DB Cooper. what’s in a name – and it was Dan wasn’t it? the question’s the same.
But that name is not the name. Your own the prize some seek for fame.
That name too, a clue so many missed for so long after you said so long, now so long ago.
But clue upon clue has not led us to you. So many convinced that they know what is true.
Stories abound. Theories persist. Ironic panoply for the man under canopy.
What is evident from the evidence - Twenties in the dirt, a tie, Skychefs matches, no footprints in the sky, Confessors and suspects, professors and convicts, exes and wives, Secret lives, skydives, airlines, sleuths, truths.
All this and still you fall toward time’s abyss.
Dan Cooper, so bold. Your trail already cold, before it grew old.
Your freezing time in the sky, now time frozen
And post landing i shiver to think, did you freeze, break bone, drown alone, simply sink?
Or did you fall back to our sublunary pall, catch a cab, fool us all?
Back to your life having made your statement. Lie latent. Nuff said – let ‘em think you’re dead?
Your story’s still the thing. So many reasons so many wish to know unsavored history. Can you tell it? End the decades’ mystery? But myth gives some reason to ensky the one from the sky.
One who risked others……caused no one to die. Yet if more you would say, a day to repay could lie nigh.
40 years, can ya believe it? The likely majority of people who read this have probably not heard of, let alone thought much about, the only unsolved skyjacking in US history. 1971 Thanksgiving. Northwest Airlines flight 305 is hijacked between Portland, OR and Seattle, WA. It’s a Boeing 727, an aircraft then equipped with stairs that lower from the bottom of the rear section of the fuselage. Out into the black of night, freezing air temps, isolated rugged forest below, leaps a man with his ransom. He’s using a parachute provided to him as part of his demands. Not to be seen again, although there have been many folks claiming to be or know the man, DB Cooper becomes legend.
Check out http://huntfordbcooper.com/ ”Skyjack” is a blast to read. It’s a trip back in time to a different country, a different culture, and for all of you who have never seen a phone with a cord coming out of it -a different technological era.
Previously edited by mechanicussententia on January 6, 2011 at 7:28 pm
However it happened, I stumbled upon Ken Burn’s “The War” series at the public library a week or so back. I wasn’t looking for it – it was looking for me, I guess. I don’t know why I have, as long as I can remember, had an intense interest in the history/stories about WWII, the War, now commonly referred to as “the good war.” (I finally got a copy of Studs Terkel’s Pulitzer-winning “The Good War” – $1, hardly-used paperback from the public library)
Deep inside my psyche lies some pull toward a strange gnosis. It is hard to understand. Maybe I just won’t admit that I’m a ghoul, satisfied by words and pictures of mayhem and havoc – the majority of a species affected by events driven by some abstruse force. Whichever events might be called wanton, one of the veterans quoted in Burn’s film called, in particular, the Nazi death/human experiment camps & buildings, “…the most horrible of human experience ever visited upon the face of the earth.”
Maybe part of some odd ghoulish anodyne, which seeing and hearing Mr. Burn’s film provided me, was to go into the kitchen after seeing it all, and to weep aloud, uttering sounds that don’t usually accompany even tears of great sadness. What was that engulfing sense of loss? A sense of loss of something so precious I’m not sure I can form any concept of it, myself. A realization of an immensity of the hole existing now and forever where something wonderful might have come to be. And whatever might have filled in that space has been forever lost to us in this existence – nothing can be there, except in our imaginations. A different “reality” can never be recovered – not ever. Each of us can only know our own loss.
But for our shared Loss, I could only let the ghoul sob at the kitchen window. Like a heartbroken, young child coming to some kind of realization that sometimes things go somewhere far away and never come back. I cannot know if the sense of loss is of “my” loss or what seems to be capital “L” loss. Bigger than my experience. It would seem to somehow be the latter. Can Loss be quantified? How does one quantify the non-existant?
