CooperNWO305

I concur with Flyjack. Let’s be careful about putting out all these modified sketches. They grow legs and then we have people thinking they are the main ones. Let’s be honest here and acknowledge that the pouty lip pic and push has been because of Vordhal and what looks to be something about his lip. If you’re pushing Vordhal and you’re the one making the sketches, there becomes some bias. This attached 302 looks to me to be referencing the B sketch and indicates a wider nose. Regardless of who Cooper is, I just don’t know too many people who have such nice features as in the B sketch.

You seem to indicate that the pic is perfect and agreed upon by everyone, which it’s not. But I do agree it’s probably close and the best we have. However, there are 302s that indicate the face was too narrowly or the nose not wide enough. Same logic using Mitchell’s comment about the saggy chin. If we are only using the pic then where are Mitchell’s comments? I can’t find “thick” anywhere without getting to a desktop. Anyhow, here is Smith as a young man with his right side of his lip casting a shadow. And as an older guy maybe in his 30s with same lip issues and odd skin under his right chin and neck. Pants pulled up, looking kind of geeky unfortunately. He seems like a plain average guy, on the shy side, would not pass for a tough guy. Some of the minions and naysayers like to discount Smith, but his characteristics do fit quite a bit. I don’t have an issue with disagreement from the experts in that none of us agree on suspects and rarely will you find any of us touting someone else’s suspect. It just does not happen in the case.

Are pouty and protruding from the Roy Rose interview? Does he say thick too? There are 302s that discuss a wider or broader nose, a number of them. The Cooper sketches show a handsome man, at least the B one does. That does not align perfectly with the descriptions, but taken together I feel the B sketch is as good as any case could have, much better than the major cases that come to my mind.

I remember the gray flannel suit site and found it a vortex coincidence that Gunther mentions that movie in his book. Decent old time film with paratroopers.

If the bomb was actually radio controlled (which it doesn’t seem to be) then those would be skills possibly only picked up in the military, in a specialized field. Possibly picked up in the civilian world, but less likely. If he was dealing with just dynamite and an electrical blasting cap, then those are still skills, but could be picked up in the military, mining, blasting for construction/roads, etc. He could very well have known explosives, but still made a fake bomb or just a dynamite bomb with regular electric detonator. At that point he just has to pretend it is more high tech than it is. Cooper comes across as a bit of a story teller/embellisher. Carr said “know it all.” Live wires inside a briefcase makes for good drama, but a simple switch would have been safer for him, albeit less visually dramatic.

Interesting article on the JonBenet Ramsey case, interesting in that it seems that this document shows the actual DNA markers for the family and the possible suspects. One could not load this into a genealogy site, but I think it might be able to be used to verify if someone's DNA matched. Seems odd that this would be published. https://www.foxnews.com/us/jonbenet-ramsey-case-newly-unearthed-documents-reveal-dna-did-not-match-key-players-early-unsolved-slaying

I agree it is more than a novelty but right now the public is mainly only seeing what is in the general news articles, which are talking about kids using it to write school essays (hardly a strategic issue in my mind). Google seems a little rattled though. Good point about criminal records too. Although I don't see Cooper as having a record, we could still benefit from data that shows who was incarcerated at the time, hospital records could show that too for medical or psych issues. One of the Zodiac suspects related to a phone call on live TV was ruled out due to him being in a facility at the time of the murders, although I am a little hesitant to say that Cooper could not have left a facility in the area for a few days of furlough. If Cooper did this today we would of course have a bunch of video, but even if we didn't, just using the data we've been chatting about would help catch him.

A fun way to see AI in action and for a layman is to watch the show Person of Interest. It's been off the air for a while, and of course was for entertainment, but the concepts are there. The other good one is the movie Terminator. :) Hopefully I'll be long gone off this earth before we get to that.

