Orange1

After the way he got treated last time I'm hardly surprised he's not back. I'm probably more surprised he just didn't leave earlier of his own accord. btw nothing yet means anything about whether cooper lived or died. a number of people have posted the theory that he died on impact and someone found him, took the money and buried him with his gear. until we know if it is the right canopy and if there is a body attached to the harness (as there was clearly something down there preventing the kids from pulling it all the way up) any conclusion about whether he lived or not would be pure speculation. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Funny timming to be asking for the man who packed DB coppers rig. Did they not just find a potential canopy/ CKret.... is that you? Doubt it, ckret would have known the answer from the original DB Cooper thread at the very least. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Yeah. Get used to the fact that stuff like that is not gonna look shiny new for very long. You might soon ace your landings, but knock your alti on the side of the plane, and so on... Have a look at the experienced jumpers around you and their altis, helmets etc...!! Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Why do they need the "heavy equipment", anyone know? Sounds to me like it is not just the canopy down there but then I have no experience in digging up ancient canopies suspected of being evidence. Would be nice if Ckret would pop in Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Well spotted Nick! This could be fun... like another poster said, also seeing what else is down there. This bit makes one wonder though - ...as to why they didn't find it if they were looking in the right place.. and why the property owner (or his predecessors) never found it before. Unless.... [jumps on speculation bandwagon again ] the original owner DID find him and, like some have speculated, buried him and kept the money. I guess we'll find out soon enough! Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

For those of you who can't be bothered to watch it, here's his own description of it: Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

very nice... i seem to recall it was howling that day tho (i remember cos i needed to pick up something from erik and he was going on the jump)?? is that DOU? Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Well, I clearly have't spent the many hours you seem to have on poring over all the details. Money found without cooper in my mind = either he lost some or all of it in the air, or he died. Grand conspiracy theories about people surviving a jump like this when there is no evidence they ever did a single jump in their lives then leaving some behind for 8 years probably make great fiction, if all the 'evidence' you have is that they wore sideburns for a long time. The biggest hole in the Weber theory remains the fact that he has not ever been placed in a parachute, despite Jo's many attempts to follow all sorts of angles, and while there may be disagreement among jumpers as to how survivable the jump was for an experienced jumper or paratrooper, I doubt you will find ONE who thinks someone who had no or little experience would have survived it. I'm very curious as to your reasons for being here ... the amount of time & effort you've spent, you've already indicated you have plans to go check out the areas and yet IIRC you also said you weren't even alive when the hijack happened... are you one of those people Jo thinks wants to write a book about it? Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

If by PVC you mean those tubes... I've got my fingers caught in one once, round about my 20th jump or so. Not fun. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

I think it's a damn big hole, actually. To go to all the trouble to pull off the caper and then have to leave all that money buried for 8 years because you didn't have access to transport that you could use safely - or, frankly, any other reason - just seems ridiculous. 8 years is a long time to trust a hiding place to remain secure, $200K in the early 1970s a damn good reason to buy a car (or fix up whatever the reason was for apparently leaving the money behind) and get it back real quick. I'm sorry, but this is one aspect of that "theory" that seriously undermines it imho. As for the sideburns... well, they were very fashionable back in the early 70s. Doesn't really mean much to me, probably about as common as men wearing jeans today is. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Part of my AFF training (ripcord rig) was on a creeper to help me find the ripcord from the "right" position (ie arched belly to earth position), and we did the same thing again after AFF, with a hackey rig during my conversion to BoC briefing. It would seem to me this is pretty much common sense, and I am quite surprised to see it does not seem to be par for the course in student training... Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

I can pretty much guarantee the answer to this is always the same... "I jumped out of a plane" Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

I'm quite impressed by the amount of time you seem to have to devote to the case. The sketch results are interesting but even with more sophisticated software I doubt it will really be of much use. Especially pre computer imaging, sketches/identikist/photofits - whatever - have been notorious as never being entirely accurate - at best. Something you can see just about any time you see a photo of a criminal next to his sketch... also plenty of stuff on this if you google it. There was something that in the early 70s the best help they got from sketches gave them clues in 5-10% of cases... hardly very inspiring. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Well, it's got a lot more substance to it than some of the other names that have been put forward Thinking again about your obsession with the money -- agree where it was found is a paradox BUT there just might be some explanation that you/we have not thought of -- so am wondering if that by itself is really reason enough to "flaw" all the other theories. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

That hardly surprises me. It's not the kind of "question" I would expect them to "answer". It's not really what people would consider evidence, when you've stated yourself many times how Duane lied to all sorts of people about all sorts of things. There are probably a million other "questions" in the world that the FBI could "never answer", but they're not the kind of questions anyone would really expect them to answer... Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Conspiracy theories are very useful to people who can't prove something (it's because "they" are hiding the facts). Maybe you can't prove it for the simple reason that it wasn't the case in the first place. Jo, with all due respect, you have absolutely no way of knowing what happened on exit. You weren't there. You have no evidence that Duane could have pulled off that jump and for some strange reason when there did appear to be links between Duane and known skydivers - something you initially asked for - you suddenly decided they were not worthy of further discussion. Now you claim to have evidence but won't let the FBI look at it. None of this is helping convince anyone that Duane was Cooper. I for one think I can understand perfectly why Carr hasn't bothered coming back to these forums, at least at this time. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

