The Unexplained - Howard Hughes - Edition 391 - Bruce A. Smith

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April 17, 2019 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

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Edition 391 - Bruce A. Smith

Part Two on the D B Cooper research by journalist/author Bruce A. Smith

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	Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Return of the Unexplained.
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	Thank you for your emails too.
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	And if there's anything that you would like to say about the show, if you want to make a guest suggestion or just shoot the breeze generally, or tell me a story, something maybe that's happened to you, then you can always get in touch with me through the website at theunexplained.tv.
	And some of you haven't been doing this recently.
	And it really is important.
	When you get in touch, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use the show.
	It's always good to hear those things.
	And, you know, I always say this, but let's say it again.
	I'm not kind of collecting data to sift through later on you.
	I'm just interested to know where people are.
	And also, you know, what the show means to you and how you use it.
	You know, people driving trucks and doing all sorts of things in every corner of the world.
	You know, we've got a big fan base, if I can call it that in Australia.
	A lot of people listening in the United States and Canada.
	New Zealand there.
	Japan.
	No, we've got people listening there.
	Singapore and, of course, the United Kingdom and many European countries.
	I think some people in Europe are finding this show a bit of an escape from the ongoing drama of Brexit, which we are not going to discuss here, whatever has happened to it and with it, by the time you hear this.
	It's just too complicated in so many ways as you will know wherever in the world you happen to be.
	Now, it's not often on this show that we quickly return to a topic not very long after we first touched upon it.
	But this time, because there is so much more to say, and because the man that we're going to speak with tells me that he has a lot of information that he'd like to deliver that we didn't get through last time.
	And thirdly, I think, because the case is so interesting to all of our listeners, I think, around the world, and certainly to me, then I think it's a good idea to do this, even though it's only been a couple of months since we last spoke with Bruce Smith in the northwestern corner of the US about the D.B. Cooper case.
	The man who skyjacked a plane, got away with a bag full of cash by parachuting himself off the back of a 727 jetliner, and then seemingly disappeared.
	Or did he?
	This time round, we'll be asking questions about the investigation and bringing you a lot of new material that you may not have heard before about the D.B. Cooper case.
	So, it is one for the DB Cooper completist, this one, and I think it is a kind of perennial fascination.
	Okay, thank you very much for all of your emails.
	I hope the website is working for you at theunexplained.tv.
	Adam Cornwell worked very hard on that.
	And something that I've recently been able to achieve, and I feel that I have achieved something by doing this, is that I'm now able to post my own shows.
	In the past, I had to rely on Adam to do it for me, and now there's a portal where I can go, and all things being well, I'm able to post the show and make sure it gets to all the places it has to go, and make sure the things that have to appear on the website appear.
	Now, if you're involved in websites, and you have been for a while, that's really easy-peasy stuff.
	But let me tell you, I love sound.
	You may have noticed that by the number of experiments in it that I do.
	I love sound, and I love speaking.
	But websites and how to put them together and the things that you do around them, it could be a foreign language.
	But I'm learning an awful lot as I continue to do this, and I hope to learn a lot more.
	So thank you, Adam.
	And I am now posting the shows myself, which means that I've got just a little bit more control over how they appear and when they appear.
	And Adam is always there at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool to make sure that the process goes as smoothly as it has been.
	So your thoughts on the website, your thoughts on the shows, let me know if I'm going in the right direction.
	Let me know if there's somebody you want to hear on the show, and I will endeavour to get them here.
	All of those things through the website, theunexplained.tv.
	Okay, let's get to the US now and part two of the D.B. Cooper story with Bruce Smith.
	Bruce, thank you very much for coming back.
	My pleasure.
	Now, Bruce, I think this is the first time I've come back to a guest so quickly after speaking with them the first time.
	You were very keen that we talk some more about this because I think you felt, and certainly from looking into it a little bit more, it appears that there is more to say than we said.
	Well, I think we're talking about D.B. Cooper, and the first time that we spoke about the skyjacking, and it's the only unsolved skyjacking in the history of the world, not just the United States, there are compelling reasons that really bounce off of that question of why isn't it solved?
	And that opens up a lot of rabbit holes to get lost down.
	Some of them are conspiratorial, and some of them are greater realizations of how limited police departments actually can be, no matter how big they are.
	In fact, when police departments get bigger, they can be more constrained.
	They have more trouble connecting the dots, as Condoleezza Rice famously said after 9-11 here in the United States, when they talked about, yeah, we had all the information about, you know, the planes are going to fly into the World Trade Center, but we couldn't get them to the right people to make it actionable intelligence, you know, that kind of thing.
	And it also calls into question exactly the role of Hollywood and TV and movies, how we dramatize the FBI, the CIA, and I suppose, you know, on your side of things, MI6 and MI5.
	And it's my observation, it's my reality, that the FBI here in the United States does not function anywhere close to what most people think of as how it functions on TV.
	You know, I can remember watching when I was a little kid.
	There was a black and white TV series that we got years after it was made over here.
	It was called the FBI.
	And I think it starred a man called Ephraim Zimbalus Jr.
	And, you know, he was a great broad-shouldered, square-jawed American actor.
	And certainly the impression I got out of that was that the FBI was pretty much infallible.
	And I think American people must have taken great comfort from that.
	But the story that we will unfold here now kind of shows that that is not the case for a whole variety of reasons.
	One thing I did do before we had this conversation was that I took another look online and you could lose yourself a day by looking at all of the stuff about D.B. Cooper and you still wouldn't be any further on.
	But one thing I did find was a website that listed no less than 10 people, all of whom might be or might have been D.B. Cooper, including a skydiving instructor, I think we talked about this person last time, a Boeing employee, because who else would have such knowledge of the 727, a woman, and a man called McCoy, who was caught and jailed for a copycat skyjacking.
	There are 10 names, that's just a few of them.
	This is the difficulty that we face, isn't it?
	That there are so many people who might fit a particular template if you put a template up there to be assessed.
	Well, the bigger issue, and I think the stronger dynamic that brings forward these 10 suspects is the dynamic, the fact that a lot of people either want to be D.B. Cooper or a lot of people want their family member to be D.B. Cooper.
	And I call this the Cooper vortex.
	People get sucked in to a fame and drama kind of sequence.
	I talked to one woman whose father is a D.B. Cooper suspect.
	And to my way of thinking, his name was Don Burnworth.
	He's now passed away.
	But if you were just to look at his picture and compare it to the sketch of D.B. Cooper that was drawn up by the eyewitnesses who participated in the skyjacking with him, you would say Don Burnworth was D.B. Cooper because it looks almost identical.
	And I asked his daughter, I said, how do you feel if your father turns out really to be D.B. Cooper?
	She said, oh, it would be so cool.
	I said, really?
	How old is she?
	She's 45 years old or something like that now.
	Her father passed away a couple of years ago.
	He was 90.
	Remember, D.B. Cooper did the skyjacking 47 years ago.
	And in the sketch, and it's estimated by the eyewitnesses that he was in his mid-40s at that time.
	So he would be at least 90 years old today.
	Right.
	So had he survived, he would be very much up in years.
