olemisscub

Ulis on TV. I really don’t like this lawsuit. It’s my opinion that a DNA recovery specialist needed to make the initial request. I think if a credentialed DNA lab sent in a request (non-FOIA) to try and recover DNA from a particular spot on Cooper’s tie that the FBI perhaps would have granted the request. Or at least have Tom make the request since there is already precedent for him having access. Eric is just a random dude to them, of course they aren’t going to give him access, especially when he didn’t have someone lined up already. I advised him on a FB Live a month or so ago that his lawsuit would carry a lot more weight if the DNA lab was part of the suit. I’m concerned that suing the FBI is just going to piss them off and that we’ll never get access again.

They removed the last 3 rows of seats. No idea where Cooper’s seat is now. Would be a cool piece for a museum.

Ok, forget that patent then. Can you find any other places that actually made TiSb alloys with high percentage antimony than those listed?

looks to be a fingerprint smudge or an artifact of the film itself.

Ugh, more metallurgy talk. "Up to 18% antimony" appears on four Vordahl patents for actual alloys being created, they just predate the tie era by a few years. If you can find another place in America where you can prove that they were creating TiSb alloys in similar percentages, then please I'd genuinely like to know. Battelle in the early 50's, Crucible, and Sprague are the only places who are ever on record in the United States creating alloys with that high percentage of antimony. That's a very small field. And yes, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence...someone else could have been screwing around in a lab making a TiSb alloy, but those 3 particles, if they are indeed an alloy, ARE a good lead. Again, there's only one guy whose name appears on more than one TiSb alloy patent where the Sb is that high, and it's Vordahl. So I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility that Vordahl's work is the proximate cause for that experimental alloy ending up on Cooper's tie, whomever Cooper was. As I've said, if that's the case, I think it likely it's derived from TIMET outside Vegas, not Cru in PA. I've not found any evidence of layoffs in 71 with Crucible.

I've spent some fair amount of time researching metallurgists who died in 1972 to see if any were younger and died of some sort of disease or cancer, premising the research on the idea that Cooper was a dying man. Melvin Fisher, the copycat, believed he was dying from a disease and wanted to leave something for his kids. McCoy thought he had a brain tumor that was going to kill him. Hahneman told members of the hijacked crew he had some illness and later claimed that he got a fatal diagnosis for liver disease from some doctor in Cambodia in July 1971. Hahneman said lots of odd things like that, so who knows if that was true or not.

No kidding. Of course it doesn't match precisely. Nothing in the patent gives you a precise measurement to use. It claims that in that particular process you can use an alpha promoter of up to 18% antimony. Again, I'm not sure how many times I have to say this: the significance, if you want to place significance on it, of that patent is that it shows that Ti and Sb were still being alloyed as part of experiments during the tie era. I'm sure you'll respond so I'll gladly give you the final word on this. I hope I never talk about metallurgy again on this site.

It doesn't HAVE to match to have significance. And again, what would be a match on a process patent? Even if there was an exact measurement that could be matched, there's no indication for when during the process itself the microscopic alloy came from. The alloy could have hypothetically gotten on the tie early in the development or testing phase for the process. If we were claiming that it got on his clothing via a commercial product, then yes, you'd have to match it perfectly. But since this may come from a lab, it can have any number of percentages on it because the particles could have come from any stage during the development i.e. not a completed product. Again, the significance, if there is any, of the patent is that there is a mixture of Ti and high percentage antimony that is allowable in the process, which means that Ti and high percentage Sb were alloyed at some point during the creation of the process to see if it would work. There is no precise percentage called for in the patent, so saying that you can "eliminate" the particles from the process is just incorrect. What matters is that it appears to be a TiSb alloy. We only have evidence of two companies experimenting with TiSb alloys in the tie era. Thus, it's a lead. It's a lead that led us to a person who I think needs to be investigated further. Nothing more. I've never made the claim that Vordahl is Cooper. I think there's a possibility he was. The same as I think it's a possibility that WJS is Cooper or Hahneman or Braden or some of these new Canadians that have popped up recently. If you want to attack Ulis for overplaying it's significance (I believe he may have called it a smoking gun), then go ahead. He's wrong for saying that IMO.

