Math of Insects

I remember reading about that, but I thought that in the end it had proven not to be possible that it was Cooper’s. Either the date was wrong, or there turned out not to be a chute there. I can’t remember the details. Do you?

I agree, that's the money shot: It's not impossible his actual chute was found and then rejected/released. Maybe even likely. Frustrating.

I have to wonder if maybe that inspection card and log book might have been to WWII-era airmen what, say, elevator inspection cards are to us. How many of us would go looking for one if it weren't posted in front of our eyes? I have to think most people who needed chutes back then, just put them on and never took notice of the hidden bit of cardboard meant primarily for the person doing the inspecting to show that he'd done his job.

Is your argument that the brother in law planted a story in the newspaper as a way of shielding her from publicity? That would be at odds with Flyjack's theory, which is that he intentionally planted the story to get ahead of what they presumed would be the discovery of just "her" amount of money missing from the rest. In his version, it's specifically the publicity they wanted. It seems that people keep forgetting: we live in the future. We know he's never been found. 100% of those who did this before Cooper had either failed, been caught trying, or been found. In real time they were still tracking a suspect. For all anyone knew they'd have the guy in the back of a van the next week. No story in the Bucks County newspaper would mean a thing if he said, "I gave most of it to my mom and some to the cute stewardess named Tina." This whole theory involves some kind of futurist 3D chess that just isn't really in the realm. It's fun as sci-fi/conspiracy fodder but impossibly far-fetched as a real-world proposal.

Perhaps, but we can pick any of them equally, at random, to choose to “believe,” and then make the case that best supports them. Cooper needs to be dead to never be caught, so it feels like low-hanging fruit for rando fan-fic writer. “Haha, The Man, you’ll never get him now.” Surely if you’re Cooper, writing to the one organization that otherwise had no clue where to find you or who you were, giving them their first and best shot at really finding you, you weren’t under the impression that they’d read that you were dead in an anonymous letter and that would be the end of it. They just seem like someone’s backstory idea (or rather, a couple of people’s). Maybe in the end one or more of the letters will prove to have been from him, but it feels equally possible to have been the least likely candidate, as the most. Horses for courses…

Then all bets are off. To me they read like off-the-rack fan-fiction. (I.e., the work of randos who who just wanted to borrow a little glory from a thing in the news.)

“Completely bedridden” in a fast descent to death as of January, or traveling to the Bahamas and boasting of future travels in March. These can’t both be true…

The expression comes to mind, "If all you have is a hammer, soon everything begins to look like a nail." If the money were recovered a week later, and a little bit was missing, people would assume the guy who stole it had what was missing. No one in the public would assume a flight attendant whose name they wouldn't have known and whose story was completely unfamiliar to them, must therefore have the missing money. The FBI might wonder, but they are not taking their tips and information from blurbs in the Bucks County newspaper. They already had her statement, and knew where to get more. There was no reason to assume more wouldn't be missing, whenever it was found. We only know that because we live in the future, when Tena Bar has occurred and involved a number that starts with 5. For them, in real time, any amount might have been recovered, from 0 to 200,000. Or some might have been recovered one day and some another. And so on. They didn't know that one day we'd be here looking back at no other money found save the number that starts with 5. Her FBI agent brother-in-law would not devise some elaborate plan to help his sister in law steal $5000 ransom money from a hijacking she was involved it--at least not one that names her and suggests she might have been offered that exact amount of money. If anything, he would be the one urging her to give it back. And if he did devise one, it would have been internal to shield her from investigation, not external to control what nice old Margie Johnson from down the block thinks. This whole proposal is quite contrived and fanciful. It's fine to ponder it, but I wouldn't advance it as anything more meaningful than science fiction. There are a host of far simpler, more ordinary explanations for this very normal little nothing-burger of a local-newspaper blurb. You have to really be looking for conspiracies to find this even vaguely credible.

I can't find a way to read that little blurb that way at all. If anything, it would have the effect of introducing her as a likely recipient of some of whatever money might eventually turn up missing. Without that blurb, no one in the public would have known a thing about that offer/interaction. It's like when Heidi Fliess, the Hollywood Madam was arrested, and all those producers and politicians released statements saying they didn't know her and had never met her. Great, but no one ever said you did, and now everyone totally knows you did. It just seems like Mario was looking for a little human-interest story and filled one of the slots with a crazy-to-most-people tale of how a person with a tie to their area had a real-life interaction with a hijacker, and was even offered money by him. I can't see how this would do anything but hurt "brother-in-law FBI agent's sister," if it were put there for the reasons being proposed here.

OK, I see. So a TV show or the like. So the wind chart would theoretically be ok to share, you were just thinking it would be more fun to make it a reveal at CooperCon? Is that right? It wouldn't be covered by whatever the preliminary talks are related to?

@Flyjack, are you comfortable explaining what you mean about "being asked" not to disclose your research? My first thought was book deal, but then someone else presenting your research publicly at CooperCon would seem to be the ultimate deal-killer. It's hard to get more public than that! Even sharing with select people privately would seem risky in that case. All it takes is one of them to say a single thing in public to mess up the whole deal. What does it mean when you say you are "being asked" not to share?