	And the likelihood is that if he's on any of these lists, he is one of the people who's passed on.
	Yeah.
	There's a high likelihood.
	When I asked, and when I reframed the question to the daughter, I said, if your father is proven to be D.B. Cooper, you know, he could go to jail.
	Now, how do you feel about it?
	And she goes, oh.
	Do you think there is something here, and this is something else that came up from the cursory researches that I've done today on top of what I did for the last conversation, that there is a kind of, you know, we have a character over here in our history called Robin Hood.
	And Robin Hood robbed from the rich and gave to the poor.
	Do you think that there's a kind of Robin Hood imagery going on around D.B. Cooper these days?
	Very much so.
	I think D.B. Cooper is viewed by many people as a hero.
	He's a working-class hero.
	He beat the system.
	He's a guy who was an average Joe, and he proved himself to be smarter than the cops.
	He got away with it, and he didn't hurt anybody.
	Good for him.
	After the skyjacking, in the days that followed the skyjacking, there were a number of FBI agents whose names were not revealed in the paper, but who were openly praising or showing their respect for Cooper, not only as a master criminal, but just as a all-around downright cool guy.
	So there is this element, and the cops are not unaffected by it.
	So it's very much a part of that.
	And there used to be, up until very recently, a party.
	It was called the D.B. Cooper Festival or D.B. Cooper Days the Saturday after Thanksgiving here in the United States.
	That's usually going to be the last Saturday in November.
	Thanksgiving is our big national holiday, and that takes place on the last, the fourth Thursday, I think, of the month in November.
	And the skyjacking took place on the night before Thanksgiving.
	And so the Thanksgiving holiday weekend is viewed as the Cooper anniversary period.
	And in the primary landing zone area that the cops searched after in response to looking for D.B. Cooper, It was in a town called Ariel, and the tavern there has become the focal point for all of the D.B. Cooper aficionados,
	researchers, and people who just love being part of this whole excitement about D.B. Cooper.
	So it's become another kind of Roswell almost, hasn't it?
	Oh, yeah.
	It's right up there with Roswell.
	That is astonishing.
	Okay, so just for a listener who might have picked this up on this second edition, please go back and listen to the first conversation two months ago, and all of this will make sense.
	But we have to say that D.B. Cooper is what the media called a man who hijacked a Boeing 727 aircraft in the northwest U.S. in the airspace between Portland and Seattle Wednesday, November 24th, 1971.
	He extorted $200,000 ransom, parachuted himself off the plane, and ostensibly disappeared.
	Okay, here's the new stuff.
	And you've given me a very comprehensive list of things that we didn't get to last time.
	The first on your list is sloppy police work or cover-up.
	And you talk first of all about some lost evidence, the missing eight cigarette butts and various other things.
	Yeah, this is the first thing that pops up when you start looking at how infallible is the FBI.
	And you can really point to lost evidence as saying, I don't think you guys are so hot.
	The cigarette butts, Cooper smoked eight cigarette butts and left them on the plane.
	Now, back in 1971, from his perspective, that seemed to be a reasonable thing to do because this was long before DNA testing was in anybody's consciousness.
	As it turns out, those cigarette butts would now provide the best evidence because the dried saliva on the cigarette butts would give us the primo sample to extract and determine D.B. Cooper's DNA.
	But of course, the officials, the officers investigating them, wouldn't have known that, would they?
	No, nobody would have known that in 1971.
	So it's reasonable that Cooper left them behind and didn't take them away.
	He could have stomped out the ashes and put the butts in his pocket.
	Certainly any skyjacker is going to do that nowadays.
	But back in 1971, that wasn't an issue.
	But the fact that we're talking about them now means that they were preserved as evidence.
	Yes.
	And then we get a little bit down this rabbit hole of bad police work, sloppy police work, inefficient police work, and possible cover-ups.
	The inefficiency here is that multiple jurisdictions were involved in the investigation.
	The FBI is not some singular kind of organization.
	The D.B. Cooper investigation was administered out of the Seattle office.
	But when the plane stopped to refuel itself in Reno, Nevada, Seattle FBI agents weren't there.
	And so the FBI sent in FBI agents from its Las Vegas office.
	And they're the ones who recovered the evidence that was left on the plane.
	Because it turns out that Cooper wasn't on the plane when the plane landed in Reno.
	So now we know that he jumped out of the plane somewhere between Seattle and Reno.
	And the evidence that was taken from the plane and was held by Las Vegas, only some of it made its way to Seattle to be administered by the case agent up in Seattle.
	And some of it was held from decades in Las Vegas, including the cigarette butts.
	Now, a little bit further examination.
	The case agent in Seattle in 2009 made a cryptic public comment about the cigarette butts when he was asked, was there any testing of any kind on the cigarette butts?
	And he said yes, that they had been evaluated in 2003.
	Evaluated?
	Yes.
	He used the word processed.
	They had been processed in 2003.
	Now that suggests that the FBI still had possession of these cigarette butts as late as 2003.
	However, this case agent, Larry Carr, also said that in 2009 that the cigarette butts were now lost.
	And the question is, who lost them?
	And even more importantly, who lost the evidence, the documentation, the findings from 2003?
	If these cigarette butts were processed in 2003, what were the findings?
	It seems astonishing that something like that could happen.
	Sorry to talk over you, but one of the other things that I've been reading is that, and you tell me if this is right, that there are 660 volumes of evidence that have been gathered over the years about this.
	So if you've got that volume of material, how can you lose important stuff?
	How, how, How does one lose evidence like this, indeed?
	This opens up a more troubling examination of FBI record keeping and how it processes Physical evidence.
	As I dug more into this, there are other researchers that have been looking at the FBI for exactly this reason.
	And during the 1990s, there was a lot of internal and external concern that the FBI was mismanaging its evidence and its laboratory investigations of physical evidence.
	In fact, during the 1990s, a whistleblower by the name of Dr. Whitehurst, who was a supervisory FBI agent, for 10 years was complaining to his bosses at the Department of Justice that things at the headquarters of the National Laboratory of the FBI were horrible,
	that FBI agents were losing evidence, they were manufacturing evidence, they were lying about evidence, and that they weren't trained as scientists and they did not have the technical and scientific abilities to properly investigate physical evidence.
	And for 10 years, he was championing this as a whistleblower.
	The DOJ finally stepped in, conducted an investigation, found 40 failures at the FBI National Laboratory, which triggered a congressional inquiry and found that most of these complaints were true.
	But nobody was criminally prosecuted, and Whitehurst, the whistleblower, lost his job.
	Well, that's astonishing, but it's not the only case of that kind that we've heard either side of the Atlantic.
	There were some rare earth minerals quoted.
	This is the environment.
	This is the environment in which the D.B. Cooper case is being investigated.
	So you have to take the rose-colored glasses off and get real about what the FBI can do well and what the FBI does not do well.
	Okay, there were some rare earth minerals, apparently, or strange exotic metals on the tie that was worn and discarded by D.B. Cooper, Dan Cooper.
	And there was no follow-up.
	This was discovered in 2009, you say, yet there was no follow-up on that, which could have been something that, again, could have added to this tapestry of material that might have helped to solve this case.
