olemisscub

Never change, Flyjack. Enjoy your night.

The only one of us who got any “fact” wrong was you with saying Flo didn’t see Cooper standing before she wrote 6’1. I can’t be “wrong” by saying that my preferred range for suspects is 5’10-6’. That’s an opinion. I’m well aware of how shoes affect things. That’s precisely why I said I won’t outright discount someone who is 5’9. Shoes will make that person appear 5’10. Same logic applies to someone who is 6’2. They’re gonna look 6’3 in shoes. That’s far too tall.

Respect your opinion on all that, but personally I’m gonna stick with a preferred range of 5’10 to 6’. If I’m just doing bullet points on a suspect’s description, a 5’11 suspect is going to get that particular box checked but a 6’2 or 5’8 suspect won’t. But that’s just me.

You’re basically 5’9. Do you think you could possibly estimate someone is 6’1 when they’re really the same height as you are? Likewise, there’s no way if you saw me or Dave that you could possibly mistake us for being your height. We’d be notably taller than you. And if Tina was willing to estimate Cooper as much as 4 inches taller than her, then in her mind he was notably taller. Concerning Cooper seated, if anything, this would lead people would led people to underestimate his height. When people saw Cooper seated he was “slouching” (Gregory) or “bending over” (Tina). You just can’t get a very accurate measure of someone seated. Look at the people who we know saw Cooper standing. The only one who didn’t go at least as high as 6’ is Lysne, and we know he’s not a good witness, by his own admission. Not interested in debating an inch or two, but literally all 3 stews went up to six feet tall. Reckon anyone has ever thought you were six feet tall or even six one? Hard to imagine. If a compelling suspect was 5’9, I’d be a bit leery, but I wouldn’t dismiss them outright. 5’8? I just can’t go there. It’s why I could never go all in on Braden. Highly unlikely people could have thought he was 6’. I already have a hard time imaging someone 5’9 being estimated at 6’ by multiple people. 5’8? No way. And for future reference, heights and weights on those WWII draft cards would not have been self reported, at least not for the most part. Your height and weight mattered to the military. They measured you in your barefeet. This is why you see so many draft records that have heights like “6’1 1/4” or “5’10 3/4”. Oh, and Flo actually had already seen Cooper standing when she was sent to the cockpit. She checked him in at the aft stairs as he boarded.

I’d always heard that too. No idea the source for that. Her only extensive interview before recent times was with Tosaw and I just did a word search of his book and didn’t see anything similar.

My take on this height is this: I think the FBI probably got it right, with the 5'10 to 6' assessment. Tina was 5'8. It's on her passport from 71 and she also apparently told the FBI this as well since it's in her 302. There is a video clip of the crew getting out of a van the next morning in Reno about to take the plane back to Seattle. You can see briefly see Tina's boot heels in that clip and she looks to have about a half inch heel. I actually figured their heels would be higher, but they weren't. Tina's first 302 says the HJ was 5'10 to 6'. Her second 302 she just says 6'. It is a well known phenomenon that people who are intimidated by an individual will exaggerate height. However, think about your own height and go through this exercise. I'm 6'1. If someone was 6'1 or 6'2, there is no chance in hell that I would estimate them to be as tall as 6'5. So if Tina was willing to estimate that someone was 4 inches taller than her, then it seems hard to believe he could be roughly her same height. It goes the other way as well. If Tina was willing to go as low as 5'10, then someone 6'2 is probably out of the question. That would be like me thinking that someone could be 6'3 and they turn out to be 6'7. This is why I think 5'10 to 6 is probably about right. But then again, did she ever stand side by side with him? We don't know. Perhaps she had to squeeze past him at some point if he was standing up working on the money bag or something like that. She also claimed that she showed Cooper how to lower the stairs, but does that mean she was standing next to him literally pointing at how to do it or did she merely just explain to him how to do it? Regardless of how people can and do misinterpret height, Tina thought he could have been as much as 4 inches taller than her, which suggests to me that he likely wasn't close to her height. So a suspect who is 5'8 or lower is a complete non-starter for me and by that same token, I have a difficult time with a suspect who 6'2 or something like that.

