olemisscub

I’m hearing that Tom’s scope has been fixed and is up and running.

Confirmed that this was Flo living in Missouri. Her last name was Wheeler by that point. The mention of Arkansas is a clue but the clincher is the mention of Coffelt because Flo is the one who the Coffelt camp claimed ID'd him as Cooper.

When people these days try to shove photos in front of the Stews for identification, they need to keep this 302 from April 1976 in mind:

There are plenty of baffling things in the Cooper case, but this packing cards thing is near the top. We've got the Air Force sergeant identifying it by the July 1960 card and saying it's 24 foot. He apparently finds this card in "a pocket on this parachute", which sounds like the pocket where those cards go on the NB-6. Then you've got the official description from evidence claiming that it is the 1957 26 footer. Following that you have the "integral part" line. So which one did Hayden get back that is in the museum? The 1960 24 footer or the 1957 26 footer?

sadly, yes

Indeed. There's a 302 where Bill requests that they make one. Would be nice to see what Cooper's nose profile might have been and what type of turkey gobble he was remembering.

Sluggo has passed away. https://www.brooksidefuneral.com/obituary/william-walker

Do we know if they go back and unredact 302's? Let's take Braden, for example. If someone were to submit proof of death on Braden, and he was mentioned in Vault 25, would they go back and unredact him in Vault 25 and reupload Vault 25?

The most comprehensive study I've seen on eyewitness accuracy was a study done by Dutch academics. They found that 44% of eyewitnesses were able to get within an inch. So if 44% of witnesses chose 6'1 for a height, then the actual perp was between 6'0 and 6'2. 34% of people were given a "partly correct" assessment, which means they got within two inches, so if they chose 6'1 then the person was actually 5'11 or 6'3. And as you can see 22% fell outside that range on their estimations. As far as eyewitnesses overestimating the height of criminals during a crime (when they are aware of the crime), that's pretty much settled science at this point.

It’s almost as if individual words sometimes matter… Ridiculous that one of the premier law enforcement agencies on the planet didn’t audio record their interviews.

What do we make of this discrepancy? The "cockpit can put it down" line is essentially a silver bullet for any suspect who had flown or was intimately familiar with the 727, since they would have known that the cockpit didn't have the controls to do that.

this matches up...

Gregory says Cooper had his glasses off briefly at a certain point.

OK, you win. I’ll cry Uncle. I don’t want to talk about bloody metallurgy anymore.

Ulis on TV. I really don’t like this lawsuit. It’s my opinion that a DNA recovery specialist needed to make the initial request. I think if a credentialed DNA lab sent in a request (non-FOIA) to try and recover DNA from a particular spot on Cooper’s tie that the FBI perhaps would have granted the request. Or at least have Tom make the request since there is already precedent for him having access. Eric is just a random dude to them, of course they aren’t going to give him access, especially when he didn’t have someone lined up already. I advised him on a FB Live a month or so ago that his lawsuit would carry a lot more weight if the DNA lab was part of the suit. I’m concerned that suing the FBI is just going to piss them off and that we’ll never get access again.

They removed the last 3 rows of seats. No idea where Cooper’s seat is now. Would be a cool piece for a museum.

Ok, forget that patent then. Can you find any other places that actually made TiSb alloys with high percentage antimony than those listed?

looks to be a fingerprint smudge or an artifact of the film itself.

Ugh, more metallurgy talk. "Up to 18% antimony" appears on four Vordahl patents for actual alloys being created, they just predate the tie era by a few years. If you can find another place in America where you can prove that they were creating TiSb alloys in similar percentages, then please I'd genuinely like to know. Battelle in the early 50's, Crucible, and Sprague are the only places who are ever on record in the United States creating alloys with that high percentage of antimony. That's a very small field. And yes, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence...someone else could have been screwing around in a lab making a TiSb alloy, but those 3 particles, if they are indeed an alloy, ARE a good lead. Again, there's only one guy whose name appears on more than one TiSb alloy patent where the Sb is that high, and it's Vordahl. So I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility that Vordahl's work is the proximate cause for that experimental alloy ending up on Cooper's tie, whomever Cooper was. As I've said, if that's the case, I think it likely it's derived from TIMET outside Vegas, not Cru in PA. I've not found any evidence of layoffs in 71 with Crucible.

I've spent some fair amount of time researching metallurgists who died in 1972 to see if any were younger and died of some sort of disease or cancer, premising the research on the idea that Cooper was a dying man. Melvin Fisher, the copycat, believed he was dying from a disease and wanted to leave something for his kids. McCoy thought he had a brain tumor that was going to kill him. Hahneman told members of the hijacked crew he had some illness and later claimed that he got a fatal diagnosis for liver disease from some doctor in Cambodia in July 1971. Hahneman said lots of odd things like that, so who knows if that was true or not.