	Yes, here's a good, this is an excellent example of what the FBI does well and what it does not do well at all.
	In 2009, the case agent that I mentioned earlier, Larry Carr, in a stroke of genius, decided that with the power of the internet, that he would be able to tap into citizen scientists to get their help.
	In effect, he created a team, a group that he called the citizen sleuths.
	And in fact, these were like FBI auxiliaries.
	They weren't paid, but they were professionals who donated their time because they were interested in the case.
	And the citizen sleuths to this day are still active.
	Now, Larry Carr was taken off the case the following year, and it's part of his legacy, of Carr's legacy, that he got this thing going.
	And the next case agent that took over, his name is Curtis Ng, allowed the citizen sleuth to continue and gave them access to the physical evidence and the documentation in the files.
	They took the tie that was found in Reno that had been left on the seat where Cooper was sitting.
	And we believe this is the tie that D.B. Cooper actually wore.
	So it's believed that this tie is D.B. Cooper's.
	Now, did he wear it every day of his life or did he buy it at a clothing store or a hand-me-down shop the day before he stole the airplane?
	We don't know.
	All we know is that we found the tie.
	And the citizen sleuths took it upon themselves to investigate what was on the tie.
	And they took samples, excuse me, and put them under electron microscopes and began to find a lot of very cool stuff.
	They found titanium in a very rare strain of titanium.
	They found particles of pure titanium, which would be very unusual.
	And the circumstances of how rare pure titanium would end up on the tie is not fully understood to this day.
	Does that add weight, do you think?
	And again, I'm sorry to interrupt, but it's an important point, to the thought that D.B. Cooper may have had aerospace knowledge, because titanium is something that is used in aerospace.
	Yes, titanium is used, but what's used, the kind of titanium that is used, let's say in the supersonic transport, the SST, is an amalgam, an alloy of titanium.
	So the first thought was, is that, okay, since this titanium Cooper's got to be somebody from advanced avionics, either a supersonic transport or something like a military aircraft, because titanium alloys are going to be put on the leading edge of the wings because they have a capacity to withstand very, very high heat.
	And so when you're flying at three, four, five, and six times the speed of sound, you're going to get a tremendous amount of friction on the leading edge of the wings, and that's going to lead to heat.
	So you need to have a titanium buffer on the surface of the wings.
	But you don't use pure titanium.
	And so the citizen sleuth thought maybe Cooper might have been involved more in the fabrication or the production of titanium alloys, let's say in some kind of foundry that's working with ores, titanium ores, or things like that.
	This kind of information attracted the attention of the travel channel, and particularly one individual by the name of Josh Gates, who has a very interesting show on the travel channel called Expedition Unknown.
	And he contacted the citizen sleuths to find out more about this titanium stuff and was so fascinated that he ended up funding additional research on the tie.
	And more samples were taken from the tie and sent to a fancy Schmancy state-of-the-art electron moscoscopy laboratory in Illinois.
	And that's when they found rare earth minerals and phosphors that would be used, again, in avionics, particularly on instrumentation that would go into high-end aircraft, such as the supersonic transport or military aircraft.
	So it starts to lean back to what we were talking about when we had our last conversation, that this man had some kind of military background.
	Yes, or a familiarity, at least, with pretty fancy high-end aircraft.
	The most important thing about this, though, is that as far as known today publicly, the FBI did nothing with this information.
	Zero.
	They didn't check out the titanium, and they haven't checked out the rare earth minerals, and they've never commented on it.
	It's as if they sat on their hands.
	Now, do you think it could be just the fact that they have other things to do, the fight against terrorism, internal crime, people with guns shooting other people, all of the other things that security services of every kind have to think about these days?
	And perhaps they just don't have time to be on the trail of somebody who by that point was 80.
	Well, the FBI has 17,000 trained field agents, and I think you can have one or two look into D.B. Cooper.
	Is that a misappropriation of resources?
	I don't think so.
	But I understand the political pressure not to pursue Cooper too vigorously.
	I get that.
	And that's another element in the D.B. Cooper case.
	What kinds of political pressures did the FBI operate in for the past 47 years?
	And I think that has to be very closely examined about what the FBI says and what the FBI does and what the FBI doesn't do.
	As one cop told me, he says, the only crimes that get her investigated are the ones the politicians want us to solve.
	So there was not the will to solve this one, you think?
	He thought.
	I think that's a very real dynamic that the Cooper case is viewed as a political liability.
	Why would that be?
	Well, you mentioned it, but people are concerned about terrorism and they don't want any of their tax money spent on something that isn't terrorist-related.
	Right.
	So they don't want somebody picking up a newspaper somewhere in New York at the end of a day's work saying, look at this.
	You know, I spend my tax dollars to try and keep our people safe and they're looking back at something from 45 years ago.
	I get that.
	There's more to this, though.
	And some of the other stuff that we didn't talk about last time in any great detail was missing radar transcripts from aircraft that were following Flight 305, this hijacked plane, military jets, missing radar transcripts of various kinds, and also redactions in the communications between the plane and the air traffic control system.
	Those things are very odd, both the redactions and the lost tracking of the jets following that plane.
	Yeah, let's take them as two separate issues.
	The radar transcripts that were used to determine the flight path have never been released publicly.
	Are they missing?
	I don't know.
	Somebody may have them.
	If they do, they haven't told anybody publicly.
	And they are never part of any kind of concise presentation by the FBI about this is where we think D.B. Cooper jumped.
	This is where we think D.B. Cooper landed, because this is where we think the plane was at the time we think that he jumped out of the plane.
	All they say is they've given us a map and they said this is the most likely flight path plan, and we base it upon Air Force radar.
	Okay.
	But that's as far as it goes.
	So we have to take their word for it.
	But if you had planes chasing that plane, following, tracking that plane, you'd have something more precise than that, wouldn't you?
	You would think.
	So what is known is that a D.B. Cooper was being tracked by three different radar screens by the planes.
	There were two F-106s out of McCord Air Force Base, and then a T-33 trainer jet joined the chase.
	And they're all following and maintaining radar contact with D.B. Cooper's plane known as Flight 305.
	Then you had Military tracking radar at McCord Air Force Base near Nacoma, and they were using what is known as SAGE radar.
	SAGE was state-of-the-art for its day, and those transcripts have never been revealed.
	It's also understood that the FAA out of Seattle Center, the commercial airplane radar system, was also tracking 305.
	So there should be five separate radar pieces, pieces of radar documentation.
	None of them have ever been made available to the public, nor has their existence ever been acknowledged or identified.
	We have it, but this is where it is.
	You can't see it, national security.
	There's never been any commentary like that at all.
	More problematic, and related to this, it's like the other side of the coin.
	The FBI has released the voice transcripts, the transcripts of voice communications between D.B. Cooper's plane, Flight 305, and Seattle Center, the FAA Flight Control Center out of Seattle.
	It's 19 pages long for the duration of the flight from Seattle to Portland, and then south of Portland, another FAA tracking station picked them up out of Northern California.
	And we have those transcripts too.
	The two transcripts, so we have dozens and dozens of pages of voice transcripts.