His other recent blog post about the sketch and the eyes was erroneous. I emailed him about it and he said he'd do a correction on it. He thought that this document was a reference to Schaffner picking out this set of eyes. I pointed out to him that the reference to Eugene is the clue that this document was about Bill Mitchell. Schaffner couldn't remember what his eyes looked like so the agents ran around asking which of the other witnesses saw his eyes. We knew Gregory and Hal Williams made claims about seeing his eyes and picked out eyes from the Facial Identification Catalog, but this most recent Vault release was the first indication we have that Bill also picked out a set of eyes. The eyes he chose didn't end up on the Bing sketch, so Bing's eyes came from either Gregory or Williams. In my most recent video that I published yesterday, I argue (although it should be obvious) that the eyes on the sketches are likely the least accurate components of the sketches. Bing's eyes are, as I stated, based on Gregory or Williams' selection from the catalog. Then, with the Comp B's, Rose essentially just drew the eyes from KK5-1.

I agree that there is something strange about those early descriptions. You'll see where they often refer to both back chutes as being olive drab. I don't dwell too much on that though. I chalk that up to the "fog of war", as it were. Early chaos as you say.

It's a good question, although that description is wrong from the start anyways. It says "All White Nylon". Of course we know the functional reserve was salmon colored, so I doubt that description came from someone on the scene. I would speculate that since Emerick is the one who handed them over that he provided a description at some point between handing them over and when that report was written. That would seem to make the most sense. They called Hayden at 2:50 AM to get a better description of the back chutes, so maybe they did the same with Emerick and it just isn't reflected anywhere in the notes.

Indeed. Tom said they were just crumbs.

Here are the shards that Uncle Bruce has always been so obsessed with.

Milnes seemed to really respect Nyrop's wishes that the FBI and LEO's stay completely out of it. I can't envision them slipping a tracker in one of the chutes given how standoffish they were during the actual hijacking. As we know, other FBI offices during other hijackings didn't keep their distance like the Seattle Office did. Interesting that Seattle took a totally different approach with the Sibley hijacking a year later. They ended up shooting and wounding him. That was a United Airlines jet, so maybe UAL told them to intervene.

Ok I wasn’t thinking about it being the FBI’s transmitter. I see how one could read it that way.

I generally tend to not give much credence to people claiming that transmitters or anything like that that were used. None of his actions indicate that he was planning on a rendezvous with an accomplice. He is the most similar to Mac as far as the DZ of the copycats went. He was 100% winging it IMO, same as Mac. LaPoint was that way as well.

I must have completely missed that or maybe my brain is just too full of these files that it kicks old irrelevant files out of my memory.

Finally we have some new stuff of substance in the Vault. We now know who was the "first" real suspect was, at least insofar as the first to be given a dedicated file. Subject File No.1 was Joseph Henry Johnston. So he was technically the first and Uncle LD was the last, being #1062. This caught my eye as well

I haven't looked at the discord in ages. I assume whomever you are speaking about probably watched Jude's video because he goes into Gunther's pretty varied catalog of books. Gunther seemed capable of writing about any topic he set his mind to, which is why I'm very suspicious that he was pulling one over on all of us. Vordahl as Clara! HA! Now that's funny. Barb is indeed being investigated as a possible hoaxer and there are some plausible connections, but that's not for me to divulge. I haven't looked too much into it anyways. My current stance is that it smells like performance art. I think saying he "lied" is an unnecessary pejorative, at least as far as my view of him. It'd be like saying Andy Kauffman was "lying" or that the Coen Brothers were "lying" about Fargo. Artistic license is the way I'd phrase it. That seemed to be the majority opinion in the reviews I've read from the time period. It was sort of a "wink-wink" thing i.e. "we see what you're up to and it's quite clever". As for my legal cases, you can usually tell when someone is full of shit pretty quickly. Just an intuition I guess. But you said, there are some damn good liars out there. Most of my clients don't lie to me because they know I have the evidence. I have had a few who I totally believed UNTIL I got the surveillance footage showing them doing what they said they weren't doing! Lying is a skill I suppose. Also, motivation matters as well. If the person has no motivation to lie and gets a fact or two wrong, well, maybe that can be forgiven. Like say if it's just a random witness to something. Take Robert Gregory in the Cooper case. Is his testimony useless because he says Cooper sat in the window seat and says that a dark headed stew sat with him the majority of the time? No, I think not. On the other hand, we have an evidentiary rule that's called The Fruit of the Poisonous Tree. This usually applies to law enforcement and their investigation. If they screw up one thing, then by default you have to assume that the rest of it is screwed up or susceptible to being screwed up. So it's really a case by case basis of when someone's testimony should be deemed useless. With the Gunther book it's difficult because we don't know anything about Cooper before or after the hijacking, so everything that "Clara" says outside of the actual hijacking is unfalsifiable. Yet she fails on the very few things in the book that we CAN check. She said he had a reservation as opposed to just buying his ticket, she has him seated in row 15, Capt Scott coming back to check the bomb, he asks the pilots their location before jumping, etc. And yes, I know that she wasn't there for the hijacking, but she wasn't there for his life before she met him either, and she appears to have supplied a ton of details about that stuff. So why should that be trusted? I don't know, she just seems like a literary device to me, as Georger said. It's like the way Melville uses Ishmael in Moby Dick or something. But again, just my two cents.