Numbers might help. But they can only be applied to existing lives and things that were, and remain, annihilated. Numbers are not sufficient. Numbers only serve to stagger and stun. Sometimes the number “1″ is all it takes. SomeONE is gone. Just multiply that one by some millions.
We now live in a human world that, like a victim of a disfiguring accident, still functions, but without all of its fingers and toes, all of its faculties. They’re gone. But what makes this period of human carnage different, more far-reaching in its aftermath than antecedent conflicts?
—————Perhaps the size of it helps prevent us from going on and destroying all the rest, ultimately our own selves.
And wars and rumors of wars seem intrinsic to humanity. If they must always be with us, a necessity, then it is certainly so. We’ll persist like the infants we remain, even as full grown humans. We’ll resort to perhaps our most used, comforting, and pathetic appeal. We’ll cry “Justice”, “…it was justified…”, “…we are justified…”
Shakespeare scorned our infantile impression of fairness. “Though justice be thy plea, consider this;
That, in the course of justice, none of us Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy; And that same prayer doth teach us all to render The deeds of mercy.”
In our lives we are taught much, some of which we call “good” and some “bad”. But it may be that we cannot do much else than be what we are – so often, for reasons we cannot understand, or for no reason other than what happens in this world, happens -unkind to most others.
Another big day in space, now 35 years back. Then already six years after the first moon landing…not so many folks took a lot of notice or interest in that particular techno-political, extra-atmospheric “dance”. Was the rendezvous and docking of an Apollo command module and a Soyuz (guess which one is still hauling the mail, or should that be “the bacon”?) anything much more than just ongoing PR, propaganda, and some kind of misty-eyed, gauze-draped delusion about a relationship that at its roots is still contentious, distrustful, antagonistic, and entrenched in polarized ideologies?
Maybe the existence of the International Space Station (ISS), which i love to watch glide across the sky above my home with my wife, on the nights it is visible to our geographic location, argues against such assertions. Perhaps, on the other hand, ISS is actually an artifact of the cold war. A lot of US “persuasion” was utilized to get post-Soviet-empire Russia to ditch their own Mir space station and occupy their engineering and space assets by partnering up with the US and other contributors to build, service, and maintain ISS. Gotta keep those brains and production capacities occupied with things other than developing and selling, not-good things like missile & bomb tech to people who don’t love US.
Before I digress too much…some other time we’ll have to ruminate on unilateral nuclear first-strike, mutual reduction in nukes by both “sides”, and what is a “super”-power. (I haven’t seen anyone of late in any government wearing blue and red skivvies with a cape)
Perhaps like Apollo-Soyuz, the ISS is sorta like time-out or a time-out room. “Out there” is where we go to behave differently than we would in our “normal” environment. No punching or kicking, no taking somebody else’s water bottle, no budging in line (things like this don’t happen on the ISS, do they?) No lying, no spying…whoops…been keepin’ up on current events? Spying…check that …it’s still happening “on the ground” (hey, that disgustingly over-used phrase is actually pertinent to its context in this case) and since the first years of earth orbit technical capability, spying has been implicit in such efforts. Check out “Spy Satellites and Other Intelligence Technologies That Changed History”, by Thomas Graham, Jr.
So, let’s launch our machines with our technonauts (and our virtual eyes and ears) beyond the dense air. And let’s keep believing that “up there” some “brotherhood”, some trust, sincerely heart-felt hugs and hand shakes, and “doing science” are manifestations of real, improved relationships between nation-states (which are just tribes on steroids), even if perhaps in fact appearances are not fully congruous with “reality”. Yes, some cooperation occurred and occurs. However what is the true scope of that cooperation? Much different today than in 1975?