	The two volumes are written in radically different language.
	The first one reads very academically and cerebrally.
	It's very dry reading.
	It's very difficult to fully comprehend.
	It has a lot of slang or abbreviations.
	It uses HJ quite frequently.
	HJ stands for hijacker.
	In the Seattle transcripts, there are 19 separate redactions.
	So their transcripts are blacked out.
	The question is, why?
	And when questioned, the FBI says that these redactions refer to extraneous communications with other aircraft in the environment, in the air, around Seattle.
	Because when Cooper was flying, all air traffic was grounded and diverted away from SeaTac for the duration of the time that Flight 305 was getting refueled and the passengers were getting off the plane.
	That was several hours long.
	And then once 305 was back in the air, at some point after that, air traffic coming in and out of SeaTac was resumed.
	But then it was flying towards Portland and it flew right over Portland Airport or very close to Portland Airport.
	And it's not quite clear how air traffic was diverted away from Flight 305 at that time.
	The notion that the redactions were a response to maintaining some kind of privacy or proprietary concerns of communication with other aircraft, I find to be very suspect.
	And again, it's like, well, you have to trust us.
	And let's go, really?
	I have to trust you?
	I don't think so.
	Particularly when you read the transcripts from the Red Bluff, California FAA Control Center, which is very clear, very matter of fact, very conversational, very easy to read, and there are no redactions.
	It's the same plane.
	It's the same skyjacking.
	Why are there such fundamentally different kinds of transcripts?
	And the transcript Federated Bluff doesn't have anything redacted at all.
	And presumably, there was plenty of conversation at that time with other kinds of aircraft in the area.
	Those communications are not in these transcripts, so they may have been edited out, but at least there's no redactions.
	So you have anomalies that are very suspect and very troubling and point to what some people call a puppet master, somebody controlling the narrative, somebody controlling the flow of information to the public,
	to the D.B. Cooper researchers, somebody that is filtering and monitoring and supervising the overall investigation and how it looks to the public, how it looks to the world.
	That certainly suggests a very strong sensitivity to the political impacts of the D.B. Cooper investigation.
	And I think that's a very strong dynamic that cannot be underestimated.
	Do you think that D.B. Cooper got away because somebody meant him to get away?
	Maybe.
	Very possible.
	You talk about the parachutes, not only the parachutes that he was provided with at the time, but also strangenesses that transpired in later years, starting with the fact that the parachutes apparently were packed with chaff.
	Now, any of us who studied anything to do with military planes knows that chaff is that sort of, we call it aluminium here, aluminum foil, shredded stuff that planes put out to try and deflect radar attention.
	And apparently, for some reason, you say that chaff was packed with the parachutes that he was given.
	The exact opposite happened.
	The parachutes that were being prepared for D.B. Cooper, the people that were preparing those parachutes and were prepared to put chaff into the parachutes were instructed to remove...
	So in other words, something that could have meant that he was tracked if they'd packed chaff in those parachutes was left out for some reason.
	The chaff, we call it chafe, by the way.
	The chafe could be it's used to foil radar tracking.
	And most chafe will amplify radar signals.
	So it's almost like when your eyes adjust to the dark, someone's shining a bright light in your face and you can't see anything.
	Everything turns dark.
	It's that kind of thing.
	So if he was to jump from the plane with a parachute that didn't have chaff, you just wouldn't know he was there because it's a person wearing a parachute.
	It's not a metal plane.
	But if he had chaff there, at least there would be some indication of his trajectory.
	Yeah, there would be an electronic flash.
	There would be a brightness on the screen.
	There would be an anomaly, a radar anomaly.
	All of a sudden, there's a very strong radar signal coming back from Flight 305 because all the chaff is reflecting radar signals.
	Now, the question is, is this a true story?
	We've only gotten it from one source.
	We've got it from a reporter by the name of Adele Ferguson who interviewed a fellow by the name of Major Dawson.
	I believe his first name is William, Major Dawson, William Dawson.
	And he was in charge of the preparation of the parachutes at McCord Air Force Base in Tacoma, and also too for the launching of the F-106 fighter jets that followed D.B. Cooper's plane.
	Now, Dawson, many years later, became a state legislator here in Washington state.
	And that's when he was being interviewed by Adele Ferguson, who was a freelance journalist.
	And in a side conversation, they were talking about his role as an Air Force major at McCord and what his contributions were in the preparations or the response to the DB Cooper skyjacking back in 1971.
	And that's when he told her that he was ordered to take the chafe out of the parachutes he was preparing.
	And he also was instructed, he also said that he was ordered to tell the pilots to back off from the plane and not get too close.
	Don't follow too close.
	So there are two elements here that suggest an orchestration to allow D.B. Cooper to get away.
	Now, as it turns out, Cooper refused any parachutes from the military and insisted on getting civilian parachutes, which then opens up the really big rabbit hole of what civilians provided those parachutes and exactly what kinds of parachutes did he get.
	And then ultimately, what kind of parachute did D.B. Cooper use?
	And what does that say about D.B. Cooper's skill in terms of selecting or choosing a parachute?
	So there's a lot of little touchstones going down this rabbit hole that we might want to touch upon.
	Well, it would suggest that, for one thing, we talked about chaff there.
	It would suggest that here was somebody who had enough specific knowledge to know that there was a possibility, or there may have been a possibility, that chaff could be packed within the parachute.
	Whereas if you request a civilian parachute, chances are that nothing military, nothing like that is going to be done to it.
	Correct.
	Correct.
	It suggests strongly that this was not Cooper's first rodeo.
	There is something that I don't get, but you've documented this.
	There was a parachute expert, somebody used by the FBI, who was subsequently, in much later years, murdered, a case apparently that's remained unsolved.
	What connection do you think is here?
	It's a very big rabbit hole.
	The guy we're talking about is Earl Casse.
	Earl Casse was a skydiving champion, was well known in the Seattle and Pacific Northwest area.
	He was one of the leading aficionados of the skydiving sport and was contacted very quickly in the investigation, like the day after or a couple days after the skyjacking, to provide expert testimony and an evaluation assessment of Cooper's skills and what kind of parachutes would be necessary.
	Because Cooper's jump was pretty tough.
	And many people at the time thought it was bold.
	He jumped at night in the rain over terrain that he was unfamiliar with.
	He was in cloud cover and he was jumping with somebody else's parachute.
	Off the back of a 727 commercial jet liner, which would have had its own slipstream, air currents around it.
	You had to know what you were doing to be able to achieve that.
	Yeah, so as it turns out, and people thought, well, the plane's flying at 2,000 miles an hour.
	That means Cooper's jumping in.
	He's dealing with a wind chill factor of 200 miles an hour.
	And in November, at 10,000 feet, the temperature, the air temperature is about 20 degrees Fahrenheit.
	So people were saying, you know, the wind chill factor is like 100 below zero.
	Well, that's not the fact at all.
	Empirical evidence has now shown that when you lower the staircase from a 727 into the slipstream, there's virtually no wind on the staircase.
	Really?
	There have been anecdotal stories.
	A lot of people have done the Cooper jump for fun.