But have no proof he sent anything whatsoever to the actual FBI. If we do find proof of that, I’ll change my tune on all of this. If he actually got a letter from the Acting Director saying they aren’t interested or whatever, then I have to believe he’d have included a picture of that response in the book. As a government document Gunther would have been free to publish that. You’re far more trusting than I am of an author who wrote books on how to get rich quick and how to get laid. To not think that there is a very real possibility that this is an elaborate piece of performance art by an extremely intelligent and capable author is a mistake.

I gave a lot of thought to this and ultimately they're different scenarios because the people I prosecuted or defended were actual individuals that I could speak to and who were commenting on an actual fact pattern for which I had evidence. So I'm able to impeach them or cross examine them. Can't do that with Clara. Their whole testimony isn't useless if they get a few things wrong, certainly not. And I wouldn't totally discount Clara for that, but what exactly does she get right in the book that makes it more probable than improbable that her story is true? I've yet to see anything in the book that was something totally unknown at the time that would make us Cooper nerds go "holy shit! It must be real." I know that many people point to Elsinore, but I believe that is merely coincidental. Let's say you are writing a Cooper book and you've sent your fictional Cooper to LA. Now you have to figure out a way for him to learn about skydiving and jumping from a jet so you can get him to the mental place he needs to be to know how to do the hijack. How is he going to learn about skydiving? Well, from skydivers, of course. The location is just coincidental. The narrative is completely different from the Elsinore Ghost story as well. Ghost is already a skydiver who had possibly already made a few jumps (according to Cameron). Cotton goes to an airshow, is introduced to it by his girlfriend's brother, makes a few jumps, and instead of asking a parachute master about jumping from a jet like the Ghost, he gets his info from an airline pilot. The location is the only connection to Elsinore. That's not enough IMO. I'm not wildly impressed by the industrial chemicals bit either. That's not nothing, but it's not dispositive for me. Sidebar: Jason Langseth sold industrial chemicals for a living at the time of the hijacking. His mom's name was Clara too. Jude's book also has a somewhat similar scene. He had to envision a way for his paratrooper to learn to skydive and he ends up at some Canadian airfield learning about it. If Gunther or Jude didn't write a scene where their Cooper learns to skydive/freefall, that would have created a plot hole. So no, you don't throw out the baby with the bathwater because Clara gets stuff about the hijacking wrong, but she needs to get some things right as well. These would need to be things that weren't in the public domain at the time. For example, if she had mentioned that he left his tie on board, well, that would be something. Again, I'm not an expert on the Gunther stuff, so I defer to you guys in case I'm missing something. Don't mistake me having an opinion for it being a strong opinion, haha. My heels aren't dug in one way or the other with Gunther. I'm flexible.

