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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.
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.
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"
We all know that D.B. Cooper was Jimmy James.
WTF is a piracy?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You don't hear of too many gentleman bandits. I'm rooting for him, personally.
If it weren't for these meddling old people!
#DeleteChrome
Not the point. He knew how to lower the stairs. He was familiar with THIS aircraft, a 727. The whole thing took place between Portland and Seattle, where the SST manufacturing plant was located, which is a valid and rare source for the material found on the tie. The government had just cancelled the SST program and Boeing laid of thousands of workers in the midst of the Boeing death-spiral recession that was happening at the same time where Boeing went from 130,000 employees to 35,000 in 18 months. That's when the billboard went up: "Will the last one to leave Seattle please turn out the lights?" That points to someone who worked at Boeing or at least had inside information.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
A GPS watch taken back in time to 1971 wouldn't work because there would be no GPS satellites in orbit.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
So he also transported enough GPS satellites back in time, for his GPS to work? ;-)
The whole thing is yet another scam to dupe people out of money. First, titanium is far from rare. Titanium dioxide has been used as a pigment since the 1800s. It's the most used white pigment. It's also in sunscreen, food, cosmetics, rubber, paper, plastics, and ... well, you get the point. It's everywhere, and has been well before the '70s.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
It was Jimmy WALES. Ever wondered why he has no need to accept a salary for running Wikipedia?
That's how the world works, grasshopper. A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.
The clue is to change your perspective. 'News' is not what is significantly important (Boeing wasting billions), it's what the public likes to read. Justice is not determined by the economic effects, it's by the possibility of prosecution. You can convict a shoplifter with ease, almost no one involved in the 2008 crisis was prosecuted at all. The money from everywhere is keeping this system in check, because why kill the goose with the golden eggs if it also does a lot of things wrong?
and of course the better system is...?
And he did a some time at fox river
The FBI closed the case, so now they're outsourcing it?
No
Trump should shut that FBI office down as a warning to the other ones
The DB Cooper FBI office? Even pretending that there was one specifically dedicated towards finding DB Cooper, it presumably would have been shut down when they closed the case
and bank robberies
What do you think the DB Cooper incident was?
You almost understood any single part of this story. Keep working on it bud. You'll get there one day.
No, he's Jimmy Jam . What better alias could one come up with to evade detection as a famous skyjacker than being a 12-year-old in Minneapolis at the time?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
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.
And cerium is used in cigarette lighter "flints", strontium in cathode ray tubes.
The GPS device has a knife switch on the back that toggles it to use LORAN navigation.
You have the Minneapolis connection right, but the name is Jimmy Jingle, a defunct vending machine company.
We had Jimmy Jingle vending machines on campus when I was in tech school. A truly horrible rinky-dink operation. Coffee machines that vended absolutely tiny cups, etc.
Bullshit - pure titanium isn't used in SST construction. It's always an alloy. And the far more likely source is catalytic converters or glass manufacturing, same as the cerium that was detected. Titanium is just not rare. You'd be contaminated with both elements if you worked in a muffler shop in 1971.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Next time could you bother to read the article? Yes, titanium dioxide is common, which is the entire point of mentioning that element, because the elemental form is far less common, and even less common then.
It's not that your comments aren't valuable, it's that you don't know when you have fine caviar in your hand or fetid dogshit -- it's the same to you either way. In this case — so you know — this is dogshit.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
We've know for quite a long time about the titanium. Here's a story from 2011: http://www.upi.com/Did-DB-Coop...
It hasn't been relevant for a long time, the guy walked off with $200k and may or may not have survived. In the mean time, a small band of cyber criminals has been hacking banks and ATM's for the last decade without ever being caught despite still being active, having been tied to close to $1B in losses worldwide.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
worst. joke. evar.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
But he jumped blind in bad weather. He should have called it off if he wasn't going to be able to see the strobes.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
It seems to me that this residue could have come from the plane he hijacked. It doesn't make sense that he would have used a tie from work, or that he would have all this residue but also be an employee who wears a tie. It seems reasonable that a Boeing maintenance employee might who had worked at that plant and had residue all over his coveralls might have been transferred to a maintenance division and have been leaving that residue around.
727 was a very common plane at the time. I was still seeing them at airports 15 years ago. A lot were produced. It was the 737 equivalent of its day. It isn't really a big deal to know how to operate the stairs; you could learn that on one flight by chatting up the flight staff, or just buy a used study guide. After all it isn't a secret how the controls work on commercial airplanes.