	And in fact, at air shows, skydivers would be lining up.
	Hundreds of guys would be paying good money to get on a 727 and do a Cooper jump during the day.
	And there's anecdotal evidence from one of these groups jumping is that somebody left a styrofoam, a coffee cup, a styrofoam coffee cup at the top of the stairs before he jumped.
	And the wind impact was so little, the coffee cup stayed there on the staircase for the entire night.
	You would never, ever have thought that.
	But back to Earl Cossey, the man who was brought in to be the expert on parachutes.
	Many years later, this man was found murdered.
	Yes.
	Cossey's story is lengthy And convoluted.
	What we do know, and we're learning a lot more about him because he's a presence in a lot of the 302s.
	The 302s are FBI field reports, and the FBI is now releasing field reports.
	Now, the FBI closed the case officially in 2016, which means that all of their paperwork, all of their documentation, all of their evidence is no longer in FBI control.
	It is now in the control of the people.
	We own it.
	It's our documentation now.
	It's not theirs.
	So the question is, how do we get to see it?
	But the FBI maintains itself as the gatekeepers and as the storage.
	And it's believed that FBI files on Cooper are stored in warehouses all over the Baltimore, Maryland, Washington, D.C. area.
	And 302s are giving us a better picture of the FBI's relationship with Earl Cassey.
	Earl told them right off the bat that Cooper did not have to be a real expert skydiver, that he could have done the jump.
	Anybody who had half a dozen or so lessons and practice jumps probably could have done it and probably get down to the ground.
	Okay.
	He may have been scratched up on the way down landing in a tree, but getting out of a tree is not an impossibility, even at night in the rain.
	Especially if you have a military background.
	Especially if you are trained on the government's dime to get out of a tree, you're going to know exactly what you're doing.
	And there's circumstantial evidence suggests that Cooper prepared by bringing extra rope and that perhaps he used the stuff that wasn't found on the plane in Reno when it refueled, like a reserve parachute.
	He may have used a reserve parachute, not as a backup parachute, but as fabric with the ropes attached to it, the shroud lines of the parachute, to give him an extra 30, 40, 50 feet worth of material to shimmy himself down out of a tree.
	So at any rate, Casse quickly became the de facto technical expert to the FBI on parachutes.
	And at some point early in the investigation, he began talking to the public that he had provided the back shoots.
	Really?
	Yes.
	Now, there were four parachutes provided to D.B. Cooper.
	Cooper asked for two back shoots and he asked for two front shoots.
	The back shoots are the primary main parachutes and the front shoots are reserved belly packs that are smaller and less sophisticated.
	What a skydiver wears on his back is the main show.
	And Casse said he provided the back shoots.
	Now, in his story, when pressed on what kinds of parachutes he provided, he changed his story from time to time.
	And in fact, I interviewed him before he was murdered.
	I interviewed him four or five times, and he changed his story every time I talked to him.
	Sometimes he provided what's known in skydiving circles as an NB6.
	An NB6 stands for Navy Backpack 26-foot canopy.
	It's an emergency Navy pilot parachute.
	Most people don't know this, but pilots do not take parachute training as part of their pilot training.
	And the reason for that is too many pilots get too many injuries practicing how to skydive.
	So the thinking is pilots are better off if your plane's going down and you got to jump out and use your parachute.
	Here's the rip cord, you pull it and then start praying.
	And the odds are pretty good you're going to get down to the ground.
	And they're finding that most pilots will have at least a 90% successful ejection rate, even without any training whatsoever, which is another surprise that 90% of the air crews who had to bail out during World War II made it to the ground okay, even though none of them had any skydiving practice at all.
	And we're talking bombardiers, pilots, tailgunners, you know, belly gunners, navigators, all of that.
	You know, 90% of them all made it to the ground.
	Now the Germans picked them up and put them into concentration camps or whatever, but that's another story.
	But the idea that jumping out of a plane, even when it's tumbling upside down from 15, 20, 10,000 feet in the sky with German aircraft shooting at you is relatively a safe operation.
	Most of the guys are going to get down to the ground okay.
	And so that's been a real wake-up call, a real surprise to a lot of people.
	Now, for Casse, he became famous in D.B. Cooper world as the parachute expert.
	And when I called the FBI and had a parachute question, or anyone else called the FBI, we were directly referred by the FBI, directly referred to Earl Cassey.
	It was as if Cassey worked for the FBI.
	He was one of the guys.
	And we were all surprised to find out that when a journalist by the name of Jeffrey Gray in 2009 was given unprecedented access to FBI files to write A definitive D.B. Cooper book, which came out in 2011, known as Skyjack.
	Now, up until this point, very few of us had ever seen any official FBI documentation on the D.B. Cooper case.
	I hadn't, and I only know of one or two other people who had seen any of the files.
	But Jeffrey saw plenty of them and released a bombshell inadvertently.
	And he wrote that the back parachutes were provided to Northwest Orient for the D.B. Cooper skyjacking by a fellow by the name of Norman Hayden, who was an acrobatic pilot flying out of Renton, Washington, not too far away from SeaTac Airport, where the skyjacking and the ransom exchange took place.
	This completely contradicts what Earl Cossey had been saying for 40 years.
	So why would Earl Cossey say that?
	Now we're going deeper down the rabbit hole.
	Why?
	I think it's easy to assume that Earl Cossey liked the spotlight.
	He liked being famous.
	He was in lots of documentaries.
	Okay, so there was the possibility that he was exaggerating, but also the possibility that perhaps you think that somebody put him up to maintain that story?
	Here's what I think happened.
	And it's all circumstantial.
	I think Cassey was brought into the inner circle of the FBI's investigation and was asked to provide the facts and plausible explanations of how Cooper could have died in the jump, that he picked a bad parachute, that meant he didn't know what he was doing, the conditions were too rough.
	And Casi provided the FBI with rationales and technical explanations that would support the FBI's narrative and perspective that Cooper most likely died in the jump.
	In other words, people wanted a story.
	Journalists wanted the story.
	They wanted the backstory.
	They wanted the full story.
	And he was a guy who would give it to you.
	Yes.
	And the FBI wanted something to hang their speculations on that had some solidity to it.
	And so Casi provided them the platform upon which to build this narrative that Cooper didn't know what he was doing and ended up dead.
	But as you say, over the years you spoke to him, and his story, you say, was never the same twice.
	No, never was.
	And the last time I spoke with him, part of the, one of the unusual elements of Casi's story is that he had the parachutes in his home in a suburb of Seattle, but was too busy to run them down to the airport.
	So he put them in a taxi cab.
	And he has readily admitted, and he admitted to me, he sent them to the wrong airport.
	He didn't send them to SeaTac Airport.
	He sent them to Boeing Field, which is an airport right next door to SeaTac.
	And then from Boeing Field, they went from private car.
	Somebody drove them over to SeaTac Airport.
	So technically, when he said I packed the parachutes, the back parachutes, then he'd have been right.
	They just didn't get to him.
	Well, I asked Cassie directly.
	I said, how come you sent them to the wrong airport?
	And he said, F you and hung up on me.
	And that's the last time I ever spoke with him.
