Georger:   You are now claiming that I claim that Mr. H was in charge of the DB Cooper case. That is totally not correct Here is what I said from my post: " The Cossey chute story was what he told Ralph (as the FBI agent) but it is not true as a lot of the info the FBI was told by Cossey.".

Also, I first met Sheridan Peterson in 1961 when he stayed at my home for one month. That is ten years before Norjack and why are you trying to confuse my story? You should be working to better understand what took place. Have you read Bruce's new book yet? He quote's my information right on about the case.

About brown cosmetic contact lens: My Yacht Club friend "Jim Erickson" tells me the cosmetic lens were available in hard contact form and not very expensive in 1971. Also, a pair of home made cosmetic lens could also have been made by using a pair of clear hard contacts, sprayed with brown model airplane lacquer (masking off a small round place to see through). Jim's father started Erickson Lab and was in business before Norjack and he knows the business. He says soft lens were just becoming popular at that time and the Lab could provide even a tinted (to make finding s lost lens easier) lens, so brown hard lens would have been used in those days to make cosmetic lens. 

Attached is the best photo I have of Sheridan from the Boeing News file working photo which was used to make the add for the  new Boeing Skydiving Club.

Bob Sailshaw

So how many Cooper copycats survived their jumps?  Did any Cooper copycats go "splat"?

So how many Cooper copycats survived their jumps?  Did any Cooper copycats go "splat"?

All who jumped, survived:

1. Robb Heady
2. Martin McNally (didn't know how to put on his chute)
3. Richard La Point (January in Colorado and no jacket or sweater- but he had his cowboy boots!)
4. Richard McCoy
5. Frederick Hahneman

No splats!

For those who haven't reached Chapter 29 in my book, yet, here is the relevant info:

Chapter 29


Copycats



At the risk of becoming lost in the fog of conspiracy looking for evidence of group activity, we need to look more closely at the copycats if for no other reason than some in the FBI, such as Ralph Himmelsbach, consider DB Cooper to be one.
“You have to remember that Cooper was a copycat,” he told me when I visited him at his home in 2011.
Himmelsbach claimed that the first skyjacker to demand a ransom and parachute was not Cooper, but a fellow he called “Gaylord.”
However, Ralph was incorrect. The first skydiving extortionist was actually named Paul Cini, and he hijacked an Air Canada flight out of Calgary, Alberta two weeks before Cooper’s caper.
Nevertheless, Himmelsbach is spot-on with his general analysis.
“With each new skyjacking, the skyjackers improved their techniques,” Ralph said, echoing fellow FBI agent Russ Calame’s evaluation of McCoy’s effort.
Along those lines, I was surprised to hear Himmelsbach confirm Calame’s conclusion that McCoy was not home in Provo during the Cooper skyjacking, because it meant Ralph was willing to hold an opinion opposed to the current view held by the FBI.
“We did look at McCoy in the Cooper case, but he (McCoy) was in Las Vegas when the Cooper skyjacking took place,” Ralph declared.
But what was McCoy doing in Las Vegas during the Cooper hijacking? Ralph!  I
muttered quietly, but was unable to pursue because Ralph’s dinner company arrived.
I’d also like Ralph to amplify his perspective on the copycats because he is the only one I know to have stated that there were twenty Cooper-esque skyjackers in the months following Norjak. Other published accounts say a dozen or so, and I have been able to find fourteen. This haze casts a pall of mystery over the topic.
Nevertheless, most authors talk about the four primary copycats: McCoy, Robb Heady, Martin McNally, and Frederick Hahneman. All made it to the ground safely, even McNally even though he had never parachuted before, which belies the proposition that the Cooper jump was too dangerous to be successful.
But the essential question remains: were they a group? Did any of them know DB Cooper or Paul Cini? Were they coached in any manner? How did these skyjackings evolve, as Himmelsbach has observed. Was it an organic process and achieved by skyjackers merely reading newspaper accounts of previous hijackings, or were they part of somebody’s deliberate plan?
Frankly, there is not enough information available to the public to make any
 
determination on that question, and it reveals some of the limitations of open-sourced sleuthing—we just don’t have enough muscle to unearth these kinds of facts.
Nevertheless, this inquiry received a shot of adrenaline from an unexpected source: the Washington State Historical Museum in Tacoma. In 2013, they opened a major exhibit on DB Cooper and mentioned that DB Cooper had thirteen copycats. I asked the WSHM to provide me with a list of these Cooper-esque hijackers, and they gave me s few names I had never seen anywhere else.
Their primary source is the website called “Skyjacker of the Day—a Hundred Days, A Hundred Skyjackers,” a site originally developed to build interest in the June 2013 launch of the book, The Skies Belong to Us—Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijackings, by Brendan Koerner.


