olemisscub

It's all guesstimating on his part. Also, Cliff finally informed him that he remembers 305 reaching the Battle Ground VORTAC. Despite basing an enormous amount of his Western Flight Path stuff on things Cliff has said (despite Cliff saying at CC last year that he had no problem with the FBI Flight Path), Eric is now seemingly ignoring Cliff's statement about 305 reaching Battle Ground. Eric's main issue is that he is basing a hypothesis on a piece of evidence with a nine year gap in chain of custody. That money could have ended up on TB in an enormous variety of ways over those 3000 days. What he's doing is taking the last chapter of a book, and despite not knowing what is in chapters 2-9, attempting to re-write the first chapter. It's very strange to me. You don't work backwards from evidence like that.

8:13:30 to 8:14:30

Either his truth or someone else’s truth, certainly.

Fascinating that the only people who dispute it are those with an agenda. Also, how could anyone have seen it when it was flying above three separate layers of cloud cover?

I prefer non-fiction books

My belief is that Reca appropriated a story that he overhead at some point, but was too stupid or lazy to know that we DO know roughly where Cooper jumped, thus making his bullshit story instantly false. He probably had a friend who was a pilot who told him about having to make an emergency landing near Cle Elum on the night of the Cooper hijacking. The guy had to walk into the nearest town and ask to use the phone. The punchline of the story being "I bet them folks thought I was D.B. Cooper! Har har!" So Reca just interpolates himself into this story. I've tried to see if there are any mentions of a plane landing there that night but the local papers for Cle Elum and that county aren't online.

I thought Slim King was a Reca dude, but now he’s peddling the Rackstraw grift?

I maintain that this is a realistic scenario for the money find. A person who just realized he had become an unwitting accomplice to a capital crime. Kills two hypothetical birds with one stone: explains money find and explains why no one came forward.

Perhaps we’d have gotten a story like that from a guy who lived outside Brush Prairie if he had a thought that the hijacker landed near there. With everything hyperfocused up near Woodland, it’s possible that a lead like this was just never reported.

Sure, but not Polaroid camera film of all things. That's inexplicable. I'm still maintaining that Cooper was too sly of an individual to be just breaking into stores and risking everything he just accomplished by being reckless. This is a guy who kept the passengers in the dark. He liked to keep a low profile. He'd have just played it cool during his escape, same as McCoy and Mac did. He didn't need to break into a place to use the phone and risk getting shot or god knows whatever else. He could have just kept walking a few extra miles to Woodland and just walked into any gas station that was open and asked to use the phone. Or he could have hitchhiked a ride. He's dressed in a suit after all: "Hey, my car broke down a few miles back, can you take me someplace with a phone real quick?"

Yes, that's why you steal it if you see some just sitting out. Let's try to be real here...A guy who just jumped from a jet with 200k isn't taking Polaroid film.

You don't think someone breaking in to a store looking for cash and other sellable items would grab some random shit on the way out? A hijacker isn't taking Polaroid film. Period. Cigarettes? Cigars? Polaroid film? These are teenagers/young adults. Doesn't have to be the same kids from that burglary ring.

If you read the papers during the week of the hijacking and the week before, there is a whole rash of burglaries taking place throughout northern Clark County. The Saturday after the hijacking they found lots of stolen goods in this flop house where all these druggies were living. It's possible that these were related. And you may say "why would thieves like this break into a place and only take cigs and gloves, etc." Well, I think the answer to that is that the stolen items were ancillary to their main objective for breaking in. I suspect these people would have broken into these country stores trying to rob the place. Broke into these places to see if they had money stashed or within easy reach or if there was any other item of value just laying around (a chainsaw for sale or something like that). While they were in there snooping around they grabbed stuff on the way out. If you read the article, it sounds like these people were re-selling some of the things they had stolen. So perhaps they took the Polaroid film to take photos of their loot for re-sale purposes. You wouldn't want to have photos be professionally developed of your stolen goods. This from Nov 29th:

These two crimes are undated but both appear in the Nov 30th edition of The Columbian.

If I were to buy into this being Cooper, I’m thinking that the Jess Hatfield intruder was NOT Cooper. That’s an unnecessary diversion for him. That’s too out of the way. He just made it back to civilization and then he goes back deep into the countryside? Nah. The guy on the road and then the burglary seems to check out as being the same individual, Cooper or not.

Understood, but I’m getting off the road when a car approaches unless I’m hitchhiking like McNally did.

The only realistic scenarios to explain this would be if he landed in the woods and it took him several hours to find a road OR if he was roughed up on the landing. McNally was so concussed from hitting his head in the landing that he crawled off and slept for 12 hours. Perhaps Cooper was injured and it took him a few hours to recover or maybe he was moving slow due to an injury. It’s unlikely that the girl who spotted him (if it was him) would have noticed a limp. All that said, I think the last thing Coop would want to do is draw attention to himself by walking down the street when a car drives by and/or committing a burglary. Best to just keep a low profile and get out of Dodge as quickly as possibly while not arousing anyone’s suspicions.

It's possible that the address remained the same from 1942 to 1971 considering that he was already middle aged in 1942 and probably didn't move again. But I'm not sure this is the type of address that is going to help us.

Only issue I see is that he’d have to cross a river to get to Paradise Point. The first two are intriguing. If Cooper knew the area a little bit (or if just winging it perhaps), then he’d know that to get to civilization he had to walk west toward I-5. So Cooper would have walked down Old River Road toward Woodland.

Chris Broer found this from the Longview paper on 11/25/71. I have a hard time believing this isn’t the burglary that we’ve been attributing to the Heisson Store. I realize the 302 says 10 miles south of Merwin Dam but this has to be the same crime. This is about three miles away from the site where the girl saw the man walking down the road.

I've yet to see an example of ransom money being delivered without paper straps. Detlor told me that paper straps were good because it allowed an extortionist to quickly and easily make an estimation of how much money they had been given.

The Facebook Group is essentially the only place (aside from a few random things on the DZ) where actual Cooper research is being posted and discussed.

I honestly can’t believe how anyone could possibly think that “bank type bands” means rubber bands.