	And he was murdered three months later.
	Now, did he actually provide back parachutes?
	It's possible.
	Did Norman Hayden provide his back parachutes?
	Yes, Norman, Norman.
	There's a lot of documentation that verifies and corroborates that Norman Hayden provided the parachutes that he provided.
	So it's possible that there was four back parachutes laying around SeaTac Airport somewhere.
	And two of them may still be there in some closet somewhere gathering dust, 47 years worth of dust.
	We don't know.
	But as for Earl Cossey, what were the circumstances of his murder?
	I think his murder was in 2013.
	Correct.
	We're coming up on his anniversary date, April of 2013.
	So his reputation and his role in the investigation spiraled downward after 2011 and intensified.
	The questioning and scrutiny of what he said just mushroom amplified across D.B. Cooper World.
	And his reputation was in the toilet by 2013.
	His wife divorced him.
	He was living alone.
	And one night, he is murdered.
	He's hit with blunt force trauma in his head.
	And his body is found by his daughter, his adult daughter, two days after his murder.
	And he's found on the floor of his garage.
	And that's all we know.
	That's all that the police have ever told us.
	And the family refuses to give us any more information.
	The murder is still unsolved.
	And it has been bumped up to the major crimes case for the Kings County Sheriff's Office.
	And their mom, they're not talking about anything.
	They won't return my phone calls.
	And there's been a lot of speculation that Cassey was murdered to shut him up, that he had become a liability to the official FBI story that Cooper used a bad parachute and didn't know what he was doing.
	And this was a way to Cut all those loose strings.
	It's a pretty drastic thing to claim, though, isn't it?
	It's very drastic.
	And I have absolutely no corroborating information.
	It is total speculation, all built on circumstantial evidence.
	But it's reasonable and it's plausible.
	But is it factual?
	Is it true?
	I don't know.
	And that goes for an awful lot of the elements in this case, which makes it, in fact, all the more intriguing.
	There was another D.B. Cooper type of case, a copycat after D.B. Cooper, performed by a man called McCoy.
	And the person apparently who arrested McCoy, because this guy was caught and, you know, did time for it, was sat on from the very highest levels not to make any kind of connection between McCoy and D.B. Cooper.
	And there are still people, I mean, that list of 10 possible D.B. Coopers, McCoy is on that list.
	There are still people who say that this man was D.B. Cooper and he was carrying out another one.
	But for some reason, J. Edgar Hoover, at the very top of the FBI, didn't want anybody making a connection between D.B. Cooper and McCoy.
	That sounds really odd.
	Yeah, it is.
	Interestingly enough, we're talking about this because the Travel Channel last Sunday came out with a D.B. Cooper episode, which really looks into the McCoy angle of the Cooper case.
	That's how strong the belief is in some circles, particularly in the FBI, particularly in the Salt Lake City division of the FBI, who still believe that Richard McCoy, who lived and died, lived in Provo, Utah, and did his skyjacking there and was apprehended in Utah.
	They believe that McCoy was D.B. Cooper doing a second skyjacking and doing it for more money.
	There's a lot of similarities.
	McCoy basically recapitulated the D.B. Cooper skyjacking almost to the nth degree, but with refinements and improvements.
	So why wouldn't the FBI and others want to make a connection with this man, whether they'd be right or wrong, simply to say, well, case closed then?
	Because saying this is the guy who got away, but this time he didn't get away?
	The whys, the whys.
	Hard to discern what the whys might be.
	I can tell you what I know.
	The special agent in charge of the Salt Lake City office in 1972, when Richard McCoy stole his airplane, is a fellow by the name of Russ Callum.
	And Russ is a true believer that McCoy was Cooper doing a second skyjacking.
	And a lot of his staff believe that.
	And it's intergenerational because a lot of people in Seattle, in Salt Lake City, still believe that.
	There's a lot of strange FBI doings surrounding this speculation, this theory.
	Callum, two things came up.
	Callum, two things in particular.
	Callum came up with a lot of physical evidence that prove that McCoy's, that disproved McCoy's alibi.
	Callum proved that McCoy was in the Las Vegas area and not home in Provo, Utah over the Thanksgiving weekend in 1971.
	For reasons that have never been explained, the Seattle office, which is in charge of the Cooper case, totally refutes Callum's physical evidence and proof that McCoy was in Las Vegas and could have had the opportunity to get on a plane and fly from Las Vegas to Portland to be D.B. Cooper and skyjack Flight 305.
	And is that just a territorial dispute between two conflicting teams of investigating officers in different places who were working on different tracks?
	It could be.
	But the Seattle office has never explained why they refute their brother's findings down in Salt Lake City.
	The second thing that puts a shadow over all of this is after Callum collared McCoy, he turned 55 and had to age out from the FBI.
	So he had to retire.
	He had to retire.
	Hoover stepped in and put a dud in charge of the Salt Lake City office, in effect, shutting down the McCoy Cooper investigation.
	And Callum never specifically accuses Hoover of intentionally interfering and shutting down the McCoy Cooper case, but he infers it strongly.
	And if you read his book, his feelings on the matter are very clear.
	There's a third element to this.
	Callum and his co-writer, Bernie Rhodes, have been legally enjoined against selling the rights to their story to move to Hollywood.
	So they've written a book, and the book is allowed to be legally distributed, but the publishing rights cannot be sold to any other publisher, nor can the use of those rights be used for any filmmaking or documentary.
	Is that because there are restrictions on what somebody who'd been in the service, that's Callum, could actually put out there?
	So they've allowed him to get a book out there, but they said when it came to a movie, no.
	Exactly.
	One other thing that I hadn't heard, Apparently, some of the money subsequently turned up.
	Is that right?
	Yeah, about at this place called Tina Bar, about $6,000 worth of money has been found, and there's plenty of mystery about this, too.
	And it again goes to sloppy police work and inefficiency.
	How the money got there, the money was found in 1980, so we're talking about eight or nine years after the skyjacking.
	And the money that was found was found in three, there were three different money finds, apparently.
	And the first one is incontrovertible.
	A kid found three bundles of money slightly buried in the beach sand, and one day he was running his hands through the sand and found the bundles.
	And they were pretty weathered.
	And that's known as the money find.
	It's the only incontrovertible physical evidence in the D.B. Cooper case because the serial numbers matched up with the money that was given to Cooper.
	Now, when the FBI found out about the bundles, they went down a couple of days later and started digging in the beach sand around where the bundles were found, and they found more money.
	But it was all in itsy bitsy pieces.
	Now, they found handfuls of money that were two, three inches in diameter.
	And there is video evidence showing the FBI finding these shards, as they were called, and being put into plasticine evidence envelopes for later storage.
	It's believed that there were at least six of these envelopes and possibly more, maybe 20.
	No one knows where those plasticine envelopes are today.
	They're missing.
	So we have more missing evidence.
	And the only thing that is in the evidence of these shards are two plastic cases, like large medicine boxes that you would put pills in, that have copious amounts of what looks like paper dust, which are remnants of $20 bills.
	And they don't even get to the eighth inch diameter degree.
	So we're talking like millimeters big.
	Very, very small stuff.
