I was looking over the Cooper bills and noticed something…all things considered they appear to be in pretty good condition. In other words, they’re not discolored or warped. They are not simply balls of pulp or mush. In fact, we have individual crisp bills white in color and still quite legible, even the finest detail.
This got me thinking, if the cash had been submerged on the bottom of the Columbia River, embedded in muck for three years, then violently sucked off the river bottom and deposited on Tena Bar in a mess of slurry, wouldn’t they look much worse?
We have seen experiments involving burying money in sand for a period of time. The hope being that these experiments would help answer how the money arrived on Tena Bar—buried by Cooper, dredge theory, etc. That said, we can attack this problem from another direction.
Why not submerge a packet of cash, in the Columbia, for three years? Is it not possible that after three years we’d be left with little more than a discolored blob of pulp that would be difficult to identify as individual, clearly legible, bills like the Cooper cash? If it does this would put to rest the dredge theory, would it not?
When I’m in Portland for the conference I’m going to start such an experiment. Ironically, the results, ready in three years, would be just in time for the 50th Anniversary of the hijacking and the 2021 DB Cooper Conference. To that end, if anyone has any suggestions or input to make certain that the experiment is carried out properly please let me know.
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