The ChatGPT products I've seen are interesting from a novelty standpoint, but there are other products out there that are more focused on what we would be looking at. Asking a program to determine his personality is not much different than all of us speculating on his personality. AI or any data process relies on the availability of data and access to the data. DNA is a good example. Availability of the DNA is an issue, as we don't know if it even exists. Then comes the access to it, if it even does exist, followed by access to other data such as genealogy sites who have taken DNA samples. Cooper's DNA is no good to us unless we can compare it to other DNA samples. His DNA might tell us ethnicity, maybe likelihood of having certain illnesses, etc. But we really need a full DNA profile, then access to that, then access to other DNA profiles. For me, AI would be great if we had availability of data from 1971 (which we really don't). Time cards of every male in the country, credit card receipts (not common in 1971), medical records (not scanned likely), bank statements, tax records, purchases like a car, etc. In 2023 you could put together quite a bit about a person if you had access to this data, because it does exist, but in 1971 the data just does not exist anymore. Once you had all this, you could then match it up with males of certain ages, etc. and then really narrow down a suspect list. You really don't need AI for it, as there are programs and people that do it now. AI right now is no the easy button, and if it does become that way, then we will be in a scary world. To Flyjack's point, right now it is garbage in/garbage out. There may be one or two revolutionary finds still out there, but I'm not optimistic. The hair sample and maybe DNA from a fingerprint lift are the two that come to mind. Right now we are all still gathering readily available information and speculating. I do think with the right access, the FBI could narrow down suspects using the DNA on the tie, but that requires a lot of changes to our civil liberties, and that just is not going to happen. We may get lucky and have some family member come forward, but that hasn't' happened yet.

Mitchell even suggests a toupee.

Anyone have a dictionary for what the terms mean under complexion? Would swarthy or olive fall under Ruddy or Dark?

If he had picked up August of 71 he would not have seen 305 was a 727, at least from the one I have. But in October he would have.

Georger: I'd be interested to hear what you come up with regarding the insurance company. I've discussed this with some people before, and the general thought is that their money just got thrown away when they went out of business or merged, or whatever happened to them. I just wonder though if someone working there would have seen that money and maybe took it home as a souvenir and it is sitting in a box somewhere. I honestly don't know what the procedure was for that company in terms of destroying evidence like that, but maybe something slipped through the cracks.

When you respond to my post and use a term like gaslight, then you are being aggressive and personal, whether it is shrouded in fancy words or roundabout comments. So responding to my post, to me, with condescension, is personal. You can throw in a term like aggressive and maybe get some attention, but you using fancy words and tactics does not mean you are being "nice" so to say. It is actually passive aggressive. If you want to act high and mighty, then I'm going to call you out. Maybe it is your personality and you don't mean to do it. Doesn't really matter, you do it enough for it to stand out as an issue.

You are only reinforcing my commentary. Planes crash, yes, but the odds are very low. Cooper was not a crashed plane, and saying this is the exact same as Malaysia 370 is just completely off the wall. You are telling us that we have a vested interest in Cooper surviving and if we didn't, then the calculations or observations would be the same. You are stoking doubt, that is gaslighting. Trying to sow doubt by talking in circles and making statements like probability is only or the future. That is complete BS. Complete. There are many examples of where probability can be used to determine how something occurred, or where an item might be, or say where a plane started it's day or a missile was launched from. I've seen the trend on your posts. You like to inject doubt, not conversation. Again, that is a technique people use in this case, and actually online a lot. I can jump into any online conversation and make a few comments that allow me to interject myself, but actually never really take a realistic position. I can't be sure that the FBI had someone with Operations Research experience on the case, but I suspect they had people who knew the field. Do we think they did not use probability when determining the search area? What about using it to determine where to put resources on a case, should it be Cooper or more current terrorists? Probability is used every day, we all do it. Keep on trying to gaslight us.

