Parts of several theories, not all my own. We are many.
Dan Cooper was in the Pacific Northwest testing the vulnerabilities of the country’s transportation infrastructure. The bomb in the briefcase had traveled to several different places and exposed vulnerabilities in different areas, to include air travel.
He was doing a job. He was calm, he was nice to the crew, he let the passengers go. He was not worried about snipers.
It was a good act, complete with a grudge. The grudge? One might look at mergers of transportation corporations in the Northeast in the late 1960’s, and a big bankruptcy that followed in 1970 in the same industry. How many people lost jobs?
It’s doubtful that Dan Cooper was a paratrooper. If you were blown off the drop zone at Salerno or jumped at night into France, the last thing you want to do in your later years is parachute out of a passenger plane. You’ve have had your fill. A parachutist knows just enough to realize that this was not a good jump to make. The speed, at night, the weather, the temperature, into mountains and forest. Dan Cooper knew just enough to be dangerous. Maybe the plan was to never jump in the first place, and then something or someone changed it.
Dan Cooper said McChord Air Force Base was a 20-minute drive away. Why not say Fort Lewis was a 20-minute drive away? Who talks in terms of air bases and not ground bases? How about Army Air Corps? Even a plane mechanic or airfield worker would have learned the basics of a parachute. Maybe he knew the West Coast of the United States, further west than Washington/Oregon. Maybe he had been there before, when he gave up some of the best years of his life like so many others in the Greatest Generation.
How’d he get to the airport? How did he get away? Where would titanium be found outside of production? Titanium has to go somewhere, it had to be transported. Trains. The dynamite sticks? Railroad flares. Maybe he knew a lot more about trains than just being a passenger. Maybe it was in his blood. Did anyone ever check the trains?
What are the landmarks that one could see outside of an airplane window at night? Interstate 5, the Lake Merwin Dam, and the main line of the newly consolidated Burlington Northern Railroad that paralleled Interstate 5, and that just happened to have branches right near the suspected drop zone.
He would have practiced his jump. Probably on the West Coast in the summer/fall of 1971. Somewhere there is a list of names. FOIA put this one on a silver platter for someone. Complete with the Raleigh cigarettes.
The composites all look different. The color ones will be the best match. The eyes and the hair will likely be indisputable. Maybe a piece of Bill Mitchell’s testimony will fit. Maybe the nose is different. Composite sketches are never perfect. The witnesses said the real person looked older than the sketches and that his hair looked dyed.
There are many ways someone can have a neutral accent and not live in Canada or the Midwest or the Pac Northwest.
The tie? Maybe he leaves it as a calling card to let people know he accomplished his mission. The tie would have absorbed particles during transit or transport of materials, he didn’t have to work in the aircraft industry or industrial chemicals. Or maybe it really did come from a pawn shop.
Some observations on Max Gunther from the articles. LeClair talked to Gunther and changed facts, and then Gunther changed facts when he wrote the book. Throw in Clara and her story and you have many dots to connect, but there is a chance that some of the dots will connect. Remember, someone could have used a friend’s life story to throw us off. I’m told I should read it. My copy is coming soon. Some think it is the Holy Grail. They say the birthdays match up. Robert DeNiro was more popular in the 1970’s than Ben Gazzara.
Dan Cooper made air travel safer; security in our transportation infrastructure improved. Hundreds of newspaper articles were written, books, magazines, TV shows, movies, t-shirts. This gave purpose to so many people’s lives. People made thousands of dollars, maybe millions. Maybe the money never appeared because it went right back where it started (minus a little bit that got lost in a creek near Battle Ground or was purposely dropped further upstream years later). Maybe he was paid a small sum, enough for a nice dinner with his wife, then he went right back to work, and then a few years later passed away peacefully in his sleep. Some people know who he is.
Rest in peace Dan Cooper. If a debt was owed to society, you paid it off long ago.
