Posted on 12/16/2014 4:21:28 PM PST by NKP_Vet
If they had timed their escape just right, three prisoners who slipped out of Alcatraz more than 50 years ago on a raft made from raincoats would have had a chance of survival, new research shows.
Scientists who were studying the San Francisco Bay's strong tides reconstructed the possible routes of the audacious 1962 escape. The men might have been able to find shelter on an outcrop near the Golden Gate Bridge — that is, if they weren't swept out to sea first, according to the study.
From 1934 to 1963, during its time as a maximum high-security federal prison, Alcatraz hosted some of the 20th century's most notorious criminals, including gangsters Al Capone, Mickey Cohen and Whitey Bulger. The facility is perhaps most famous for its forbidding location, isolated on a rocky island in the middle of San Francisco Bay. [Photos: Hidden Fortress Beneath Alcatraz]
In the three decades that Alcatraz was in operation, there were only 14 escape attempts involving 36 men, according to the FBI. Nearly all of the escapees were caught or died. But on the night of June 11, 1962, three inmates left Alcatraz in one of the most mysterious prison breaks in American history.
John Anglin, his brother Clarence Anglin and Frank Morris tucked dummy heads into their bed sheets and snuck into an unused utility corridor through holes they had crudely drilled through their cells. Then, from the prison roof, they shimmied down the bakery smoke stack and climbed over the fence. From the northeast shore of the island, they floated away from the prison on a small raft made from more than 50 stolen raincoats that were inflated with a musical instrument that was converted into a pump. Even the FBI still calls the plan "ingenious" on its website.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
You have to assume some bank robbers new the tide tables for S.F. Bay, not very likely, or they were incredibly lucky and hit the tide just right. I tend to believe they never made it.
Where’s the book?
How hard is it, really, to have some of your fellow inmates sit there and watch/record the tide for several weeks beforehand? It’s not like they have much else to do during their time outdoors...
Why was Alcatraz closed down? It would be a great place to store terrorists, wouldn’t it?
The hard part would be to figure out how the tide works under the Bridge and in the East Bay.
Could have, but didnt.
I think their homemade rafts came apart at the seams in the water and they drowned because they couldnt swim, or froze from hypothermia and their bodies were swept out to the open sea.
Besides which, assuming they made it, its hard to believe that all of them managed to avoid detection all these years. Certainly one or most of them would have returned to a life of crime.
I thought Mythbusters already showed that they could have made it. They actually recreated the escape.
I saw this show and noticed the two brothers really did look like family relatives which was to be expected because they were my grandfather's cousins. After the escape date, he claimed to have seen them at a family funeral.
Given the ingenuity of that side of the family, I have no reason to believe they didn't escape and survive.
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