Has anyone independently verified the Village Voice listing from 72? I've looked for a copy extensively in online archives and can't find it. The following is my not-so-well informed opinion about a topic of The Vortex that I've not spent much time investigating on my own. So no need for anyone to get rustled over it and I'm glad to be proven wrong about it since I admittedly haven't really researched it nearly as much as others have, specifically Dave, Marty, and Flyjack. 1. Truth If this book involved the real Cooper and his real girlfriend, then I think it's mostly useless in trying to determine the real Cooper. To protect his source, Gunther would have absolutely had to change certain biographical information. If she was real, Clara should have easily been identified by a number of Clark or Cowlitz County residents given the information that is in the book. Born in Longview. Had an older brother and sister. Father died in 1950. Round face and wore glasses. Attended college in her hometown. It's hard to fathom that being accurate biographical information. As for Cooper. A Canadian born American paratrooper who ran for Rutgers track after the war? That shouldn't be too hard to find. Yet none of these individuals have been found, so clearly those biographical details aren't authentic. This is all assuming that Clara gave Gunther accurate biographical information to begin with. If she was worried about criminal liability, then why would she give Gunther accurate biographical information about herself? So either way, be it Clara changing details to protect herself or Gunther changing details to protect his source, we have to assume that the biographical information contained in the book is a complete non-starter and mostly useless for identification purposes. And with complete respect to my friends who have spent years pursuing this as a lead, isn't the name Dan LeClair a total invention by Gunther? I don't proclaim to be an expert on the book, but Clara never gave Gunther Cooper's name, right? So chasing leads based on that name should also be a complete non-starter. So if we assume that Gunther was contacted by the real person, then the only informative aspects of the book for those of us in The Vortex are with the narrative of what occurred before and after the hijacking. 2. Hoax Don't have too much to say about this except that there is a well respected researcher in The Vortex who believes they may have identified the hoaxer and it's a fascinating theory. It's not my place to go into those details though. I'm sure they'll announce their findings if and when something comes of it. 3. Fiction I'm sure I'll catch heat for my opinion on this, but this is where I'm leaning lately. I believe it's very possible this is performance art. It's nothing new for an artist, be it an author or filmmaker, to portray something as truthful that is fictional. What immediately comes to mind is The Blair Witch Project claiming that it was "found footage". Or even the beginning of Fargo: "The following is based on true events." For those claiming Gunther was taking a professional risk, why would this be a risk if it was actually just made up? This was an individual Additionally, I spent some time recently looking at reviews from 1986 (I found about 15) and despite what many people have claimed over the years on the forums, I found that most of the critics reviews were positive. It appeared to me that the majority of the reviews understood it to be fiction, wrapped in a rouse of truth for artistic effect. None of those who believed it was fiction attacked Gunther's reputation or anything like that, so I don't buy that narrative that he was taking a risk. The only person who claimed this was a risk was Gunther himself during the promotion of the book. To me that just seems like part of the whole "is it real or isn't it?" schtick. To use a wrestling term, Gunther was just engaging in Kayfabe. It's Gunther essentially saying "for real, this TOTALLY isn't made up by me...I mean I'm taking a risk here by believing it, so trust me." In fact, many of the literary critics applauded Gunther for how cleverly he devised it and how expertly written it was. So I don't see any risk if it was just 100% fictional because it appears that most of his peers believe it to be fiction from the get-go. Concerning Gunther/Clara et al, contacting Himmelsbach...It's worth noting that we've so far not found anything in the Vault (unless Flyjack has) that indicates that the actual FBI was contacted by anyone about this. Contacting Himmelsbach, a retired FBI agent, with a falsity would not open anyone up to liability. However, contacting the FBI with a known falsehood could possibly have had criminal consequences. I believe, if this was indeed a work of fiction, that contacting Himmelsbach was done to try and add credibility to the story by hopefully having him comment on it. There may even be evidence of this that we found in Himmy's papers that we went through last year. There was a letter from Gunther's publishing company to Himmy informing him that they were about to begin a publicity campaign for the book and that they were hoping that he would provide a comment to assist in their advertising efforts. I believe this may be the cause of Himmelsbach's particularly negative comments about Gunther and the book that he gave to reporters: I think he felt he was being used as a pawn or a tool by Gunther/the publishing company. Ultimately, I find the whole story to be too "cute" to be realistic. This criminal hijacker is found by a single lady and she nurses him back to health and they fall in love. Really? C'mon. That positively reeks of someone's fictional account: either Gunther's or a hoaxer's. I'm attaching an interesting Seattle Times review. This critic actually spent time looking for lakes and for the doctor and for anyone who might know Clara. SeattleTimes-Nov 21, 1985.pdf

That was AFTER the decision to overhaul it. What originally PROMPTED the decision to overhaul it is the question, not what they did to make the sketch good AFTER their decision was made. Those additional modifications could have just been applied to the Bing sketch. But they lacked confidence in Bing due to their misunderstanding of which sketch Flo was criticizing, so they started over. Bottom line is that if Flo wasn’t the prime mover in getting the new sketch made, then why would her testimony be the polestar feature of all 4 memos that discuss why they are changing it?

I NEVER SAID IT WAS THE ONLY REASON!!! Stop straw manning me. They clearly wanted to do a sketch that showed Cooper being older. But they would NOT have created an entirely new likeness of Cooper except that they EXPLICITLY STATED that they believed there was a disagreement among the witnesses about the sketch. There wasn’t a disagreement. They misinterpreted Flo’s comments and thought she was talking about Bing, THUS they thought there was a disagreement. Without their mistake they’d have likely just aged Bing up and put color to him. Show me a criticism of Comp A that would make the FBI think they needed to trash the sketch and start from scratch. You think Gregory saying the guy needed Nixon hair and rounder cheeks would have been enough for them to disregard the stews all liking the sketch?? No way.

This is so dumb. You think Roy Rose needed a mugshot to properly age a drawing up? No. He did not. KK5-1 was sent to Rose because the FBI thought Flo was saying the Bing sketch needed to look more like that. This isn’t complicated You absolutely know I’m right and are just being belligerent because I discovered something that you did not. Grow up.