No, it just means that the Pacific Northwest is a big freaking place. If you dropped something at random out of an airplane into the forest and nobody stumbled across it for a long time that doesn’t mean it was hidden with care. If it turns up decomposing in the mud instead of carefully stacked in a cool dry place then that’s pretty good evidence it wasn’t hidden with care.
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Sadly In Research Of podcast isn’t that far yet.
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It was 1971. ATVs didn’t exist yet. Those of us alive at the time vividly remember the invention of those, and particularly when the trikes came along and then were banned because a bunch of people died on them. It was quite a scandal in the 1980s.
In any case, you’re playing the game wrong. It’s easy to invent scenarios that might have been, but that’s not how investigation works. You have to have evidence to support every part of a story. You have to work forward from the evidence, not try to invent scenarios that circumstantially fit random facts of the story and sound good to you. There’s no evidence that supports Cooper surviving the jump.
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^This^
There seems to be the same sort of wishful thinking behind that one escape from Alcatraz…
The three escapees left Alcatraz. A few people have survived a swim like that, but the odds that someone who hasn’t trained and prepared could to it is pretty small. There is no sign they made it to shore, and hijacked a car, as they had planned. They haven’t been in contact with their family, who probably would not have welcomed them.
They tried hard. No question. But there is no rule that the unquenchable spirit of man must win through. They were bad guys and they probably got theirs. DB Cooper too. Shit happens.
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“ The Alcatraz swim course may have a notorious reputation, but we can assure you that over the past 27 years, we’ve safely escorted more than 15,000 swimmers along this course. The biggest variable is the tides. Luckily, our race director, Dave Horning, has swum the course 75 times and knows the San Francisco Bay tides well. …”
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Ooo. That’s a much larger number than I was expecting. They don’t say how many swimmers were not safely escorted, but I am sure word would get about if it was too many. I have seen Alcatraz from the shore, and it doesn’t look that far. it’s the sort of thing that you might try if you were desperate enough.
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I would imagine that the presence of a home-built raft made out of raincoats, and the quality of that raft, would be big variables as well.
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ATVs have existed since 1961 in Canada, and 1970 in the US. But this is a red herring; I don’t really think Cooper planned to come back with an ATV. I’ll explain my motivation below:
I think you’re missing my point. I don’t don’t have a horse in the D.B. Cooper race. At best I’m agnostic about his survival. My point is that every explanation of the sequence of events that led to the remaining evidence is largely speculative, and can “support” (meaning, in the mind of the person making the argument, but in reality not really) whatever argument someone wants to make. @Brainspore said it didn’t make much sense that Cooper would have buried the money where it was found because [reasons], and I pointed out that it did make sense based on [other reasons].
Just to make my point ultra clear: even if Cooper did survive the jump, we have too little evidence about what happened on the ground to reliably speculate on why the money was found where it was.
Yah I found the same links, but you couldn’t really buy them everywhere, nor were they good enough for treks into the woods until well into the 1980s. As I said, I was there, and I remember the introduction, rise, and drama of early ATVs.
In that case, we’re basically making the same point. I would add though that plausibility plays an important role in judging the likelihood of various scenarios that may match the evidence. In the absence of sufficient evidence, we have to start invoking plausibility. The only plausible scenario is that a pile of goo hit the ground seven minutes after he stepped off that stairwell. All the experts in skydiving pretty much agree on that, and the experts at the time concluded he was dead as well, because there was no reasonable scenario where he could have survived.
But because no body was found, people have spent 50 years making up baseless stories about him. It’s a compelling tale and he was a bit of a folk hero to a lot of people, so we keep talking about him to this day, but there’s no rational reason to believe he survived that night.
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I did the Escape from Alcatraz Triathlon and the tidal currents are very strong out there. The race start is timed to minimise the tide and you still need to aim considerably away from the target field in order to hit it. They also have catch boats for people who miss the target and are getting swept out to sea. And that’s for triathletes in websuits and have been training.
For untrained prisoners, the chances of them making landfall is pretty low.
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The perfect cover-up for the perfect crime.
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I’d never heard of the In Research Of podcast and can’t thank you enough for making me aware of it.
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