Orange1

So then Georger is correct that the Vegas identification stuff is all rubbish? Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

You forget - Boeing emploees who designed and made the planes along with the schematics - don't forget that Duane Weber had this information available to him when that plane and others were nothing more than a design on paper. Sorry Jo, I think we missed this link. Can you be more specific about the fact that Duane had this precise info? The last I heard you say on this was that he had a brother who worked for Boeing who...possibly may have had access to the plans and....possibly may have taken them home and...possibly may have left them lying around the house (sounds just like the kind of guy the CIA would want on their top secret project!) and that these plans....possibly may have been for this and that Duane ...possibly may have seen them. Now you are once again convinced of something that is built on maybe after maybe after maybe...oh, and one of those maybes is completely wrong, by the way: Not that this will make the slightest bit of difference in your conviction but what you said above does not fit the facts. You say: "when that plane and others were nothing more than a design on paper". The 727 was already built and flying when the CIA asked Boeing to do work on the ventral exit for airdrops - that is clear from the Church report. You are trying to imply that these plans that Duane's brother may have had access to that he may have taken home where he may have left them lying around where Duane may have seen them...all happened when this was still in the drawing board stages for the plane itself. Couldn't have happened. I read "the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" many years ago (long before the Da Vinci Code came out). Their theory reminds me of Jo's. Take an assumption, the fact that it is very dodgy indeed gets glossed over, then you build a series of "may have happened"s on top of that, each "maybe" suddenly gets converted to fact and ..voila, Jesus married Mary Magdalene and fathered a line of kings in France. The Duane Weber theory reminds me a lot of that. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Yup, and that is one of Ckret's convictions that never made sense to me. Who better to survive that kind of jump than the kind of person who may have plenty experience with it - i.e. a paratrooper. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Interesting reading up them, see eg wiki article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montagnard ...also this thread: http://e20-c75th-rangers-association.org/forums/showthread.php?t=394 Another article I saw put the # of Montagnards evacuated to the US at 2000. Sounds like plenty of reason for someone to have a grudge, but of course the ethnic looks and accent would both have been completely wrong. Oh and some 'trivia' seeing as we have been talking about inisgnia http://cgi.ebay.com.my/PATCH-ARVN-RED-BERETS-Special-Forces-VIETNAM-WAR_W0QQcmdZViewItemQQitemZ380088533306 Finally, I idly wonder, given that Vietnam was French before liberation, how many Dan Cooper comics were circulating there. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

And if they weren't even going as far as CA chances are they didn't even consider Asia... Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Look at the bit on Rusty Phillips in this link - at least one example of someone who flew in both Africa (Congo, as it turns out - for those of you who don't know where Leopoldville was) as well as SE Asia. There must have been others. http://www.utdallas.edu/library/uniquecoll/speccoll/aamnote/aam62.pdf Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