Titanium dioxide was used to alloy aluminum extrusions in Aircraft. Perhaps he did not work for Boeing,he could have worked for Alcoa in Wenatchee. I'll bet he worked for aerospace and got caught in the downturn. Whether you worked for Alcoa or Boeing the financial downturn was real. I suspect Alcoa as he would be around the raw alloy ingredients to make Aluminum extrusions.
Good catch! Thanks.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
And spiral shaped aluminum chips? http://www.citizensleuths.com/...
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.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Because they need to keep people distracted from what's really going on lest they do something to upset this whole farce the world is living.
The better system is to simply ignore everything and do what makes you happy.
... if you worked in a muffler shop in 1971.
If you worked in a muffler shop in 1971, you would probably be asking, "Whut's a katlitic converter?"
The first production catalytic converter was not until 1973, in part because they wouldn't work while leaded fuels were still common. And titanium white was first produced in the 1910s, not the 1800s like you said above. Your dates seem to be rather off.
Unfortunately the crime has expired. :)
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Probably an early prototype formulation of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese
They didn't have the "enhance" command back then.
Since I go to yard sales and thrift shops all the time, an obvious question is how do we know that these rare or trace elements did not end up on D.B. Cooper's tie from a previous owner of the tie? Tom
Unfortunately the crime has expired. :)
Nice try but the statute of limitations no longer applies:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law - Aleister Crowley
Back in the 70's, converters got blocked up pretty quickly, so the quick fix was - if it was a honeycomb, disconnect one end, jam a rod into it. break up the honeycomb, and pour it into the recycling drum - it it was pellets, dump them into the recycling drum. There was good money in recycling the rare elements in them, and people didn't want to fork out extra money for a replacement converter.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
The earliest uses of a synthetic titanium oxide, not of pigmentary quality, were during the late 1800s as opacifiers and additives to increase acid resistance in glazes and vitreous enamels.
A blue porcelain glaze using hydrous titanic oxide was described in 1841. Titanium compounds of all kinds were investigated for use in the late 1800s in the textile industry, including titanium oxide as a mordant for wool, also not the calcined white pigment
And titanium dioxide was discovered in 1821.
Again, there is no "evidence" that titanium was so rare back in the 1970s.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
It doesn't matter if he's dead, or if the case isn't relevant anymore. Who cares about its legal status. The heist captured the public imagination. The audacity of it, the lingering mystery. People will still be talking about it in 100 years, just like people still talk about wild west stage coach robberies.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Not the point. He knew how to lower the stairs.
Not impressed. I know how to lower the stairs. It's not hard. After watching someone, you'll know too. It's not that hard.
As for being familiar with a 727, they're a dime a dozen. Very few differences between the one DB Cooper hijacked and the last one I flew, probably back in the 1990s.
The whole thing is yet another scam to dupe people out of money. First, titanium is far from rare. Titanium dioxide has been used as a pigment since the 1800s. It's the most used white pigment. It's also in sunscreen, food, cosmetics, rubber, paper, plastics, and ... well, you get the point. It's everywhere, and has been well before the '70s.
Nice try, but we're not falling for your psyops. Everyone knows that titanium tioxide is a component of pico-thermite. Which... is why no one ever found the body.
How do you spend money that's that hot?
You owe money to the Mob; So you pays what you owes. :)
They really can't bitch too much.
So WTF You paid with stolen money? ALL of the people who give them money do. :)
I think he walked away proud. :D
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
a) It isn't titanium dioxide, but actual titanium metal, in shapes that indicate the particles are swarf and debris from machining operations.
b) the x-ray spectroscopic data show that the particle tested isn't pure Ti but is pretty darn close to being so. No other elements approach 1% of the total spectra.
c) one fragment was found to have close association with aluminium crystals, which might indicate an alloy. (is there a metallurgist in the house?)
d) yet another particle showed 400 series stainless steel embedded in a fragment of titanium. The shape and texture of the bond between them suggests one tool was used to work both metals. One possible scenario, a drill bit was used to male a hole in SS and then make a hole in Ti, smearing a bit of SS debris onto the Ti swarf during the operation.
e) there were several spiral chips of 500 or 5000 series aluminium, which is an alloy with the principle alloying metal being magnesium. Not particularly strong until and unless heat treated, but with good machinable qualities and corrosion resistance.