Because it's a process patent it doesn't have to match exactly. I don't recall anyone saying it matched exactly, perhaps Ulis did, but neither I or Nicky or Chris Broer have ever said it matched exactly because, duh, obviously it doesn't. The significance (if there actually is any) in that particular patent is that it's one of only two documented instances where titanium and high percentage antimony were still being mixed together during the tie era. Mixing high percentage antimony and titanium was always an experimental deal because it's a difficult combo to alloy due to some metallurgical issues that are way over my head. It was a couple of guys at Battelle Memorial in the early 50's who first came up with the process for alloying Ti and Sb and Crucible sent Vordahl over there to learn the process from them at some point, maybe 1952. So the knowledge of how to alloy those things properly wasn't easy to come by to begin with. Vordahl seemed to be a specialist because his name appears on more TiSb alloys in the 50's than anyone else. I'm kind of exhausted from posting disclaimers on this TiSb stuff, because yes, patents aren't all inclusive. There could have been any number of metallurgists out there just messing around with alloying TiSb for the hell of it. Maybe some metallurgy professor in a metallurgical class somewhere was showing students why it's difficult to mix them together and that's where it came from. Maybe he worked in waste disposal at a railyard and they were unloading waste from a laboratory. There are a million different scenarios one could concoct to explain the existence of a TiSb alloy (if that's what it is). However, I think it's a mistake to dismiss the rarity of TiSb alloys. It's rarity is a genuine fact. You talk to metallurgists today and they'll assume you're talking about TiSn, not TiSb. Going by patent research, there was never a single American product commercially produced that had TiSb alloys where the Sb was over 10%. So for a TiSb alloy to have ended up on someone's clothing, then there is likely some proximate connection to a metallurgical lab. Where that connection is, if any, is obviously the question. The tie could have been picked up from a trash bin outside a lab for all we know. Maybe Cooper got his ass kicked for being a nerd and some thugs threw him in a dumpster outside of a laboratory or maybe some hoodlums he owed money to took him out to an industrial landfill and threw him in and that's why his tie looks like it went through a car wash of chemicals. Because Vordahl was essentially "Mr. TiSb alloy", I think it's possible that Cooper may have been someone who worked around Vordahl, likely during his time at TIMET, not at Crucible. His work with TIMET in Vegas is much closer in time to the hijacking and is also much closer in location. Also, TIMET was legitimately shutdown at the time and Cooper would have been unemployed for the foreseeable future. I've seen quite a bit of time recently trying to find TIMET employees from that era who were Air Corps vets or Paratroopers, etc. I've actually found several, but they don't match Cooper's description. The TiSb is as good of a lead as anything else out there, but ultimately it's just a lead to be investigated, same as any other. Ultimately, we need Tom's scope to get fixed, which I've heard may be soon. He obviously needs to check and make sure those are indeed alloys. I think he also needs to run more control tests on other items. I know that he tested an engineers tie from way back when and it didn't have hardly anything on it, but that's just one item. We need more control testing. Tom also wants to check out Vordahl's name badges because that could be illustrative of what an actual research metallurgists items look like under a scope.

I think there are only a tiny handful who would make that claim. Particular patents can be a good lead if there is something really rare, but they obviously aren’t dispositive. Someone else could have been fooling around with that particular mixture and just never patented it.

From Chris Broer on the FB Group: When McCrone Labs provided its analysis of roughly 105,000 tie particles, it came in the form of 19 different spreadsheets, with 3 tabs in the 500 Series and 16 tabs in the 600 Series. I previously posted a table that totaled among all the spreadsheets how many of each 1-2 element combo there were. In this table, if there's a number, it means those two elements were a 1-2 combo in at least one tie particle. The number itself shows how many patents were submitted for that combo 1964-1971, with low numbers of patents (under 2,400) shown in red, using patents as a proxy for R&D. The goal is to give group members some research ideas, possibly looking for companies that were involved with several of the unusual (red) combos.

