Math of Insects

The question then arises, though...if he needed the money that bad, and he didn't get it here, why didn't he keep trying to get it elsewhere? How was he suddenly not in need of money he was willing (first) to potentially kill, die, or go to prison for, and then extort/hoax over? It's sort of the financial version of the "If He Died, Where Is the Missing Person?" game. I am guessing you took that into account in your 10-year-gap theory and will posit in due time. I too have wondered if others placed ads. It's possible he gave a different name to each reporter so he could see who followed through. That would also explain the cross-out before "Clara."

Thank you. I agree that the way you've presented it, it feels more like there was a "Clara" than was not. I am not quite as quick to say an author wouldn't "need" a book or want to capitalize on the zeitgeist, but I follow the reasoning that there were plenty of other ways to achieve this that didn't involve lying to the FBI. The needle is moving. I'll be eager to see what you've come up with. I just want to clarify one element, and if you're inclined I'd love to be talked through it. It's a sticking point for me. If you're tired of covering the same ground and want to move on, I'd understand that as well. Here's the issue: Cameron says his thing about the Elsinore encounter (I agree, likely falsely. I have never believed that element). Clara says something that generally lines up with that claim. That match-up is often used to give legitimacy to the book (and Cameron). But if Elsinore didn't happen (which I believe it didn't), how did "Clara" come to give that detail? How can she know something that's "in the files," which later turns out not to be so? She can't "know" it from Cooper, because it didn't happen. So how did she have that information? I could see Gunther knowing it from a cursory reading of whatever preliminary files he may have had access to. I can't understand how Joe or Jane Public hoaxer could know it. Or was it potentially just more flight of fancy and it happens to line up with something that's actually in the files, even if it's there falsely? Like Nostradamus supposedly predicting what we had for breakfast? Since I do not believe there's any conspiracy involved, Clara "knowing" about this keeps the door open in my mind that she is potentially (at least partially) a creation of Gunther's. One last small question: had Gunther ever written about that first "Cooper" contact, and the Clara ad, before the contact from Clara 10 years later? Thank you once again for the context.

Thank you for this additional context. Did Gunther ever write about the contact from "Cooper," in the years before he heard from Clara and wrote his book? If yes, I think the "gain" for a fake Clara could be easily explained in many common ways. Notoriety, wanting to feel important, wanting to piggyback on a suddenly rising pop cultural icon. Lots of people claim importance for a little moment of borrowed glory. If no, then indeed the only two options are Gunther made Clara up, or she was real and somehow connected to that first contact. Gunther gains in both of those scenarios, funny enough. I am less clear on Clara's "agenda" in that case, as you note, and your guesses/conclusions seem as likely as any. But since that latter scenario has a single explanation, and it involves many variables (Cooper lived, Cooper tried to confess to multiple reporters, he also took the time to make sure Clara got birthday wishes, he got no money and no articles but still dropped immediately out of sight forever, placing no future birthday ads, Clara was real and also stayed silent until she contacted Gunther and does the thing Cooper could have done years before, etc); and since the former leaves no real questions unanswered, I still think parsimony suggests fake-Clara. Elsinore is a huge factor. If testimony about this encounter is later proved unreliable, how would Clara even know about it to tell it as truth? If it didn't happen, there is nothing for her to know. But Gunther could certainly have FOIA'd his way into knowing it. That's a tough one to get past.

I agree, that part would seem to slightly move the line from the left end. In fact, from our perch here in the future, we know that the FBI DID conclude that what Clara said was a hoax, but no arrests were made over it. 10 years into that cold case they were clearly more numb to false claims of being or knowing Cooper. So the "crime" aspect did not turn out to be a real danger. I do understand that you are saying something slightly different: that Gunther didn't live in the future, and it would have been risky to put himself in potential legal or professional peril. But actually, none of the options reflect well on him. If he WAS contacted by "Clara," and the FBI was able to conclude she was hoaxing, that would mean they identified Gunther as a credulous and unskilled journalist who was unable to reach that conclusion on his own. Permanent kiss of death for a journalist. And if he WAS contacted by her, and even she believed her story was true (so was not hoaxing but was hoaxed), where did information that was "true at the time" come from? Was Clara hoaxed by someone with access to FBI files? That seems beyond far-fetched. And if he WAS contacted by her, and her story WAS true and she did know Cooper...how can information have been false or wrong? For example, for one thing it would mean the Elsinore suspect has to be the real Cooper, which would mean there would have to have been an Elsinore suspect...and now we're in murky waters to say the least. And how ever would the "real" Cooper know about the Elsinore story? Was HE in the FBI too? Nah. So who "wrote" those parts--Clara? Cooper? Or Gunther? The fact is, there are parts of the book that seem clearly to be flights of fancy, either by Clara or Gunther. A journalist cannot just decide to inject fiction or obfuscation into a purported work of reportage, and would have had to check out any such claims if they came from Clara. Since there WAS false and incorrect information, the rest of it cannot be taken as reportage. And once again, that's a kiss of death for a reporter. Once there's any fiction, it's no different from it all being fiction. It would actually be MORE professionally risky to bring the FBI a work in which he made up *some* of the elements but not all, since in the latter case, if caught, he could always say it was just a work of fiction, not purported "journalism." If you head down all the rabbit holes, I think the one that offers the least contrivance, even with some asterisks, is that it is a novel/hoax, very skillfully constructed, with just enough nuggets of real-world data to seem plausible, or at least not entirely dismissible.

I was just trying to clarify if the FBI reference to "possible hoax" meant on Clara's part, or his own. I can think of a perfectly parsimonious explanation for every part of the (intriguing) Gunther story. It doesn't seem far-fetched at all, in the wake of the publicity of the hijacking, for some crank to contact reporters claiming to be Cooper and maybe shaking them down for money, and in that world it wouldn't seem the least bit unlikely that he figured maybe he could even wrangle some birthday ads for someone, particularly if he was broke. Since Gunther was the "divorce" guy, I can also imagine a world where that whole silly whim was a hail-Mary to win someone back or the like. But I'm just tacking that on for good measure. It would not be unthinkable at all that that was the entirety of the "real" story--someone contacted Gunther and others, tried the shakedown, and got his ad placed, the end. Then for 10 years Gunther has that episode sitting on simmer in the back of his mind. Suddenly interest in Cooper starts picking up again. There is starting to be some initial access to FBI files. Gunther realizes he's got the ingredients of a great novel-slash-opportunistic-money grab. He sets his mind to the one area of real intrigue, which was: who was the mysterious Clara he placed the ad for? If you were going to write a sequel to that original story, it would be Clara's story you'd tell. In that world, everything that happened after the initial contact was a novelistic invention, and written just realistic-sounding enough to ask the kinds of the questions we then spent these years asking. Basically the "Princess Bride" of hijacking stories. None of that involves any contrivance, and feels perfectly within the realm--farther to the side of "likely" than the longshot-slash-impossibility that it was Cooper himself who wrote multiple people offering to disclose his identity, and his girlfriend or secretary or anyone else somehow knowing who to write all those years later and knowing what to say.

A hoax perpetrated by Clara, or by him?