In my google searches, I kept on coming up with articles on the paradrop into the Belgian Congo in 1964, like this one http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-vetscor/1081045/posts I'd ignored them as the drops were done by C-130 & B-26, and the 727 reference only came up as it was used to evacuate people off the ground. But it suddenly occurred to me that Dan Cooper comic aficionados should see this - because the operations were done by a combination of US and Belgian personnel. Very possible that the Dan Cooper comics may have been in circulation among the Belgian troops. Well, there were only 2 Americans with 338 Belgians in the actual drop (can we get pics of these two americans I wonder?!) but the USAF & CIA between them supplied the 3 planes so I presume there would have been any number of Americans around, probably including some or all the crew of the planes. (which included CIA trained Cuban exile pilots.) Well, actually this goes beyond comics. Anyone knows that CIA agents were thick on the ground in the Congo pre- and post-independence anyway. For those of you whose African history may be a little rusty, along with Castro, the CIA also had plans to assassinate Patrice Lumumba and documents apparently show that the assassination order (which in this case was successful) came directly from Eisenhower. (History has painted Lumumba as effectively Congo's Mandela and many suggest the Congo would not have descended into chaos had he been allowed to rule, but that's a what-if and a drift from our thread.) Here's a doc that shows the USAF was active in Congo from 1960-1978: https://www.afresearch.org/skins/rims/q_mod_be0e99f3-fc56-4ccb-8dfe-670c0822a153/q_act_downloadpaper/q_obj_b01dbb8c-4f5f-4fd4-a8fa-2d1ba44c8cc4/display.aspx?rs=enginespage Oh, and the Congo would be a cracking place to pick up a deep tan... and Africa in general would be as good a place (if not even better) than SE Asia for both Cooper and the dollar bills to disappear into. Which reminds me that of course, CIA involvement went far beyond the Congo. As African countries gained independence through the 60s and 70s, Africa became a Cold War theatre. The Soviets (and Cubans) supplied arms and training to many countries or their independence movements, and the West "fightback" was led by the US via the CIA. For example, there were Cubans sent to Angola to help the Marxist liberation movement there and the CIA helped fund and train its opposition, the (pro-Western) Unita movement. It's common cause that the main reason the US never really got involved in sanctions against apartheid SA was because the government was pro-West. etc. So if we are looking for Cooper as being someone with exposure to airdrops, and a good place to tan before the hijack and hide afterwards. Africa is also a possibility. What makes Asia stronger as a contender is that we know the 727 drop tests happened there, but perhaps we should consider Africa as a possible source or destination for Cooper too. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Snow, that highlighted para looks like it came from the Church report? Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Yeah I saw that. I don't recall anything in the transcripts about asking for V-23 though (it may be there & i just don't recall it), but the other stuff (flaps etc) was in there. I assumed inaccuracies in the article. The article for example says Cooper scooped up his cigarette butts and took them with him. But the article also shows that whoever first 'speculated' on the CIA drops here (& I think this was Jo? ) didn't need to have inside info; they just needed to have read the newspaper archives. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

From that article. yeah, gee, the guy makes it sound like no-one ever done that before. at least Cooper wasn't SL'ing at some ridiculously low altiutude wondering if there were going to be men with guns greeting him on the ground... edited to add: hmm.. and this? They seem to think this went beyond test flights (a la 377's version - why spend all that money and not use it?) And this article was printed in 1996... so knowledge of the CIA's flights was out there long before we stumbled on it here Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

I don't see this as strange at all. Academics often have very wide-ranging networks geographically, from students who come from out of town, visiting professors, people they meet at conferences, academic networking via journals and email, etc etc. I've been out of academia a long time but even back then, which was pre email/internet being widely used - and I was very junior in the hierarchy at the time - i knew, or knew of, people at universities on 3 different continents, let alone cities. & I imagine networking is far easier these days. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

I thought Ckret said he had deduced Cooper didn't ask for 15 deg. As the quote I used from the transcript some days ago show, the pilot mentions 15 deg but the wording makes it ambiguous if Cooper actually asked for it or if the pilot supposed that from what he asked. Pilot also mentioned to ground control right then that he thought Cooper knew something about aviation. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Would an early money find by the Ingrams still only be the part of it though? Maybe Tom was briefed by Ckret & therefore didn't feel a need to read the transcripts? Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

So you don't buy that some may have been lost during the jump? Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

I realise it works for any bill, but (for example) if people don't know about the where's george thing, they're not gonna think "oh let me go enter this serial # on the net" ...presumably. The stamp would be more likely to result in a hit, was all i meant. I did wonder about the Cooper bills, I mean it's not like serial #s are easy to remember. ...bank tellers might have been checking and some civilians but I wonder how many people actually sat there with the newspaper lists and checked. Though having said that, i would have thought at least one bill would have showed up somewhere, Ingram find excepted...and perhaps they did, but not in the US. Re dollars abroad. There will be a number of instances you would not know where they end up, because they go to places people do not have internet, or are too busy trying to survive to enter serial numbers into a computer, or because it is illegal to hold USD and they do not want to be traced, or or or... Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Did I read the website right - it basically is up to you when you find one to enter it on the site? I wonder if bank tellers do as well (probably not). 10% hit rate sounds reasonably high to me but then again there is a difference between getting a dollar bill with a stamp on it alerting you to the fact that something is special about it, and an ordinary one, no? Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Red dollar bills in circulation in SE Asia during the Vietnam War. Appear to be the same as Snow's MPCs. More interesting maybe is that the thread in this forum has posters who are Vietnamese and remember the war, and seemingly ex soldiers who were stationed there... anyone wanna go on and ask stuff? (The link below is from 2005 but the guys may well still be around?) The thread is in reverse chronological order. http://mail.saigon.com/pipermail/vnbiz/2005-November/007555.html Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