Interesting point about him possibly being influenced by what happened to McCoy and the money leading to his downfall. One thing I see in this case is discussion about him spending all the money, or most of it, etc. If Cooper was a regular blue collar type guy, then even $10,000 of the $200,000 could go a long way for him. That's a lot easier to hide and a lot easier to spend. He knows he is taking a huge risk by making a big purchase, so that rules out a house, a boat, a car, maybe even rules out a big vacation, fur coat, etc. But, if he plays it safe and just uses the money for dinners out, maybe gas, a bunch of little things, then there is a lot less chance of him standing out as a big spender. I think if we had a Cooper suspect and were able to see his bank account statements, then we might see a trend where he used just a little bit less of his paycheck than usual after the heist. It makes me think of some of my Las Vegas trips where I came back with a lot more cash than I would usually have, even if I did not win much, I still had a lot of cash on me, so rather than use my debit card like I do a lot, I would use that cash for a few weeks, and then get back on the debit card. My bank statements for those periods would indicate a slight change in habits. Probably too late now, but I do think looking at someone's spending habits may have indicated something was a little off. He certainly would not want to spend a bunch of $20s from the 1960s in the late 90s.

I was thinking about the "he died in the jump" conversation and how that relates to calculating the probability of that happening and him not being found. Typically those conversations refer to unusual or unlikely incidents as proving that it happened, when the reality is that those obscure or unlikely scenarios hint at it possibly happening, not always happening. So, if I show a few examples of someone no pulling, it does not mean he no pulled, it just means he may have. Same for a body not being found in the woods, and same for a person disappearing all together. The issue comes when taking the probability of all three events happening in sequence. An analogy might be someone saying that if I flip a coin there is a 50% chance it will come up heads, but not telling us that if you flip a coin three times, that the probability of heads coming up three times in a row is not 50%, it is .5*.5*.5 for a probability of .125 or 12.5%. Cooper would have had to no pull, followed by his body not being found, followed by someone not reporting him missing. I had grad course in probability for engineers and scientists (I'm neither one, unless data science is considered), and the field of probability is pretty complex. I had thought at one point that if I could calculate the probability of a poker hand, then I knew enough about probability. I was definitely wrong. I'm no pro in probability, but I do like getting involved with it as a hobby, and have used it a good amount in my job. Now, someone could say that bodies go missing all time. Ok, but do those bodies usually have a parachute rig attached to them, or a parachute flapping in the wind? Same for no pulls, there are no pulls, but how often do those really happen? How about for a guy who has just pulled off a hijacking and is now so close to getting away that all he has to do is pull a rip cord handle? How often does someone go missing and look like the suspect of a worldwide FBI manhunt? For all of these events to have happened together is really like flipping a coin 5 or 10 times and getting heads each time. Possible, but very low probability.

Dudeman. Would the actual chute ever pop out on impact or many years later if parts rusted and the container opened? I’m guessing we don’t have a lot of examples of what happens to a chute many years later. Something else that was brought up a while back about a body in the woods are vultures circling the body.

Some info from USPA on safety and skydiving. Pretty interesting. Certainly not apples to apples for DB Cooper, but maybe apples to oranges (to me apples and oranges have a lot more in common than not). https://uspa.org/Discover/FAQs/Safety

I've definitely used the "no body" means he likely didn't die in the jump. Key word is likely. If he jumped over the Pacific ocean, I would not use the same logic of "no body means he likely survived." Or if we knew for sure he landed in a fast flowing river that flowed into the ocean. However, I expect to find a body in the area that he jumped. If he jumped into Chernobyl, then maybe not, given that there were not people living there or searching there. Note: I use the totality of information here to come to a probability that he survived. If $200k was found at Tena Bar, I might lean more towards death than I do. There are just so many things that point to survival. I could argue that he died, but it is a lot harder. Typically the argument that he died uses outliers and other various ways to spin an argument. There are terms that exist for this, but I'll defer to you Fly on what those are. OleMiss probably knows them too from his experience in law. EDIT: This wiki page kind of gets at what I'm saying. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faulty_generalization To summarize: Cooper likely planned the jump, therefore he wanted to survive. The leap was not forced on him like say a pilot in a B-17 going down in flames over Germany. He uses a device specially designed for survival (parachute). He jumps in survivable conditions over a flat area in November. In a populated area, not a city, but not wilderness either. We have not found a body. We have only found 3% of the money. This is one of the biggest manhunts in history, and still is today. People hike and walk that area all the time. For all the news, no one has come forward with a missing person that truly could be Cooper. If we were on the Facebook group, we'd get a cliche like "Occams Razor" or "The absence of evidence is not evidence." Oh well. The majority of the information indicates he likely survived. If people were to wager a bet and truly be held accountable to that bet, I suspect they would say he lived. So what is happening is that people like to say he died, when in reality they should be saying "maybe he died." I say he "likely lived" not "maybe he lived"