No kidding. Of course it doesn't match precisely. Nothing in the patent gives you a precise measurement to use. It claims that in that particular process you can use an alpha promoter of up to 18% antimony. Again, I'm not sure how many times I have to say this: the significance, if you want to place significance on it, of that patent is that it shows that Ti and Sb were still being alloyed as part of experiments during the tie era. I'm sure you'll respond so I'll gladly give you the final word on this. I hope I never talk about metallurgy again on this site.

It doesn't HAVE to match to have significance. And again, what would be a match on a process patent? Even if there was an exact measurement that could be matched, there's no indication for when during the process itself the microscopic alloy came from. The alloy could have hypothetically gotten on the tie early in the development or testing phase for the process. If we were claiming that it got on his clothing via a commercial product, then yes, you'd have to match it perfectly. But since this may come from a lab, it can have any number of percentages on it because the particles could have come from any stage during the development i.e. not a completed product. Again, the significance, if there is any, of the patent is that there is a mixture of Ti and high percentage antimony that is allowable in the process, which means that Ti and high percentage Sb were alloyed at some point during the creation of the process to see if it would work. There is no precise percentage called for in the patent, so saying that you can "eliminate" the particles from the process is just incorrect. What matters is that it appears to be a TiSb alloy. We only have evidence of two companies experimenting with TiSb alloys in the tie era. Thus, it's a lead. It's a lead that led us to a person who I think needs to be investigated further. Nothing more. I've never made the claim that Vordahl is Cooper. I think there's a possibility he was. The same as I think it's a possibility that WJS is Cooper or Hahneman or Braden or some of these new Canadians that have popped up recently. If you want to attack Ulis for overplaying it's significance (I believe he may have called it a smoking gun), then go ahead. He's wrong for saying that IMO.

Because it's a process patent it doesn't have to match exactly. I don't recall anyone saying it matched exactly, perhaps Ulis did, but neither I or Nicky or Chris Broer have ever said it matched exactly because, duh, obviously it doesn't. The significance (if there actually is any) in that particular patent is that it's one of only two documented instances where titanium and high percentage antimony were still being mixed together during the tie era. Mixing high percentage antimony and titanium was always an experimental deal because it's a difficult combo to alloy due to some metallurgical issues that are way over my head. It was a couple of guys at Battelle Memorial in the early 50's who first came up with the process for alloying Ti and Sb and Crucible sent Vordahl over there to learn the process from them at some point, maybe 1952. So the knowledge of how to alloy those things properly wasn't easy to come by to begin with. Vordahl seemed to be a specialist because his name appears on more TiSb alloys in the 50's than anyone else. I'm kind of exhausted from posting disclaimers on this TiSb stuff, because yes, patents aren't all inclusive. There could have been any number of metallurgists out there just messing around with alloying TiSb for the hell of it. Maybe some metallurgy professor in a metallurgical class somewhere was showing students why it's difficult to mix them together and that's where it came from. Maybe he worked in waste disposal at a railyard and they were unloading waste from a laboratory. There are a million different scenarios one could concoct to explain the existence of a TiSb alloy (if that's what it is). However, I think it's a mistake to dismiss the rarity of TiSb alloys. It's rarity is a genuine fact. You talk to metallurgists today and they'll assume you're talking about TiSn, not TiSb. Going by patent research, there was never a single American product commercially produced that had TiSb alloys where the Sb was over 10%. So for a TiSb alloy to have ended up on someone's clothing, then there is likely some proximate connection to a metallurgical lab. Where that connection is, if any, is obviously the question. The tie could have been picked up from a trash bin outside a lab for all we know. Maybe Cooper got his ass kicked for being a nerd and some thugs threw him in a dumpster outside of a laboratory or maybe some hoodlums he owed money to took him out to an industrial landfill and threw him in and that's why his tie looks like it went through a car wash of chemicals. Because Vordahl was essentially "Mr. TiSb alloy", I think it's possible that Cooper may have been someone who worked around Vordahl, likely during his time at TIMET, not at Crucible. His work with TIMET in Vegas is much closer in time to the hijacking and is also much closer in location. Also, TIMET was legitimately shutdown at the time and Cooper would have been unemployed for the foreseeable future. I've seen quite a bit of time recently trying to find TIMET employees from that era who were Air Corps vets or Paratroopers, etc. I've actually found several, but they don't match Cooper's description. The TiSb is as good of a lead as anything else out there, but ultimately it's just a lead to be investigated, same as any other. Ultimately, we need Tom's scope to get fixed, which I've heard may be soon. He obviously needs to check and make sure those are indeed alloys. I think he also needs to run more control tests on other items. I know that he tested an engineers tie from way back when and it didn't have hardly anything on it, but that's just one item. We need more control testing. Tom also wants to check out Vordahl's name badges because that could be illustrative of what an actual research metallurgists items look like under a scope.