	It really looks like paper dust.
	And that's all we have.
	Then, so we have controversy there on the secondary fine, the FBI money fine.
	More troubling is the guy who led the money search for the FBI.
	It was a field agent by the name of Ralph Himmelsbach.
	Himmelsbach retired.
	Again, he aged out.
	He was 55, and he aged out two weeks after the money find.
	And nobody else in the FBI went looking for more money along the beach.
	Apparently, I talked to the guy who was responsible for the D.B. Cooper investigation out of the Portland office afterwards.
	And he told me that he did not, he did not, and he did not send any teams walking down the beach to talk to fishermen, guys running boats, kids playing on the beach, or people walking their dogs or anything like that.
	Hey, have you seen any money?
	You know, you see anything washing up or anything like that.
	Nothing.
	He told me that his role, his perspective on his duties was passive.
	That if people came in and they had a clue or a piece of evidence or a question, he would respond, but that would be it.
	And he did not go out looking.
	Well, that's pretty astonishing, isn't it?
	Bearing in mind that we're not talking about 30 years after the event.
	We're talking about 10 years after the event.
	Bingo, bingo.
	So into that lurch, private citizens have gone looking and asking people.
	And a researcher by the name of Galen Cook, who is one of the most robust D.B. Cooper researchers, has gone talking to people.
	He's put 50 grand of his own money into trying to solve the D.B. Cooper case.
	And he told me, Galen told me that he met some men who were teenagers back in that day.
	So in 1980, during this money find period, they were in high school.
	And after school, they would go down to the Columbia River and they'd be fishing.
	And that they found on at least one occasion a corner of a $20 bill that had the 20 on it, which is interesting because on the large bills that were found by the kid, that three bundles, there are no corners.
	So is that coincidence?
	I don't know.
	Are those fishing guys telling the truth?
	Or do they just want to be part of the show?
	I don't know.
	But you have three different elements to the money find.
	And that's where we stand today.
	And nobody to this day can give a plausible, reasonable, factual explanation of how the money got there or when it got to the beach.
	There is even more deep strangeness about this story, and our time now is limited.
	But there is a suggestion here, and you sent me some points that you wanted to explore this time, that FBI agents and maybe some of those people who in subsequent years came forward and said, I'm D.B. Cooper, and it's like, I'm Spartacus, I'm D.B. Cooper, may have been somehow mind-controlled.
	That sounds one step beyond the pale.
	Why would anybody think that?
	Well, the elephant in the room is called MKUltra.
	It's a long-standing, very comprehensive, very large-scale mind and mood control and memory control operation that was conducted by the U.S. military.
	It was very much underway when the D.B. Cooper case happened.
	Very much underway.
	It was in its full glory when D.B. Cooper was stealing his airplane.
	Now, so we know that his background.
	And for those folks who may not be familiar with MK Ultra, we're talking the Manchurian candidate scenarios here.
	The Manchurian candidate movies give you a good anecdotal understanding of how pharmaceuticals or behavioral conditioning, sleep deprivation, LSD, surgery, neurological surgeries can alter your ability to make decisions, remember what you're doing, maintain full cognizance of your identity, and all of that.
	And the whole purpose of this was to create super duper warriors who could do special operations, be fearless, and if necessary, their minds could be turned off or their memories could be turned off.
	So after an event, their memory could be switched off.
	And so if they were caught, they wouldn't remember what they did or they wouldn't have PTSD or anything like that.
	So it's the perfect crime.
	Exactly.
	So on paper, this is a perfect military training program.
	However, so what does it do with FBI?
	How does this impact D.B. Cooper?
	The first step that we move into in the D.B. Cooper case is we have to go back to the book that Callum and Rhodes wrote.
	And when they wrote it, it was the 1980s.
	They wrote it a couple years after the money was found.
	So the skyjacking is 10, 11, 12 years old.
	They interviewed all of the FBI agents that were involved in the evidence retrieval in Reno.
	And Callum and Rhodes write in their book that the FBI agents that they talked to seemed to, this is their words, not mine, seemed to be under the influence of strange post-hypnotic suggestions when they interviewed these guys.
	And that when they talked, and those were the guys that were on the plane conducting specific evidence retrieval, when they talked to other FBI agents that were involved in ground security, perimeter security, that kind of thing, crowd control, they found that those agents had memory loss or their memories were fuzzy.
	And you have to remember, this is the most significant criminal case of these guys' law enforcement careers.
	And they can't remember diddly squat?
	You got to be kidding me.
	So that's the first evidence of the application of MKUltra kinds of influences.
	Were these agents zapped or influenced in some manner or whatever?
	Digging a little further down the rabbit hole, you have all these guys who are confessing to being D.B. Cooper, who in their bones feel they are D.B. Cooper.
	And I'm specifically talking about Barb Dayton, who not only believed that she was D.B. Cooper, but she had a sex change operation and used to be Bobby Dayton.
	So her personal identity was really flip-flopped.
	Not only did she get a sex change, she also got a personality change.
	When she was Bobby, she was a tough customer.
	And when she became Barb, she became a librarian at the University of Washington Research Library and was known as a very witty, generous, kind, helpful individual.
	And then she started talking about being D.B. Cooper.
	You have Dwayne Weber, who supposedly confessed on his deathbed.
	Then you also have Richard McCoy, who seems to be very involved in the Cooper skyjacking, at least indirectly.
	And the question is, was he involved in some kind of group Cooper exercise?
	Was McCoy part of a ground team that helped Cooper extract himself from the woods, help him get down from the tree, give him a cup of coffee, bring first aid kits, give him some dry clothes, whatever, put him in a four by four and whisk him away out of the landing zone.
	McCoy, after the skyjacking, the Cooper skyjacking, and before his own skyjacking, came into a mysterious amount of $6,000 worth of money out of the blue and took his family, his whole family on a vacation back to North Carolina to see mom and dad and the cousins and everybody else and blew $6,000 and paid his credit card with cash.
	But Callum proves this, and the FBI in Seattle discounts it.
	But where did McCoy learn the techniques and the skills of Cooper's skyjacking such that he could refine them?
	It almost suggests that McCoy was tutored by a puppet master who was in charge of skyjackings.
	And also suggests, although we don't have definitive answers about this, that this was some kind of composite operation.
	It wasn't just a crime, one-off crime, but it was some kind of composite operation on multiple levels involving multiple People for some reason that we don't know.
	Exactly.
	One of the reasons why something like this could have happened, was this a rogue operation?
	Himmelsbach looks into this.
	Himmelsbach wrote a book.
	Right after Callum wrote his book, Himmelsbach wrote his book.
	And Himmelsbach really points out how airline safety changed for the better after the Cooper case.
	And he really is very specific about the kinds of legislation that were enacted in the months and year or two immediately after the Cooper case that began to get us metal detectors, identification checks, baggage checks, and things like that, which really got us on the road to the TSA and airline safety that we have today, airline security, with security lines and things like that.
	You have to remember, back in the day when Cooper walked on his plane, you could carry a submachine gun on and no one would say anything about it.
	They may raise their eyebrows, but it was legal to carry a submachine gun onto the plane.