The evidence seems pretty clear that the tie was worn in a machine shop environment where, for the time, some unusual materials were being worked with in conjunction with more common fabrication materials. Given the variety of the materials found, it is not unreasonable to suppose the tie was worn in such an area more than once, during different operations or stages where different materials would have been worked on. In addition, the tie had to have been worn by someone who would wear a tie in a machine shop. No machinist, tool and die maker or shop operator would wear a tie, even a clip on like the one D.B. Cooper left behind, while working because of the obvious safety hazards. The sleuths reasonably conclude that D.B. would have been an engineer or shop manager. (the tie being a clip-on, I lean towards the engineer option. back in '71, a clip on tie would have been seen as even more tacky than it is today. It's seems more likely to me that an engineer would wear a clip on in deference to what he sees as a silly dress code than a manager would, who might be a wee bit more style and status conscious than an engineer)
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
Back in the 70's...
Yeah, in the second half of the 70s. That didn't happen in 1971 unless you worked at one of the two companies developing as of yet to be sold converters. And then it wouldn't have been cerium metal based until later (cerium oxide was used pretty early though).
I watched the episode and they tested a theory that he didn't actually jump out of the plane, he just jumped up and down to make it seem like he did. He then waited until the approach into Reno which is flat and covered by scrub brush. He took two of the four chutes so he could have thrown one of the chutes and some money as a diversion. One problem I had with this theory is that he wouldn't have known ahead of time that they would go to Reno. He had requested Mexico but they ran low on fuel due to flying at low altitude.
The GPS device has a knife switch on the back that toggles it to use LORAN navigation.
Mod parent ++
LORAN was awesome!!! Wish they would have left the inland LORAN infrastructure in place. When a large CME or other unexpected astronomical event occurs, it would be nice to have ground-based electronic navigation already in place. Oh well.
Sig Return: 204 No Content
Nice try but the statute of limitations no longer applies:
Actually that's a good thing, thanks.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
tie was left on a boeing aircraft
Except Boeing commercial aircraft don't use that much titanium. So the contamination level from that path would be vanishingly small. Titanium (and some of the other rare elements detected) are used primarily in military programs. Which Cooper might have picked up as an engineer visiting a related shop area.
The idea was put forth that Cooper might have been involved with the SST program, which was going to use a significant amount of titanium. But Boeing never got much further than plywood mockups. Given these constraints, there aren't really that many places even at Boeing where employees would encounter such metals, making the search space pretty small. So this is data that could very easily reduce the number of suspects.
Have gnu, will travel.
But, did the 727 use titanium heavily in its manufacture? Titanium metals weren't very common back then, and were mostly used in supersonic aircraft, not boring commercial airlines.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
That's not a valid question in response to my comment. Please re-read my comment to find that I already provided the sufficient information for you to determine the relevance of your question.
It seems to me that this residue could have come from the plane he hijacked.
No, it could not.
It doesn't make sense that he would have used a tie from work, or that he would have all this residue but also be an employee who wears a tie.
As TFA says, it would if he was an engineer.
The rest I assume is about the stairs, which I have no comment on as I know nothing of it.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
It seems to me that this residue could have come from the plane he hijacked.
No, it could not.
Yes it could! Notice how that goes in circle? If you want to just say, "Nuh-uh" you should follow it with some reasons.
And yeah, it really could. You can't say it couldn't, because you won't have information that supports that. You won't know. You can't say "no" here, the best you can do is to answer the natural corollary to "could have" which is "could have not." Which I would totally agree with, as proven by my use of the word "could" in the first place.
If you think about how material transfer that ends up on a tie happens, then you should be able to understand that we're talking about indirect transfer in all cases. The tie would not have been a tool that had direct contact with the substances found; they would have been transferred indirectly. And so you can't really reasonably say that indirect transfer couldn't happen in more than one way. Especially when there is a known nexus between the craft and the supposed factory; they're both Boeing, and would have lots of people and equipment that could have touched both.
There was no Titanium metal used in the body of the aircraft. Titanium was an extremely rare metal used in supersonic aircraft, as the 727 was not supersonic, there is no chance that the tie picked up titanium shards from the aircraft. You can make up all kinds of sources that are impossible, it doesn't make them suddenly possible.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Right, you simply missed the point and don't understand what indirect transfer means. Try harder, you might eventually understand what you're disagreeing with.
All you're doing is missing the point.
Is the theory that there was only one person who worked for Boeing that could have picked up titanium "shards"[sic]? No, no, that was not the theory they floated. You simply didn't understand it, and didn't understand that it doesn't narrow it down really very far; and that's why they're asking for people who would have more insights to step forwards!