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Koener’s book is an overview of the entire skyjacking phenomena and portrays
a wonderful subtext for the DB Cooper episode. Koerner’s tome is wrapped around a lengthy narrative of the hijacking of Western Flight 701, performed by two fugitives— Roger Holder and Cathy Kerkow—and includes a juicy romance, Black Panther politics and a dicey escape to Algiers.
But one of the most intriguing aspects of Koerner’s work is showing how many skyjackings were occurring in the United States in the early 1970s—hundreds—and how they even overlapped, with multiple hijackings in one day and even involving the same airport. I was astonished to learn that one of the Cooper copycats, Robb Heady, hijacked his plane on the same day as Holder and Kerkow, and in fact Heady directed his plane to SFO just as their Western 401 was taking off for Algeria!
The following is a list of what we know about bona fide copycats—the proviso being that a Cooper copycat has to demand a ransom and use a parachute to escape.


1.  Paul Cini…    Air Canada 812…    11. 13. 71
2.  DB Cooper…   Northwest Orient 305…    11. 24. 71
3.  Everett Holt…    Northwest Orient 734…    12. 24. 71
4.  Billy Hurst, Jr.… Braniff 38…       1. 12. 72
5. Richard LaPoint… Hughes Air West 800…   1. 20. 72
6.  Richard McCoy… United 855…       4. 7. 72
7.  Stanley Spreck… Pacific Southwest 942        4. 9 72
8.  Frederick Hahneman… Eastern 175…    5. 5. 72
9.  “Lomas”…    Ecuadoriana de Aviacion…5. 22. 72
10. Robb Heady…    United 239…       6. 2. 72
11. Martin McNally… American 119…    6. 23. 72
12. Daniel Carre…    Hughes Airwest 775…    6. 30. 72
 13. Francis Goodell… Pacific Southwest 389… 7. 6. 72
14. Melvin Fisher… American 633…       7. 12. 72


Bold type indicates the skyjacker made it to the ground successfully.
The rest were apprehended by the FBI or flight crews before they could jump.

Geoffrey's interview on Author Talk is fantastic. I hadn't seen this one before.  Thanks.

GG is so smooth!  A real inspiration.

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So how many Cooper copycats survived their jumps?  Did any Cooper copycats go "splat"?

All who jumped, survived:

1. Robb Heady
2. Martin McNally (didn't know how to put on his chute)
3. Richard La Point (January in Colorado and no jacket or sweater- but he had his cowboy boots!)
4. Richard McCoy
5. Frederick Hahneman

No splats!

For those who haven't reached Chapter 29 in my book, yet, here is the relevant info:

Great answer Bruce.  Thanks for not answering the question like a douche-bag.  I find it interesting that all the other jumpers survived.  But on the other hand, it seems they all were apprehended soon afterward.  So if the Cooper suspect survived because everybody else survived, wouldn't it stand to reason he would have been captured immediately because everybody else was?

The problem with saying Cooper should have been caught like all the others is that the lessons learned (i.e. the pressure bump) from the Cooper hijacking were used to pinpoint all the later jumpers. The lack of proper ground coverage in Cooper's case led to an overwhelming use of ground coverage and searching in the following cases (except the guy who jumped into the jungle, he later just gave himself up). The search coverage was so solid, that in McCoy's case, he was one of the men searching for himself.

(And McCoy blabbed to someone else, that never helps.)

This is all an example of the problem of induction. We can't assume that every hijacking involving a parachute will play out the same way. They are all quite different. Instead, we have to ask ourselves, probabilistically, what was Cooper's likely outcome. Parachutes, even in bad weather with inexperienced jumpers doing their deeds at night, are very effective lifesaving tools. It's difficult imagining Cooper not pulling the ripcord.

Georger:  Your comment is "It makes me sometimes wonder just how close the huge investigation looking for Cooper may have come to actually finding Cooper, or some major piece of evidence, but just missed it by a hair? Such is the romance of the Cooper case."

My answer is:  "The DNA evidence on the four letters sent to the Newspapers and under the stamps and envelope flaps when compared with what the FBI has from Sheridan Peterson will lead directly to solving the case as it would shoot down his phoney alibi about being in Nepal at the time of Norjak. That is how close the FBI were to solving the case and now they are on HOLD or STAND DOWN and will never solve it. It would not cost much to get the DNA from the letters and compare with Sheridan's."  What they got from the tie is useless and they know it.

Bob Saillshaw

Immediate capture is not a given, not even for the copycatters.

McNally was in local police custody that night, but released.  He was then arrested three days later after being betrayed by a buddy in Michigan, who told the cops who, what, where and when.

Robb was surrounded by 150 local cops that night.

Hahnemann jumped who knows where in the jungle, and then turned himself in 30 days later.

McCoy had an estimated 200 cops looking for him in the scrub around Provo and they still missed him.

LaPoint was a sitting duck because he was in the middle of a snow-covered field with an orange parachute. Plus the chaff in the chute alerted the FAA fixed wing circling the area

What does the SR 71 tell us?

Good question, G. To me, it is a "Hail Mary" pass designed primarily for public relations. Also, the typical weather of the PNW and its constant cloud cover shows the limitations of even the most sophisticated equipment. Now, I suppose, we have thermal imaging down to an exact science, so to speak....