So he's putting on a chute, messing around with the money bag, trying to fit money into the reserve, changing his mind, cutting shroud lines, etc., all while the lights are off in the cabin? My reading of the evidence was always to think that Tina turned them off as part of her "close the curtain" duty as she walked to the cockpit.

This has been my belief for some time.

Hancock fits the redaction at the bottom. Wheeler fits as well, but I’m not sure when Flo became a Wheeler.

Does a DC-9 have cockpit controls to lower the stairs or just manual from the rear?

Ya I dunno. I went back and listened to what he said and he said he undid both legs straps and was hanging there about to fall out of the chute when he decided against killing himself and so he hooked back up. Not sure it makes a difference to what you’re describing but he jumped only wearing a chest pack. He didn’t have a back pack.

That’s basically what I said: “I'm a skeptic on the letters until proven otherwise.” Perhaps “convinced” would have been the better word instead of “proven”.

I liked his post because I personally think all of the letters are fake. That doesn't mean your work isn't legit on that particular one. I'm a skeptic on the letters until proven otherwise. Cooper doesn't strike me as the type to write letters to the authorities.

Fly, you’ve got to chill out on being so defensive about everything. For real. I think you’ve got PTSD from years of this board being snarky assholes toward you, but it was a knock on Colbert, it had nothing to do with you or whatever you’re working on with this decryption. I’m sure you’re doing solid work, as usual.

Because a military cryptographer decoded the alleged 5th Cooper letter and was able to make it say “SpongeBob SquarePants” instead of “Robert Rackstraw”, as Colbert and team claimed.

Does it say "Spongebob Squarepants"?

What about if he jumped like Tosaw claims, with the money tied at the end of a tether like a paratrooper with a leg bag.

I've previously asked Mac to go into detail about how his was tied. He produced this drawing. He had some rope in his mystery bag fwiw. He did a pretty clever thing when securing it that SHOULD have worked. He put that top handle of his money bag through his belt. Unfortunately for him, he didn't realize that his belt buckle wasn't sewn onto the belt but was attached with some sort of snaps. As soon as he opened his chute those snaps broke and the bag slipped through the belt. As for Gryder, it wasn't tied to him or anything. His intent was always to lose it over the river because he thinks that what happened to McCoy. I think if I could ask Tina just one question, it would be whether Tosaw's version was correct or not i.e. was Cooper's bag tied to his body or, as Tosaw claims, did he have the money bag tied to the end of a tether that was dragging behind him.

If we use McNally as a template, then no. Speaking to him, he told me that as soon as he lost the money he immediately looked around to try and find lights or visible objects to triangulate where he was at the moment the bag slipped away so he could go looking for it once he landed. Because there were broken clouds beneath him, he was unable to do so. He knew that with with the wind blowing him away from that spot that he'd never be able to find it in the dark. This is when he became so pissed he came close to killing himself. He unhooked the leg straps to the harness and almost unhooked the chest strap, but decided "where there is life, there's hope" and reached the conclusion that he would just pull off another hijacking. The next time he'd make sure to secure the bag better. Presumably if Cooper lost the money, it would have been at the same time Mac did: when he opened his chute. If Cooper pulled below the cloud cover or, if he had been successful where Mac had been unsuccessful in finding a way to triangulate his position, then I suppose he could have looked for it. Did he have a flashlight in his mystery bag? Obviously that would have been necessary if he was going to attempt to find it that night. But I suppose your question could also be: did he stay in the area the next few days looking for it? It seems that if he was local or had a place to stay nearby that he could have seen where the search efforts were happening and that would have impact his decision making on the issue. If he knew that where they were looking was NOT where he jumped, then he likely wouldn't have seen any risk in hanging around and walking through the woods or fields looking for it. A small white canvas bag though? Good luck. My issue with Cooper losing the money is the bag itself staying together upon impact. Would a stuffed tight canvas bag wrapped in parachute cord stay intact when it hit the ground or would it explode and throw the contents everywhere? So many variables there. If the bag had hit tree tops first that may have slowed it down tremendously.