No. I am saying that your mutual credentials entitle you both to certain informed opinions about certain aspects of the case. They do not make you each experts on each other. The discourse here is constantly side-tracked and sabotaged by silly personal sniping. You both have expertise that makes your point of view worth considering. I wish you'd both stick to that instead of bickering. I mean this on a personal level: I am sincerely interested what both of you have to say. You're both smart and well-informed in your respective areas, and sifting through the dumb internet arguments you both devolve into instead is fatiguing. All anyone needs to say is, "I see this differently." A differing interpretation never killed anyone. It's not personal. No one here, even the best-informed, is actually an expert on this hijacking, since there is no way to be an expert about something that is unknown. Everyone here, though, is the world's foremost expert on their own opinions or perspectives about it. It would be great to focus on that. In general, it's always more constructive to use each other as resources than as punching bags.

Neither of you mentioned any training in psychology or human relations, so perhaps it would be most productive to focus on the aspects your respective impressive backgrounds qualify for you for, instead of on each other?

Right—brain fart!

Reca's an object lesson in the dangers of "sunk-cost." That guy certainly deserved to be considered, but that consideration should have ended with a swift and easy rejection of him as an actual possibility. He should have gotten to live out the rest of his life without that nonsense following him around. Just as VP should have been rejected out of nine-finger hand before his name was ever put forth. At a certain point the opportunism becomes cynicism and even cruelty.

I think that says “saf[e]ty helmet.

Nine and half, according to some.

Well, that's the point. If it needs Cooper himself to connect them, it's pretty safe to guess they are otherwise not connected. A comic-strip in another language, from another country...it would be far more surprising if it turned out they were connected, rather than were not. Particularly since he's using the title character's name while simultaneously trying to be inconspicuous. What do you mean about any fracturing of the "community" potentially being intentional?

I don’t see how to get from “People here wouldn’t have known about it,” to “See? There’s a connection, therefore it’s more likely from this source.” Those are two precisely opposing thoughts. There being a connection to the area is all the more reason someone trying to be discreet would not choose such a name intentionally. You wouldn’t use “Clark Kent,” either. Normally, we’d hear that there was something with the same name in it, but it was only in Canada and other distant locations, and not in English, and we’d go, “OK, probably not then.” In this case, we hear it and go, “He must be Canadian then!” Any objective approach would say, “Interesting but unlikely.” Personally, I barely get to “interesting.” Any name he chose would have existed *somewhere.* It’s worth noticing that this comic existed, but until a diary is found that says “One day I will hijack a plane and be like my childhood hero Dan Cooper,” any connection is far-fetched at best, when compared to the “default” assumption that he just picked a common name to use as an alias.

I am not a fan of "we don't know" when it is deployed to imply that all things are therefore equally possible. Not knowing some particular detail of something doesn't rewrite the rules of time, place, and distance. It only means the most likely thing is the default until something crazy turns up. We know how things work in general. There would be no reason to expect that someone 100 miles south of the Canadian border would not have heard of a comic you, random Canadian, grew up with. Even if you expected it, you certainly wouldn't count on it. Not least of all at an airport of all places. It's pretty clearly a coincidence that we've arrived at after the fact. If anything, proximity to Canada makes it less likely it's from that comic, rather than more.

He wouldn’t know who knew what. This is backward-creation to make it plausible, IMO. It’s pretty clearly a coincidence.

It's pretty obvious the comic book thing is a coincidence. Someone trying to be discrete and anonymous would not pick the title character from a comic book. You might as well put Spiderman or Captain Fantastic. "Cooper" was a common name. Baseball players, movie stars...it was out there.

Way to ruin Flyjack's big surprise, Georger.

Right. Since you appear confused, Flyjack: No one is disputing the single example you posted (with two different appearances) from the files, exists. It is from 1988. Himmlebach's book is from 1986. (That's the 15 years I was referring to.) You have been implying that the source of this must be from somewhere within an unseen cache of yet-to-be-released earlier FBI files, because "anything is possible." You were gently corrected on the issues of the released files, but dismissed the correction and demeaned the person who offered it. You have ridiculed the idea that the source of this could be the primary-source book published two years before this FBI file mention, and ignored the fact that every subsequent mention of this fact is demonstrably traceable to that book and/or its author. And you've been needlessly aggressive and disrespectful, over something that can hardly be worth the energy it takes to work up the dramatic outrage over. I don't know if you took a bath on an NCAA playoff bet or if you simply fear the impression that others might share the trait of careful thinking, and yet still end up with different conclusions than you. But I do know that when grown men and women act out like this, it's rarely because of confidence in their position or themselves. If this is the hill you want to die on, I certainly can't stop you. But personally I think that going down like the Black Knight in Monty Python is beneath you, and makes other assertions you might make bear less weight. Happy Monday to you, I'm off to visit the rest of the world outside this thread. You might consider the same...