I'm afraid I'm missing something regarding this entire debate. More to the point, what the hell does this have to do with the price of tea in China? How does paper-bands versus no-paper-bands get you any closer to determining Cooper's identity? Is this really going to help settle whether the money washed up on shore and buried itself? Or, if Cooper survived or died? It seems to me you're getting caught up in the weeds.
The reality is that there is ample evidence to argue those points outside of whether there were paper bands or not.
Put another way:
1) If you believe the FBI flight path and jump zone are accurate, human intervention was involved with the Tena Bar money.
2) If you believe the money washed up on Tena Bar and self buried itself you are asking for a lot of circumstances to fall into place perfectly otherwise this becomes impossible.
3) If you believe in the dredge theory a lot of explaining has to accompany that too considering Tom Kaye's fine work regarding Tena Bar.
In my diseased mind, the fact that there was no body found, no parachute found, no attache case found, no bank bag found, no shroud lines found, not a single $20 bill found blowing in the wind, no missing persons reports, and three packets (the Ingram's description of what they discovered) of cash buried with degraded rubber bands still intact, suggests to me that Cooper survived and buried those three packets for some reason.
With this in mind, suspects may be vetted irrespective of paper bands.
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