olemisscub

Yes yes, here we go again. "I have something you don't" "Ok then release it" "No" "Why Not? "Because" You've done this to everyone on this forum for about a decade now. Didn't you say some bullcrap back in the spring about having a photo that was going to rock the Cooper World?

We don't know how successful he was or wasn't. He lived in a 1600 square foot home from 1967 to his death in 2002. He appears to be upper middle class at the most. He didn't get rich off his patents. 93% of the SR-71 is coated in a Vordahl patent but he didn't make a dime off its success because he was a salaried employee at the time. All of his inventions were assigned to other companies. Vordahl also suffered from a neurological disease that would eventually kill him. Trying to make sense of him or his actions is about as difficult as trying to determine his politics when you read through his writings.

lol In color footage Vordahl looks even more ethnic than your beloved bespeckled 5'9 Honduran mad man

Yeah, this dude is the poster child for having a light complexion. No dark features or olive skin whatsover.

"They never do, the instrument is not perfect there are always error bars. That is a match for all practical purposes. The tolerance on the instrument are generally about 1% so in reality there should not even be any decimals" - Tom Kaye. I sent Tom what you said and that was his response.

The plant manager at TIMET who fired all these people in August 71 was named Don Cooper, fwiw.

Check your Private Messages please

It's a good observation. He also works favorably with the photo that both Bill and Flo said looked the most like him out of hundreds they had seen. Should be noted that the guy in that photo definitely looks older than we usually think of Cooper.

Yes, I believe Darren has indicated that he’d like to do a Vordahl episode with us.

He was 5 or so years younger. That’s pretty much it. I’m also unclear why Petersen would have anything to do with Vordahl’s patent. Vordahl lived in Beaver, PA and worked at their Midland Lab. Petersen was 30 miles away and worked at their Robinson Lab. The way it has been explained to me by a metallurgist is that usually just the patent holder themselves and maybe one or two others would come into contact with a raw alloy that was never commercialized and that there was never any production on. A guy like Vordahl would have mixed a slew of chemicals and elements together and made a cocktail to create the alloy. Then he would cook this concoction into a small ingot that he would use for testing.

There are other verified titanium alloys found on the tie that he was able to visually confirm, so it stands to reason that given all the other chemicals on the tie (all used in metallurgy) that the titanium-antimony is what it appears to be. The issue is that the spectrum doesn’t really have an image attached to it. It just spits out what the particle is comprised of. So obviously we want to confirm that it actually is a non-commercial grade titanium-antimony particle through visual means. Tom’s microscope is currently missing a part that he is attempting to get fixed. So whenever that is done he will be able to search out these particles and visually confirm them as alloys (or not). If it is confirmed to be a TiSb alloy there are only two places in the United States patent record between 1964-1971 that are confirmed to have been fooling around with TiSb alloys where the Sb went that high. Vordahl’s patent calls for up to 18% Sb, and those 3 particles match that well. It was part of an experiment Vordahl was doing concerning the creation of a metal rolling bar. He got the patent for it but Rem-Cru never did anything with it, so it never reached the commercial market, so it wasn’t anything someone would have come upon in the wild. The only other place that has a TiSb patent is an electronics company called Sprague Electronics. I’m not sure what their use for it was, but it also never entered the commercial market.

Vordahl was very athletic and fits the FBI profile of Cooper being a middle aged man who exercised (a rarity in those days to be sure). Vordahl was a runner way before his time. We have writings of his where he talks about it from the 1960’s. As you know not many people did that back then. He was also a competitive amateur tennis and golf player. In fact, when you deep dive on him many of things you come across are stories or articles where he is competing and often placing or winning these tennis or golf tournaments. He was also into eating organic and all that. I believe one of his patents concerns something to do with organic food development.

The Vordahl presentation was professionally filmed. It will be up on YouTube at some point I think. I happened to be filming Bill Mitchell during his discussion with Ulis when Mitchell pointed to Vordahl and just out of the blue volunteered that Vordahl's facial features seem right and that he does kinda look like him given what vague memory he still has. That made many folks in there sit up a bit because, as we all know, whenever he is shown a suspect photo Bill always has the stock answer of "it's been X number of years, Cooper could walk in the door and I wouldn't recognize him." I was able to have some nice moments with him over the weekend. We had breakfast in the hotel on Saturday and Sunday. We were the early risers so both days we were the first ones there when breakfast opened. So he had breakfast both days with Dave Fudeman and myself. Saturday morning he told us that he felt that the sketches (all of them) seemed too young for his memory of Cooper. He said that all these TV programs have always put forward these commandos and paratroopers and how the FBI always showed him photos of these guys and also of skydiving groups, etc., but he never felt it could be those type guys because that wasn't the vibe Cooper gave off. With me he used the phrase he has used before, stating that he always remembered Cooper as this geeky old man with awful hair. He told me during a break in between panels that the night of the hijacking an FBI agent asked him if he thought he could have won in a fight with Cooper and he told them he absolutely could have. He said Cooper was a good bit smaller than him. I asked Bill if he remembered the drunk cowboy and he said he can't recall the guy wearing a hat, but he does remember this obnoxious drunk on the plane who was several rows in front of him who came back and stood near him for several minutes talking to Tina. So he's pretty obviously remembering the cowboy. He said that when they were in the bus with the FBI agents that this same drunk raised his hand and told one of the agents something like "hey, when can we go? I've got to piss." Oh, and Sunday he gave me his email and asked me to send him my stuff on Vordahl, so that was kinda neat. He also told a story about how he was traveling around the Northeast this past year with his wife and they stopped by at the United 93 memorial in Shanksville. He said he was really saddened by it and I'm not sure if he was crying or what but he said a female Park Ranger walked up and asked if he was OK and he told her "yes, it's just that I was on a hijacked plane a long time ago when I was young and I might could have been killed on it like these people and never had children or grandchildren." He said that she goes "D.B. Cooper hijacking? You're Bill Mitchell right?" So he thought that was wild to be recognized on the other side of the country. RPReplay_Final1668903697.mov

1969

Can’t even get a like from FlyJack for posting clear high quality sled test pics. I get no respect! Haha

My god. Give me some credit for God’s sake Fly. I’m not that freaking sloppy to post a pic of the man and it not be him. His photos are so few and far between. We only have like six photos over six months of searching. He has one of the most distinctive mouths I’ve seen. Plus these pics are over decades. Left to right, late 1940’s, 1959, 1964

Not in any pics I’ve seen. His hair seems to recede at a steady rate in the pics I’ve found.

Image I found on an archive site in a 60’s Metals magazine. He isn’t named on it but it’s unmistakably him. I was quite surprised to happen upon an unidentified photo of him.

But now that you mention it, when he was younger he indeed looked like Comp A

This is Comp B, Fly. Also, good looking? He looked like a creep.

No protruding lower lip??? Dude looked like Bubba from Forrest Gump

Not Swarthy or Olive or Latin looking?

To be fair, 58,500 of those posts are by the same 4 people.