On the "everything is on the web" theory, there are 4 980 000 sites (with English language sites as a filter so there will be more) via Google on Black Ops. I'm sure a bunch of these are conspiracy theory sites, but still. Ooh guess what - it appears America does not have the monopoly on black ops. If you add "CIA" as a further filter, you "only" get 233 000 hits. All hugely secret then. Jo confused the hell out of me with her "AHA!" at Georger when he fingered Mr Chevron Man as a CIA man, only then to turn around and say the chevron was Vietnam not CIA. Google doesn't help an awful lot because a search using "chevron" keeps turning up oil company results ... however (getting inventive) if i add "insignia" to the search term i get a lot of results that might be more relevant. Of course, with nearly 14000 results including stuff you can buy on eBay, I suppose none of these would be the secret chevron because they clearly are not secrets. So since none of the results would be relevant (and I don't really buy the story anyway) I didn't look too far into it, but I am laying my search terms out there if it helps anyone else. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

And the rumours I have heard about the reason we now have none reflects very poorly on one particular poster. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

(sigh) Jo, if you already "have the answers" then you would have already proved beyond doubt that Duane was Cooper. And you need to differentiate between people "badgering you for information" and asking you to back up or explain statements that you post on the internet. ( If you don't want them questioned - don't post them in a public forum.) Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Jo, you are the one who has gone off the edge in that response - like you did to those arbitrary pictures Snow posted a while ago. Don't you recognise irony when you see it? It doesn't take much deduction from your chain of posts to figure out what you were getting at. You still haven't told us why it took you almost 30 years to think to question why Duane wanted you to surreptitiously take photos. Why didn't you ask him at the time what he was up to? Clearly, you are of the opinion that the chevron is "only allowed" to be worn by CIA agents. It seems a strange way for a supposedly clandestine agent to dress - remember nothing stays secret for long - so here he is advertising he is CIA? Does anyone reading the forum know anything about CIA agents advertising themselves via chevrons? Do you care to share with us how Duane "cashed in" his "insurance policy" in March 1990? Regardless of the above, I was unaware of your opinion that Georger is a retired FBI agent. However, if that is the case, then I am sure he has a lot of good insight he can contribute. If this were the case it would make me more rather than less likely to value his posts. Of course, I don't believe in the The Great Cover-Up Conspiracy though. It's officially Christmas here on the southern tip of Africa, so merry christmas to all, and to all a goodnight. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Tom - very well spotted. Peregrinerose please to chime in, I understand people get naturally more farsighted as they age. Thus those with perfect vision tend to get farsighted, and those who are nearsighted tend to get less so. Is this a correct understanding? And if so how generally applicable is it? ... in other words while one may not know exactly, one can surmise that Duane would have been less nearsighted later in his life than he appeared in that picture. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

A more eloquent exposition of what i was saying earlier. Hope the first quote is not too long to hold your interest! Then this bit may have more relevance to 377's question, although the cases referred to below are a lot more recent than SE Asia in the 70s: They also mention this, but with no indication of how long it may have been the case: All from http://www.newyorkfed.org/banking/circulars_archive/11507.pdf Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Jeez, told you I needed some sleep. I managed to forget the USD is the global reserve currency. Which means that most of the USD in circulation is actually held outside the US (by central banks). from: http://www.newyorkfed.org/aboutthefed/fedpoint/fed01.html The USD was even more important as a reserve currency back then as it was - till just before the Cooper hijack - officially gold-backed and all other countries pegged exchange rates vs USD and so had to hold it. But, there is obviously a big difference between central banks holding USD and GI Joe spending his in downtown Saigon. I've skimmed a number of papers on USD circulation outside the US but they mostly date from the early 90s on (except one that is too early, 1926!) The wiki note on the increasingly large denominations of the dong is evidence of significant inflationary pressure, and that would have led to people wanting to hold dollars I haven't actually answered 377's question yet of course, but I will keep looking. Edit: I may have to try get hold of a Vietnamese or South Asian economist old enough to remember the 1970s or at least old enough to have learnt about them at university. I may have more luck doing that after the holiday season. Edit in case it isn't obvious: the dong is the Vietnamese currency. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.