Amateur Scientists Find New Clue In D.B. Cooper Case, Crowdsource Their Investigation (kare11.com)

Six months after the FBI closed the only unsolved air piracy in American aviation history -- after a 45-year investigation -- there's a new clue. An anonymous reader quotes Seattle news station KING: A band of amateur scientists selected by the Seattle FBI to look for clues in the world's most infamous skyjacking may have found new evidence in the 45-year-old case. They're asking for the public's help because of new, potential leads that could link DB Cooper to the Puget Sound aerospace industry in the early 1970s. The scientific team has been analyzing particles removed from the clip-on tie left behind by Cooper after he hijacked a Northwest Orient passenger jet in November 1971. A powerful electron microscope located more than 100,000 particles on old the JCPenny tie. The team has identified particles like Cerium, Strontium Sulfide, and pure titanium.

Tom Kaye, lead researcher for the group calling itself Citizen Sleuths, says the group is intrigued by the finding, because the elements identified were rarely used in 1971, during the time of Cooper's daring leap with a parachute from a passenger jet. One place they were being used was for Boeing's high-tech Super Sonic Transport plane...
Interestingly, it was even a Boeing aircraft that Cooper hijacked, and witnesses say he wasn't nervous on the flight, and seemed familiar with the terrain below.

Comments

Re:I have never understood

[NFN_NLN]

Why so much publicity on individual cases of private individuals?

It says right in the first sentence: "the only unsolved air piracy in American aviation history"

Re:" it was even a Boeing aircraft"

[arglebargle_xiv]

Has anyone examined a random sample of similar ties from the 1970s? Given a single sample, you can always find something novel there, until you realise that it was contamination from the shipping container, or manufacturing, or the environment, or whatever, and a bazillion other samples show the same traces.

His reserve chute was a dummy.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

His main chute was ok, but FBI now says, they accidentally sent him a dummy class room demo chute, with inoperable rip cord and the bag sewn shut, inadvertently. So he had only one working chute. Dropped into dark rainy air, without helmet, without oxygen, without camping, hunting, survival gear, with one chute and two money bags strapped to his waist. The wiki is wrong to say he went into -57 deg F air. that is cruise altitude FL300 range. He dropped at FL100, people live at higher altitude than this, in places like Tibet, ski lodges in Alps. So with some thermal underpants, he could drop to 5000 ft in less than a minute.

It is possible for him to have landed safely and secreted the money bags. After that it is very difficult to believe he could have survived long, somehow hitchhiked out of that area, to some bus station or train yard or truck stop traveled without being seen out of that area. With that level of media attention to that part of the country all strangers would have been noticed and reported. I think he died near where the cash was found. The wild animals tore through his body and clothing, most the cash and bones ended up in the river and washed out to the ocean.

Advice to future copy-cats. Practice skydiving and become familiar. Try to take your own familiar parachute. Ask for basic camping survival gear. Dry food rations and some water. After landing safely, secure the cash and note the gps coordinates. Find a water course and follow it down stream. Till you come to a river with decent flowing water. Collect drift wood, form a raft and float down stream. Raft only at nights. From the watershed where you jump, figure out which river you will end up in, pick the city to rejoin civilization, practice it couple of times, do dry runs.

With the proliferation of security cameras, high resolution picture of your face will have been recorded by TSA. So grow mustache, beard, dye them, wear glasses. Doctor your eye-glass frames to be asymmetric, slightly. You need to make the eigen values of the face detection algo matrix go askew. After the fact switch to contacts, go clean shaven and revert to natural hair color. Colored contact lenses before the crime^H^H^H^H^H adventure, a must.

Realize if you can pull this off, you are smart enough to make more money legally.