoted this story. There are no scanned versions online and the only ones for sale are part of a huge collection being sold as a lot. So there are no individual copies out there for purchase or viewing. I don't think he was lying about the encounter, but I would not be surprised if he embellished the story a bit. The skeptic in me has alarm bells going off during the the Raleigh cigarettes part. That's just way too on the nose to be totally authentic.

Elsinore is a red herring. Lyle Cameron embellished his initial story and later walked it back... IMO, to promote his publication... as an FBI informant he injected himself into the case based on seeing somebody he felt resembled the sketch.. Sketch A, the bad one. "IT MAY BE COINCIDENTAL" "HE SAW AN ADVERTISEMENT" "MAY HAVE STIMULATED QUESTIONS"

Owen McKenna, the Seattle PD homicide detective who drove the money to the airport (and whose unmarked car, a Dodge Dart, was used by Al Lee to drive to the plane) was in a shootout five years later.

UK - Money found in River... Paper, floating/suspended, some stuck together but not in complete packets/bundles.. It didn't, but this is what you'd expect if it went through a suction dredge... busted apart packets/bundles. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/pictured-banknotes-found-water-spalding-2809107

It was manufactured by Precision Aerodynamics, under contract for Vertigo BASE Outfitters. The canopy was designed by Chris Martin (designer of the Xaos canopy among others), shortly after he began BASE jumping, in consultation with Marta Empinotti and Jimmy Pouchert. I have owned several, and still have two (a 303 and a 288). The pressurization is fairly good. The glide isn't fantastic (especially by more modern standards) as the canopy was designed for tight accuracy approaches. The flare is on par with the Mojo or Troll, but not nearly as strong as other offerings of the time (like the Flik), and certainly falls short when compared to more modern canopies. The low airspeed slider up openings are, frankly, terrifying. I wouldn't use it slider up at any delay under about 8 seconds. Chris died in 2005, skydiving, when the tiny (21 square foot) canopy he was doing XRW with spun up. I haven't thought about Chris (who I did some jumping with in rural Alabama and Tennessee back around that time period), in a good long while. I'm sure I'm not the only one who misses him. I have a photo somewhere of my (then toddler) daughter pretending to fly the 19 square foot Rock Dragon model that Chris brought out to the Perrine.

It's a base canopy. Vertigo-basic research-apex canopy. To be clear vertigo was Marta's company. They got buddy buddy with Basic Research and formed Apex. Marta was contracting with different people to build canopies for her. At different times PD, Jump Shack, Precision. At that time I think Precision was doing it for them. At the time. If I could look at the construction I could tell who made it. Once they merged with Basic, I think basic built everything in house. Lee

alright, I think I got it to work, scraping is brittle and a bit tedious. The attached kmz has about a 1000 dropzones. Some DZs didn't have coordinates or I couldn't parse them and they ended up at 0,0. I grouped them by country as they were in DZ.com. There is no additional metadata other than the name of each DZ, I might add a url back to its DZ.com page but I probably won't. As someone pointed out, this data is probably from 10-15 years ago. google earth can be found at https://earth.google.com/ dropzones-full.kmz