Part 52, page 88

Transcript

The scan is the source; the transcript is machine-generated from it.

Background and Skills

Although he was not a career military officer, X served in the military -- in the Air Force -- during the [REDACTED] He was familiar with Boeing 727s, with their rear steps that could be lowered from the inside, as these were used in Vietnam at the time he was in the Air Force.

X learned to fly when he was in the Air Force, and ever since then he has had a private pilot's license and has continued to fly.

X learned to fly when he was at [REDACTED] in northern California, and would have been familiar with other bases on the West Coast (such as McChord near Seattle). He had visited Portland, and in flying would have used aviation maps of the region. Thus, the whole locale of the skyjacking would have been familiar to him, not only personally but technically.

X did not take parachute training or jump when he was in the Air Force, but later in civilian life (still in the 1960s) he learned to skydive and became proficient at it (as he does in most things he undertakes).

X became familiar with the woods when he was a young boy. He did a lot of long-distance hiking with his father in rugged terrain (the Smoky Mountains). Later, after being an Eagle Scout, he was accepted into a little-known, more advanced Scouting rank called the Order of the Arrow. (To achieve this rank, you had to undergo a wilderness survival test, in which you were given a compass, one match, and an egg, and nothing more, and were left in a remote area of the woods; you had to spend the night alone in the woods, cook the egg, and then find your way out unaided.) He has remained familiar with being in the woods ever since. He is very self-reliant.

X also has good knowledge of chemistry and explosives.

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Opportunity

At this time, more than 30 years after the crime, we cannot reconstruct X's whereabouts at Thanksgiving 1971. Because we have been investigating X with regard to other unrelated crimes, we have developed an extensive time-line for him, going back to the 1960s. [REDACTED] is something of a pack rat and has always kept boxes of old records, so we have been able to determine X's whereabouts on a significant percentage of past dates. However, our records show nothing for the period from November 23-28, 1971.

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DB Cooper-2170[1]

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2.

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b6 b7C