I think you are arguing just to argue and to be a contrarian. That's ok, it is a technique in this case and keep things interesting. You're clearly someone who understands math and logic, so that's what makes me think you are just arguing. To say the statistical element is uncompelling is kind of odd coming from someone who understands the math. If there are millions of successful skydives a year and thousands of combat bailouts in history that were successful, then those statistics are compelling, and should give an indication of what will happen in the future. Of course there will be outliers, and if you are the one guy who dies doing something, then yea it matters to you, and yes there are always exceptions to the rule. You say "things" go missing in the woods all the time and then use one example of the actor who recently went missing. How often do humans go missing in the woods and then are never found? What about ones that are part of a massive manhunt? You also are not mentioning that the jump likely occurred in a flat open area, fairly well populated. I agree with Flyjack, the question is whether or not he pulled, everything flows from that. But even if he didn't pull, there are still a lot of things that have to happen for his body to go completely unseen. You're throwing out exceptions to the rule and then trying to get people to think those exceptions are common. Exceptions happen, but you're acting as if the exceptions will happen or did happen. Possible, but how probable?

Yes, skydiving deaths occur. I used to read the back of the skydiving magazine at the place I skydived, that's where the recent deaths were reported. As I remember, we were most concerned with bumping into another jumper (not an issue with Cooper) and then concerned with hitting power lines (Cooper may have hit those, but then where is the body?). Point is, skydiving deaths occur for many reasons. The percentage of jumps to deaths is very low. Many of the deaths occur due to an accident in the air, or on the landing. If Cooper got the chute open, then history would lean towards his survival. How many skydivers die from a no pull? How many of those no pulls were due to hitting another jumper, or having a heart attack, etc? Once you dig into the deaths, the percentage of deaths to jumps is very digestible. It also seems that you're suggesting if he didn't pull that there would not be much to find. No body? No parts? No bones? Do the bones disintegrate? What about clothes? The rig, the money bag? You stated "I agree with all that as stated. I don't have a "died in the jump" theory, I'm just saying the raw facts would suggest someone disappeared forever that day or shortly after, and the only reason we resist that conclusion is because it sucks as an end to this story." I disagree that the only reason we resist the conclusion is that it sucks as an end to his story. Most of resist this conclusion due to our interpretation of the information. I personally think people like to say he died simply because that's what they've been reading for years. Sure, he could have died, but I lean towards him living. Plenty of cases go unsolved forever. I find dying in the jump a lot more exciting than he took a flight home and went back to his blue collar job and then died when he was 80.

Robert, I can see your point about the debris moving up 20 feet. However, saying that no debris goes on shore there simply cannot be true. Is this what you are saying? There was a time I wondered about how something would get so far up the bank, and then I saw a picture of flooding at the Fazios. This was after I had visited the Fazios, so I remember being shocked at how high the water had actually gotten.

Well said. When thinking of the case, I have often visualized myself in his shoes. I'm sure others have done it too. For instance, I pictured myself sitting in my house looking at the money and thinking how I would get into circulation without getting caught. So, for the Tina Bar money, I thought, what would I do to get rid of it. My first choice would be to burn it, but if I did not have a backyard or basement, etc., maybe I'd throw it in the river and hope it floated to the ocean. Fly, I think you had posted once about throwing it in a trash heap or something. That would make it possibly disappear. Anyhow, throwing it in the river would not be my first choice, but I guess it would be a choice.

Fly, I agree with your general approach. I wonder sometimes if people just like to argue, or they have too much time on their hands. The bills were found next to a major river, we have all seen the debris from rivers. To say it was planted there, or landed there is really stretching the probability of what is possible. Doesn't mean it is impossible that someone buried it on Tina Bar, or that Cooper landed there, but it is not probable.