	So where does this leave us then?
	Leaves us with a good story.
	It leaves us with lots of dangling clues.
	It leaves us with lots of work to be done about really drilling into these legislative changes.
	How much happened legislatively?
	Who were the political leaders advocating for this kind of change?
	What was the role of aviation executives?
	What were the guys who run these airlines and were really at the tip of the spear in terms of the skyjacking?
	Because they had to deal with hundreds of skyjackers and the loss of hundreds of planes and the impacts on the morale and the safety.
	And there's an untold story of all of the hundreds of flight attendants that had guns put to their heads, had to sit next to guys with bombs and hand grenades and things like this for hours, being held hostage for all of these skyjackings.
	Because there were hundreds, at least 300, from the end of the 1960s to the end of the early 1970s.
	I think the last, the wave of skyjackings ended in 72 or 73.
	And really ever since then, we haven't really had many skyjackings worldwide, except for the Middle East terrorists starting in the 70s and 80s and all of that, the Palestinian stuff, the PLO and yada, yada, yada.
	But the golden age of skyjacking in the United States pretty much ended by 1972.
	And it gives us, I think, a more realistic view of the FBI and the limitations and a better understanding of what some of the elements are that give rise to the charge of deep state conspiracies and
	the role of Hollywood to shape people's perspectives of law enforcement.
	And it reinforces my belief that the primary job of law enforcement is not to catch crime.
	The primary job of law enforcement is to tell the media good stories on the 11 o'clock news so that everybody gets a good night's sleep.
	That's a big claim.
	Yeah.
	So the next day, once everybody wakes up and is relatively rested, then we'll go find some, then we'll catch some crooks.
	But, you know, in the meantime, everybody's got to go to bed tonight and not have any nightmares.
	That's our number one job.
	So the number one job of, I think, law enforcement is mental health.
	Then we get into legalities and criminology.
	Okay, so at the end of this conversation, we are left then with two possibilities.
	One, this was a crime that was very cleverly put together by somebody who was connected in many ways, perhaps to the aerospace military, whatever.
	We've, you know, plenty of evidence for that.
	And was ham-fistedly investigated by investigators, which is, you say, not an uncommon thing.
	Or it was all of those things, but plus there was something else motivating it.
	Yes.
	How are you going to take forward your investigation to see which of these it may have been?
	When I started this 10 years ago, I thought by now I was going to get a phone call from somebody saying, Mr. Smith, you don't know me, but I know you.
	And we need to have a cup of coffee sometime.
	And I thought I was going to get a story from some FBI agent that would connect more of the dots for me.
	And that has not happened.
	I also thought that by now, some of my efforts to build relationships with the FBI agents who are still alive that were involved in the case, specifically Nick O'Hara, who apprehended McCoy, or John Detlore,
	who was in the Seattle office and participated in the initial Cooper investigation and went on to write a very comprehensive and very well-written history of the FBI.
	I thought fellas like him would want to partner up with me.
	And that hasn't happened.
	Well, that could just be because you've been very critical of the organization.
	I don't think I'm being critical.
	I think I'm being realistic.
	When they do something well, I praise them.
	When they do something boneheaded, I say that was stupid.
	And I think that's reasonable.
	I think I'm being fair.
	I'm not whitewashing anyone.
	One of the things you suggest, and we're running out of minutes, but I didn't expect this to be part of the story.
	One of the Tools that might be used to try and get some answers is something that I've talked about on the shows that I do quite a lot with people like Major Ed Dames.
	That's remote viewing.
	Do you think that remote viewing could be used on the D.B. Cooper case?
	Definitely.
	And I've already started doing it.
	I've tried to do remote viewing.
	There's a chapter in my book on my efforts to do remote viewing.
	Remote viewing is tough.
	Remote viewing makes me physically ill.
	And I have asked, I have reached out to professional remote viewers.
	I haven't reached out to Ed Dames, but I have reached out to David Morehouse and also to Joe McMonagall, who have written books about this and run workshops on this.
	I say, let's, have you guys looked into D.B. Cooper?
	And if not, you want to join with me and let's get something going.
	And they have refused to join with me.
	And I find that unsatisfying.
	I find that very, at the very least, sad.
	And if I dwell on it, then I become suspect.
	Why aren't they talking to me?
	Why don't they want to use their skills to find out what happened in the DD4?
	Maybe I can't speak for them and neither can you, but maybe they've got other things to do, but you need to continue with that.
	There are other organizations who do remote viewing, and if you want to do it that way.
	But the problem with remote viewing is that remote viewing is never going to give you an affidavit.
	It's not going to give you definitive proof.
	It'll give you information.
	And that information may be of use.
	It may take you off on another path, or it may not.
	It's not an exact tool from what I am aware.
	Yeah, that's exactly my understanding, too.
	And I think Joe McMonacle has publicly stated that even on a good day, his findings with remote viewing are only 20% on.
	And the real question is, which 20% is true and which is the 80%.
	And it's also apparently, I mean, we haven't got time to go into a conversation about remote viewing, but it's hard to delineate exactly when in time things happened.
	You know, you're seeing a sequence of events, but it's hard to say when was that and how did that connect with this?
	But it's a fascinating angle, and I never thought we'd be talking about remote viewing in connection with this.
	Bruce, thank you very much for this new conversation.
	Please keep in touch with me if anything else transpires or if you plan to update the book.
	And for my listener, who might well want to buy this book, what's the book called?
	The book is called D.B. Cooper and the FBI, a case study of America's only unsolved skyjacking.
	It's available at Amazon.
	You give them a holler and they'll send one out to you.
	I think you ought to do an audio book of this, but that's just a personal thought.
	Yes, you're right.
	I should and I hope to one day.
	That's 50 hours worth of book reading that I'm going to have to dedicate somewhere.
	It's a useful skill to learn.
	Bruce, we're out of time.
	Thank you very much indeed.
	My pleasure, Howard.
	Always a pleasure.
	Bruce Smith, and I'll put a link to him and his work on D.B. Cooper on my website, theunexplained.tv.
	This edition has been recorded with Old Faithful, and every so often I just feel that I have to get out.
	And the podcasters and the Anoraks, as we call them in the UK, will understand this.
	I have a favourite American production Shur SM58 gigging microphone.
	And although it isn't the last word in concert high fidelity, it's got a bit of a tone about it.
	And it's probably, I'd say it's nearer 40 years old than 30.
	I would say it's probably 35 years of age.
	Rather like myself, he laughed.
	But every so often I just have to wheel it out and do a show with it because nothing sounds quite like it, especially when you get nice and close to it.
	So if you think the show has sounded slightly different, it's because of the return of the vintage American-produced SM58.
	A little bit of Americana here.
	And sorry, if you're not into these things, I do apologize for going on like that.
	I'll tell you this, though, more great guests in the pipeline here at The Unexplained.
	I'd love to hear from you.
	Go to the website theunexplained.tv.
	Get in touch if you'd like to tell me what you think about the show and all the other stuff.
	So until next, we meet here on The Unexplained Online.
	My name is Howard Hughes.
	I am in London in the springtime.
	And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
	Thank you very much.
	Take care.

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