Posted on 04/01/2008 5:28:46 PM PDT by InvisibleChurch
SEATTLE - The FBI says a parachute found buried in southwestern Washington is not connected to famed plane hijacker D.B. Cooper. FBI agent Laura Laughlin said Tuesday that the agency came to its conclusion after speaking with parachute experts. It also dug where children found the parachute early last month.
Cooper bailed out of a Northwest Orient passenger jet with $200,000 in ransom in November 1971. Some of the cash has been found but his fate is unknown.
So the mystery is still a mystery. He did not survive because if he had he would have spent some of the money and none was ever spent.
I dont know how through of a search they did along that river or creek bank where some of the money was found.
But DB Cooper is at room temp.
So my secret is still safe. Whew.
After 37 years, I think “room temp” is way long past. Maybe “dirt temp” or “water temp”.
honest question from an inquiring mind, how do we know with absolute certainty that none of the money was ever spent?
It is now a bigger mystery. Where did this chute come from?
That ol’ serial number thingy. From what I understand (vie History Channel) the Federal Government has been monitoring for matching serial numbers for all this time, mostly in old bills as they are destroyed. ;-)
There is a parachute ‘expert’ out there right now saying to himself, “ya, sure it isn’t...sukkaaaaaaaas”.
Ping
So, just how does a deployed parachute come to be found “abandoned” in that part of the country?
I know I rarely find more than 4 or 5 of those pesky things around here each spring.......
I agree...it (the airspeed) would’ve sucked his shoes, and maybe other things, off.
Thanks for the ping.
Since the parachute is made of silk, could it be left over from WWII military practice jumps? Here’s more from the article:
“The parachute was the right color, and the location was in the middle of what could have been Cooper’s landing zone.
“That got the attention of FBI agent Larry Carr, who drove to the site to see the find for himself.
“But Cossey told Carr that Cooper’s parachute was made of nylon. The one the children found was made of silk and did not feature a harness container. Cossey sold parachutes at a skydiving operation in Issaquah in the 1970s.
“Cossey has been through the drill before; this is the third time the FBI has asked him to examine parachutes to see whether they might have been Cooper’s.”
Because the FBI told us so! Hey, wait a minute. Didn't the FBI just tell us it wasn't old DB's parachute? Maybe he spent some if the money on another parachute.
Maybe the Japanese dropped some Gai-jin spies in...
It seems to me that the chutes that we used to buy at the surplus store in the late 40s and used for tarps were made of nylon.
Didn’t pay that much attention since their material content wasn’t of any importance.
By the time I bought any parachute material, it was camoflaged, nylon, and Vietnam era. (We used it to make deer stands, cut into strips about 4 ft. wide and wrapped around available brush or three/four stakes. It was easy to carry, and worked pretty well.)
There’s actually a website called ParachuteHistory dot com.
According to this article, Silk parachutes were used in WWII.
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Were_silk_or_nylon_parachutes_in_world_war2
Another article indicates nylon parachutes were used in WWII, apparently both silk and nylon parachutes were used.
“When nylon was patented in 1937, its benefits as parachute mterial quickly became apparent. Researchers used dead weights until Adeline Gray made the first jump in the United States, using a nylon parachute in 1942. Ms. Gray, who worked as a parachute riger at the Pioneer Parachute Company, jumped from an aircraft flying out of Brainard Field in Hartford, Conneticut.”
This link is broken because I didn’t want to cause side scroll, copy and paste the entire link to read the article:
http://books.google.com/books?id=XHLhuMs_QFQC&pg=PA163&lpg=PA163&dq=nylon
+parachutes&source=web&ots=SpMSpXnOe6&sig=7EvrKMCqpFvSp-TcSWxmWjm90jU&hl=en
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