olemisscub

It's 100% the same guy. Doc was using some literary license for some of what he wrote about "Art." And yes, I was a bit excited on my search to find the guy but when I found his photo I just chuckled because ya, those ears would be pretty noticeable.

no one vanished after the hijacking. I found the guy from the 302 and Doc's book. This isn't a breakthrough.

This is the guy from Doc's book. Wasn't too hard for me to find him after I read that part in the book. It matches up with the FOIA doc and most of what Doc wrote about him. He definitely didn't "disappear from history". https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/36453213/arthur-leslie-wilkie this is his photo from the yearbook Doc refers to in the book.

Georger those FBI agents you spoke to were full of it!

Latest Vault Drop. More of nothing. D.B. Cooper Skyjacking Part 83.pdf

ok... And no, Jim McClellan was a pilot who was the center of the "light aircraft" lead that came out of La Center. But people with knowledge of the set up at Sea-Tac have been spoken to recently and it was stated that everyone whose notes are in the Harrison files were listening to the same feed in the same room.

Yes, this is why I think he jumped where he jumped. He wasn't a complete halfwit so I think just by common sense and dead reckoning he understood that they would have been nearing Vancouver/Portland at the time of his jump. No one in their right mind (even a mad hijacker) would want to jump over a huge city but you also don't want to jump too far into the wilderness. It's my understanding from talking recently on the phone with Jim McClellan (the pilot of the "mysterious light aircraft" from the night of the hijacking) that even on a heavily clouded night in 1971 you could begin to see the glow of V/P from 10k feet starting around the Lewis River area. So Cooper wants to jump close enough to civilization to have a successful getaway, but not close enough to civilization where he lands on top of a cop car at a four way stop. This was McNally's thought process. He said he looked down and saw some evidence of civilization but not TOO much. So he felt comfortable jumping in that location. With multiple layers of cloud cover, Cooper was only able to go off the glow of city lights to determine what was beneath him. McClellan said that Battle Ground would have been the first place south of the Lewis River that had enough glow to be visible through multiple layers of cloud cover.

so why are the timestamps in McClelland's, Griffin's, and Lowenthal's all in sync for all the other important events? They all have 8:05 for attempting to contact hijacker. Timestamps at 8:00 and 8:02 are consistent among all three. They are even back in sync AFTER the discrepancy. McClelland and Lowenthal have 8:30 for Soderlind suggesting that Tina try to communicate with Cooper. So what gives?

305 was nowhere near the Columbia at 8:14. They were actually close to Battle Ground around 8:14 Doc is a good guy and I've communicated with him privately a great deal, but his attempts to move the plane farther south are just completely flawed. His claim that 305 was over Battle Ground at 8:11 is based on a single erroneous log entry where an individual, Stuart McClelland, was listening in on the radio comms wrote that they were 23 miles south of BG at 8:18. Everyone else who was taking notes in the SAME room wrote down 8:22 for that particular timestamp. The 8:22 timestamp for 23 miles south of BG also lines up with Soderlind's calculations using the Air Force's data. 8:18 is an outlier in every sense that something can be an outlier. You cannot (or should not) base the entire premise of a work on an outlier. Also, as a practical matter, why in the world would Cooper have jumped right over, or even near, a city of 400k people? Cooper didn't know precisely where he was but if he still been on the aircraft as they passed over Vancouver he'd have known that it was Vancouver/Portland beneath him.

Agents in 74 preparing a ransom payment. In the background looks like bricked bundles from the bank. Then in the middle is the Recordex. Then in the foreground they are packaging the recorded bills into strapped packets. Don't see rubber bands on those.

FBI agents with recovered ransom money from 1963. Paper strapped and rubber banded, but not bundled.

We need to figure out where the hell the 130+ bills that were sent to the insurance company ended up!

Unlike many previously contributing members of the DZ, I don't view disagreements as wars. None of us know what the money looked like or how precisely it was packaged. We can make inferences though. Tina's statement, coupled with how the Ingram's found the money, leads me to think it looked like a standard bank bundle with multiple paper strapped packets held together by rubber bands in a single bundle. One passenger described the bag as looking like it contained bricks. A five packet bundle would suffice to explain that description. I don't think comparing ransoms in other crimes is totally appropriate because Cooper's ransom came from money that had already been set aside in the bank's "ransom pack" with pre-recorded serials.

Why would I not want her asked? Don’t be daft. I have no reason to care one way or the other about how the money was packaged. I’m just following the evidence and I believe taking her words in that 302 at face value is a solid place to start. Tina says bank type bands. There were rubber bands found on the money. Those two things tell me that the money given to him was a standard bank bundle, which have straps AND rubber bands. The way you’re envisioning it, there were 100 individually rubber banded packets of $2000. That’s a lot of rubber banding those bank people did in such a short amount of time, no? And yeah, I’ll just ask Tina. Be right back, gonna send her a text message… :-)

Are you suggesting he could tell they had straps on them because of how the money FELT sitting in his lap?? And when he's talking about how they were already packaged, he's talking about how they were already packeted in the packets of $2000, not that they were already packaged in the bag. Also, the bills were PRE-microfilmed. They didn't do it on that day, which is why they had to go back and figure out which of the $250k pre-microfilmed bills were NOT given to Cooper. In this 302 they are describing how the bills were pre-microfilmed at an earlier date.

So Tina is two for two in the historical oddity department: She’s the only person who shared a smoke with D.B. Cooper AND she’s also the only human in history who calls rubber bands “bank type bands.”

If he didn’t see the money (as you are claiming) then how could he tell they were in straps? He’s not assuming anything. “I could tell”

Tina didn’t need to mention rubber bands. Rubber bands are ubiquitous when it comes to holding money together. The paper straps stood out to her. How on earth can anyone interpret “bank type bands” to mean rubber bands?

It’s not really that complicated. According to Grinnell, who very clearly stated that he was in the bank vault when they counted the money and then placed it in the bag (I’ll take his word over hearsay since he was actually there), it was five paper strapped packets bundled together in bundles of $10,000. So there were 20 of these. You can very easily pull a packet out of a rubber banded bundle. I suspect he handed her one of the packets out of a bundle.

She already has, unless you think a 22 year old girl from Philly would call rubber bands “bank type bands.”

Appreciate the leg work, but I again have to question you on this. Has any human being ever referred to rubber bands as “bank type bands”?

FBI responded positively to my FOIA about the hair slide's location and said they'd look for it again. It has a very clear evidentiary tag (PC-H3225), so maybe it somehow ended up in a pile of random miscellaneous evidence at the crime lab or something. Worth a shot.

By all accounts they assumed he was still on board when they landed in Reno, so maybe they weren’t confident enough that the pressure bump was when he jumped to report it in real time.

It’s my belief that Rat never made such a statement. This is something he came up with afterward. His FBI interview that night indicates he didn’t notify anyone about it in real time nor did he take exact note of where it was.