The Navy Backpack 6 is the easiest, quickest parachute to unwrap and refold. While Cooper was alone in the back of the plane, he undoubtedly checked this airfoil for a hidden homing device. Confident his refolded chute was not bugged and would deploy, Cooper threw out of the jet one of the three remaining chutes. The bandit reasoned monitoring devices were in the remaining canopies. The bugged parachute would land at a great distance from his drop zone. The FBI had inadvertently given Cooper a diversion, deluxe.
As for the money found nine years after the hijacking, the facts do not match the discovery. The first searches of 1971, in the exact area where the 1980 dollars were found, turned up nothing. To account for the sand bar loot, the FBI claimed they had miscalculated Cooper’s landing zone. The real drop zone was now thought to be forty miles from where the greenbacks were dug up. It was concluded, Cooper landed in a lake that feeds into the Columbia River. Cooper died on impact or drowned while tangled with his parachute.
The currents brought the money to the 1980 shore. At this vicinity the river is forty feet deep and four hundred feet between banks. Strangely, test results of the sand bank were at odds with the hijacking dates. Experts claimed the money found in 1980, was in sediment that dated to 1974. Yet the hijacking happened in 1971. Is it possible, years after the heist Cooper left money on the shore to make it look like he perished? Could rogue G-Men, making it look like Cooper’s robbery failed, have planted the dollars? No other evidence was found, even though the river was dredged and the shore dug up.
Curiously, a two thousand pound anchor thought to be one hundred years old was discovered in the river by the sand bar. The authorities claim none of Cooper’s loot has ever turned up therefore he is dead. How difficult is it to launder money through casinos or crooked financial people?
Landing in the forest at night is not suicidal. In the process of evading enemies the forest is a wonderful ally; water and food is abundant. The high green branches negate aerial reconnaissance, as compared to a plain where one is easily tracked. Cooper landed in an area intersected with county roads. Did old sly boots have transportation hidden in a glade, or did he have a driver waiting for him at a scheduled place and time?
The Washington forests in November are survivable; the big snows have not yet fallen. Cooper may well have been an ex-Special Forces soldier who engineered the perfect robbery. Jumping at night into a forest, hiking through the wilderness undetected, is second nature to men of the Special Forces. Green Berets are the Army’s creative thinkers!
The 727 Cooper jumped out of, was an aerial workhorse during the Vietnam conflict. The 727, brought personnel and material to Vietnam and was used as a drop zone vehicle. Was Cooper a Vietnam veteran? Cooper jumped from his hijacked plane into a cloudy stormy night. Air Force interceptors shadowing the pirated jet could not get a visual on the 727.
Did Cooper take into account the weather and use it to his advantage when making last preparations before he boarded the craft at the airport? Or is G-Man Himmlesbach correct: Cooper was an inept desperado who rolled the dice with his life for a large sum of money and lost?
Other bandits have tried Cooper’s tricks; none were successful. On April 7, 1972, James Johnson, hijacked a Newark to Los Angeles flight. The jet refueled in San Francisco. $500,000 and four parachutes were put on board. Johnson bailed out over Utah. Hijacker Johnson nearly got away with the crime.
With help from an informant, the authorities were able to arrest the hijacker. The stolen money was recovered along with his hidden parachute. The sky bandit was brought to justice; his name was an alias. The hijacker was former Green Beret, Richard F. McCoy, who saw action in Vietnam. Out of the service, McCoy, a Mormon Sunday school teacher and father of two, was studying law enforcement at Brigham Young University.
McCoy was sent to prison. Four months later he escaped. Three months after his escape, McCoy was killed in a barrage of gunfire as he evaded arrest. McCoy jumped six thousand feet higher than Cooper and hiked to civilization, none the worse for his adventure. The concept that Cooper did not survive the jump or could not walk out of the wilderness is absurd.
Where did Cooper come up with this plan? Maybe, by watching the 1967 cartoon series, “Super Chicken”. In one episode, masked outlaw, Wild Ralph Hiccup, who talks like John Wayne, holds up a plane and then bails out.
If Cooper is reading this story, he has a big smile on his face. Until proven otherwise, D.B. Cooper is the only sky bandit to ever escape the FBI’s dragnet. All other aerial outlaws were apprehended or the authorities knew what country they fled to for asylum. In D.B. Cooper’s case, he committed the perfect crime and vanished with the loot. (4)
DISASTER DELUXE
(INVISIBILITY AND FLYING RODENTS)
During the early years of World War II, German U-boats decimated allied shipping in the Atlantic Ocean. With the allied war effort teetering on defeat, America’s strategic planners were tempted to try anything in lessening tonnage sunk. One idea proposed and acted upon was the attempted cloaking of an American warship in a wave of invisibility.
The code name for this operation was “Project Rainbow”. Today it is commonly known as, “The Philadelphia Experiment”. If this scheme worked, Allied convoys would be immune to Nazi attacks; the fleets would be lost to sight.
The error-filled evanescence Project Rainbow experiments were conducted in 1943, in the Philadelphia Naval Yard. The US Eldridge and crew were selected for this dangerous venture.
To achieve ultimate concealment, scientists used Einstein’s unified field theory as a template. It was reasoned a large object could be rendered invisible if a constant field of electromagnetic refraction surrounded it.
The Eldridge, a destroyer escort, was loaded with generators and high-voltage equipment. When the machines were activated, it was thought the enormous amounts of energy swirling in and around the ship would create an energy cloud. The coursing power would create a dimensional bend in the fabric of space. The twisting of matter in the third dimension would render the ship invisible.
The Philadelphia Experiment was an unmitigated disaster. The first time the Eldridge was cloaked, the ship disappeared in a cloud of green smoke. The Eldridge reappeared fifteen minutes later. The experiment had undermined the vessel’s crew. Disorientated, sick, and dizzy, the Eldridge’s compliment had to be helped from the destroyer escort and given medical assistance.
The second attempt at concealment was more tragic. The ship vanished in a cloud of blue smoke. The warship materialized momentarily 200 miles away at the Norfolk Naval Yard. The Eldridge was then lost from view, and then burst forth at its old station in Philadelphia.
Operation Rainbow technicians boarded the now discernible warship and could not believe their eyes. The Eldridge’s crew was found at their duty stations, either unconscious or too weak to move. Some blue jackets were mad with delirium, others were found embedded in the ship’s superstructure and hull. For no apparent reason some of the remaining seamen burst into flames.
Even more frightening, some of the trial ship’s mariners were never accounted for. It was attested by some of the frigate’s survivors, the missing, out of pain and fear, had jumped off the Eldridge into the water or void that surrounded the corvette when it blinked out. These sailors were forever lost.
It was purported, hours and sometimes days after the second experiment. Some of the surviving sailors were seen to go out of focus, vanish, incarnate and sometimes never reappear. One incident had dazed, angry sailors materializing in a Philadelphia bar. A fight was started then the blue jackets melted into a back wall.
Obviously, the scientists guiding the trials did not know what they were toying with when they tried to bend light and matter by way of electromagnetic power. The Eldridge underwent two experiments in the Philadelphia Naval Yard, it was rumored more trials were conducted on the high seas. Eventually Operation Rainbow was cancelled. In its place the Montauk Project was commenced.
What was learned from the Philadelphia Experiment was honed and expanded upon at Camp Hero, near Montauk, Long Island. The top secret Montauk tests, were supposedly terminated