Mummied hand with ripcord

[lodestar 0]

Back at the time I was at the Hills and during one of the meets we had a group of guys, and I'm thinking it may have been the Casa Grande crowd, put up a pole with a mummified hand and wrist clutching a ripcord as a marker for their area.
Can anyone pin down who that was exactly?
I can remember Searles and a few of the judges going over to their area and politely asking that the totem be removed as it was in bad taste, I believe it may have been a Turkey meet and sometime in the mid seventies.

[Guru312 0]

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Can anyone pin down who that was exactly?

From what I read in another thread in this SH&T forum I think the mummified hand belonged to DB Cooper.

Guru312

I am not DB Cooper

[airtwardo 7]

Somebody posted a pic of 'The Hand' on this site a while back, maybe in the Scary Sories thread...I have screen grab of it but it's on my laptop which isn't here.

~ If you choke a Smurf, what color does it turn? ~

[PROGRESSIVE 0]

From past threads, the hand came from an unfortunate Airforce pilot/student that was killed. It was until much later on that someone had found his hand and had placed it in the pea gravel landing area with ripcord in hand. The local authorities caught wind of this and put an end to the madness.

R.I.P. ?

Pete

[airtwardo 7]

Quote

From past threads, the hand came from an unfortunate Airforce pilot/student that was killed. It was until much later on that someone had found his hand and had placed it in the pea gravel landing area with ripcord in hand. The local authorities caught wind of this and put an end to the madness.

R.I.P. ?

Pete

Damn Cops....ALWAYS lookin' for a hand OUT!

~ If you choke a Smurf, what color does it turn? ~

[texascrw 0]

I had a photograph of the hand and forearm, sticking up out of the ground, with a ripcord in the hand. The story I heard in the early 80's, was that it was the mummified remains dug up from an Indian burial mound, by the Casa Grande crowd. Supposed to have happened in the 70's. If you could find one of the old crowd, that didn't bounce, maybe the real story would come out.

[pchapman 275]

I tried a little searching to be able to contribute here:

supposed photo of the hand
http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?do=post_attachment;postatt_id=71450;

in the thread "The Petrified Hand"
http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=2443457;


Now, if someone only had a photo of the birdbath made from a bounce indentation...

BSBD

Edit: I've seen at least 3 different origins claimed for The Hand in different threads...

[BCA 1]

I answered this question a long time ago on this forum. The hand was owned by Terry Cooper who lived and jumped in the Phoenix area back in the 60's and 70's. He kept it in a refrigerator and brought it out to various competitions, parties and boogies. There were a lot of stories about where it originally came from, but he told me that he got it from the med school at the U. of Arizona.

BCA

[Ron 9]

Maybe a better picture.

"No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms." -- Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson Papers, 334

[DBCOOPER 1]

Nice

Replying to: Re: Stall On Jump Run Emergency Procedure? by billvon

If the plane is unrecoverable then exiting is a very very good idea.

[ZigZagMarquis 9]

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There were a lot of stories about where it originally came from...

When I started jumping at Cal City back in the early 90s, I heard stories from the likes of Celaya, Philly, Cary and Hank that origins of "the hand" was something along the lines of it having been "found" in some old Indian burial ground "out in the desert" "somewhere".

[PROGRESSIVE 0]

Whos ever the hand belonged to must have been single. I didn't see any wedding ring!

Pete

[ZigZagMarquis 9]

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Whos ever the hand belonged to must have been single. I didn't see any wedding ring!

Pete

Nah... skydivers would have nicked it and traded it for beer!

[RogerRamjet 0]

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Whos ever the hand belonged to must have been single. I didn't see any wedding ring!

Pete

The ring would have been on his other hand (not shown)

-----------------------
Roger "Ramjet" Clark
FB# 271, SCR 3245, SCS 1519

[fastphil 0]

I was at a couple of mid-seventies turkey meets. The Herd is the rowdy ones that come to mind but I don’t remember the hand. I do remember 101 ten man teams, the ethanol milk jug cannon, hay bale bonfires, a semi-truck racing thru the DZ camping area, canopy collision with bounce off the packing shed, high wind reserve landing rescues (ground dragging and tree), round canopy CRW, bounces and then memory starts to fade at the big N2O bottles, so it could be just my memory…

[jackwallace 3]

The story I heard was that the hand was found by a jumper working in the cotton fields around the Gulch. Turned it up with the tractor.
Fastphil: the cannon was acetylene powered. The fire bottles used alcohol. And I thought it was 110 teams and a frog.
Dam 70's were tough on the memory.

U only make 2 jumps: the first one for some weird reason and the last one that you lived through. The rest are just filler.
scr 316

[GreenLight 6]

Here's our version... Still wont work... Crap...

Green Light
"Harry, why did you land all the way out there? Nobody else landed out there."
"Your statement answered your question."

[rdufokker 6]

Seems there was a popular t-shirt, probably from the Gulch that had the hand/ripcord on it. Does anyone have that shirt?

BS

Irony: "the History and Trivia section hijacked by the D.B. Cooper thread"