I may not have been clear, the "either in freefall or under canopy" refers to the skydiver, not the bag. How far the bag could have travelled would inter alia depend on how full it was (linked to how much drag). 2 miles is not a stretch at all, a skydiver in freefall drift can do a mile in high winds aloft and a lighter bag especially if not full could probably do 2 easily. Thanks for saying you can't rule out anything based on float time - i had recalled, presumably incorrectly, that in a previous post you were using that as an argument for why the money could not have been separated from Cooper in flight, apparently assuming it immediately landed in water. I still don't accept living intervention necessarily happened. Let's say the bag floated 3 miles in the air, then somehow got stuck in a tree or something where it was well and truly lodged until 7 years later or whatever it was when massive storm knocked the tree over and the bag fell into the river. Or the branches it was stuck in started decaying and then a wind strong enough to lift it out came along. etc. all improbable perhaps, but not impossible. fwiw i have stated all these elements before. my argument (such as it was) was always solid To me the real "paradox" still remains the much-discussed fact that no-one reported Cooper missing. Either he died and was such a complete loner, had given his landlord notice, resigned his job etc with the aim of this caper, that no-one missed him (possible, though not many think it likely), or he survived without the cash and went home to lick his wounds and no-one was any the wiser, or he survived with the cash had a nicer life than he had before. If we accept (and i know not everyone does but it is most likely) that to survive the descent he would have had to be either an experienced skydiver who got lucky or a paratrooper, then there are only 2 suspects that I am aware of who have been put forward who would work - Mayfield (presumably lost the cash from the financial evidence given by someone a while ago), or Christiansen (who must have had a pretty good disguise). Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

..sigh... you can use all the physics you want, but you are still ending up with theories at the end of it. If a bag of cash came separated from Cooper at or soon after exit, it could have travelled much further than a skydiver would, either in freefall or under canopy. Fact. If a bag of cash came separated from Cooper at or soon after exit, just because it was found in water at some stage does not mean it landed in water immediately, so 'float theory' means nothing. It could well have landed somewhere else and then being dislodged & transported by human, animal, weather or water to where it was finally found. Fact, or at least you are not able to disprove it as not being a fact. By the way, dictionary definition: "Intellectual dishonesty is the advocacy of a position known to be false." This is not what you claim to have meant by it. Fact. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

They didn't find a plane ticket with the name "Dan Cooper" among his belongings by any chance...? Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Albert, yes but you seem to be defending other people's theories (unless i misread your post). It is still possible that the money was separated in air but did not land in the water immediately. It is not automatic that if he lost the money it was in the water immediately, that is why all that stuff about float time doesn't necessarily matter. Theories are good but they need to be backed up by empirical evidence. So numbers on a piece of paper are great, but if a bunch of people who have been there empirically say otherwise, well you gotta take that into account. i work all day with the difference between theory and reality and numbers may be interesting but by themselves they don't prove a damn thing. btw i don't know much about jet jumps but i believe the jump would have been survivable if the jumper was experienced enough, and from what i can see the only real experience for a jump like that would have been paratrooper training. the only paratrooper that i am aware of that has ever been put forward as a suspect is christiansen. sure it's possible an experienced skydiver of the era may have got lucky and made it out. otherwise i pretty much can't see much other option than that there are bones somewhere with bits of harness attached. sorry though to SCPLF, i have no numbers on bits of paper to back that up, just common sense and the accumulated wisdom of others who have "been there done that". other than christiansen i personally don't see anyone who has been mentioned as a suspect as having the ability to survive the jump plus some proof of actually having some real money afterwards (i.e. not a just couple of grand that could have been made in some other petty scam and explained away as garage sale proceeds) but the fbi dismissed christiansen on the physical description. so i don't have a theory either, anymore. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

You don't, huh? How about this: In other words real life experiences by real live experienced jumpers out of real live jets are being dismissed in favour of a bunch of numbers on a piece of paper. Somehow that is more "support" to a theory than guys that have actually done the thing? As for the difficulty of the jump, real live experienced jumpers have posted time and time again to that but oops... it doesn't suit your theory. Tell me Albert18, have you ever jumped a jet? At night? With a load? In extreme weather? Over rough terrain? When you do, then let us know if the difficulty is being overstated. The simple fact of you even putting that sentence is is proof exactly that people are ignoring what the jumpers have to say. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

All i was trying to do was point out what seemed to me to be an anomaly in logic - the theory that the bag was tied tight enough to stay on cooper, not get blown open etc but somehow that's not tight enough for other things. I think there is a serious misunderstanding among non-jumpers about exit forces especialy from a jet, though all the posts by people who have jumped from jets get conveniently ignored by those whose theories it doesn't suit. And the arguments about "time" before deceleration or opening being short just doesn't wash, that's like saying a bullet can't do damage because it only has a fraction of a second to hit you. It's all it needs. Exploring a theory in detail is interesting but it still doesn't make it any more than a theory. For example, unless I missed something in your argument, you do not seem to allow for the fact that a bag lost in midair did not necessarily then immediately go into the water but only near it in some protected spot, with some other event much later seeing it get into the water - then all the tests/calcs about how long it floats don't really mean much. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Ok this is interesting , I hadn't heard that before. Can you give a bit more detail? (Darker colours worse?) Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Well, not sure how quality the beach time is when it's windy enough for good kitesurfing! Been a whole rash of kitesurfing injuries among my work colleagues recently.. However - I do agree that family comes first. It's just a shame that you can't work round this - maybe getting her to chat to other people around the dz etc may help? Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.