Back in 1975 in our sublunary mire, the US was finally getting through with its war in Vietnam, the Soviets were still 14 years from getting their last troop home from Afghanistan (may the same not be true for US today), the Khmer Rouge were getting going on their millions-of-dead-people program, and the USofA was only importing (according to US federal government data) around 5.8 million barrels ( combined total of crude oil and petroleum products) per day, compared to a recorded 12.6 million barrels a day in 2005.
ok…so what about that handshake in space in 1975 (imagery as poor as it was) and today the televised hugs we see from ISS? Are “former enemies” friends in space, working together in space, cooperating, building toward a really “good” future in space that will somehow get telegraphed down to the masses and voila: some sort of near-utopia?
The rational western mind believes in the future and that something that we call “technology” (no – not hand held electronic devices, although those are part of it) will make human life better. And if future human lives are better, then our apparent sociological difficulties will abate, making the future even better, and on and on……..The difficulty lies in the fact that technology (i’ll owe you a definition of that word – think about it) IS social – not necessarily so perhaps, but certainly such is the case today. Also, any one particular phenomenological experience can only by insinuation grasp a more universal “improvement.”
Even i had lost some of my passionate interest in manned space flight by 1975 (i was 23 years old at the time, go figure). But that imagery and apparent evidence of “progress” toward a better future elicited from me more of my own dreamy, hopeful feelings…not irrational, just inevitable. And perhaps such feelings do us all some good along the journey – allow us to want to persist in making our journey.
Allan K. Chalmers is quoted: “The Grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.”
Even if we are like naive children, mistaken in our imaginings about the future and about the nature of ourselves and the strange matrix in which we exist, something that gives rise to hope in any one of all of us, is just maybe a good thing. But a wise mantra is, “be careful what you hope for.” I might add, especially if it is technological Utopia.
Interesting day to start a blog. Well, what day wouldn’t be?
1969…was another world. My car had a DC generator in it, one AM only radio (we didn’t know that we should be appalled at the sound quality – heck, i LOVED it). 8-track tapes were around, but i never did put or have one in any car. Cassettes were still on the way. (Is the cassette tape the longest lived medium for audio, ever? I think it might be. It’s still around. Longer even than vinyl? Best check that.)
We had just gotten rotary dial telephones in the house (no more “number please”…to be responded to by reciting three numbers…”seven one six please”) Three numbers! unless you were calling out of town. Still, there were plenty of necessary conversations with “operators”. Not so now. Well, the necessity to speak to a person certainly persists and multiplies, but in 1969 you could really talk to someone. NO voice “mail.”
Even if, in 1969, it might take a long time for technical problems (in the domestic world) to be remedied, somebody usually answered the telephone when you called during normal business hours. “I’m either busy or away from my desk…” I can figure that out for myself if the phone just rings on unanswered. And since there is a “technology” that allows one to NOT answer their calls immediately, well it is certainly well used by what i imagine to be a large majority of “servicers”.
And the things that needed and could be serviced back then. Imagine, TV’s failed and a repairer would come to the house! take the back off the set, and maybe, fix it – or at least go order parts and come back next week. Can you imagine waiting for the TV to get fixed today? Shit, we’d be refilling our Zanax, and taking little Bobby and Janey in to the therapist/behaviorist – or at least, upping their Ritalin.
I guess we just call that kind of service thing today, “The Geek Squad”, or “Home Service Plus”, or “Mr. Goodwrench”
So….anyway…on their way to the moon and we (better off than a lot of other folks in the world at that time) had a phone or two, a television set (or two) receiving broadcast via a VHF only antenna mounted up on a pole above the garage and the flat 2-conductor wire strung over to the house. And lemme see, audio “hi-fi?”? Turntables, baby. 33 1/3, 45, even 78 RPM vinyl. Some of them were even some kind of hard “plastic” substance that would “snap” just like something made of a brittle plastic-like substance. No PC’s, wireless or cell phones, no printers, no PDA’s, no GPS, no tape decks in the house, no IED’s, no HUMVEE’s, (although i had a portable reel to reel tape recorder that me and my buddy used to run around with, pretending we were combat war correspondents – hell, Vietnam was waiting there for us in a couple years)
A couple of clocks in the house still had to be wound up. All of the wristwatches we had, required winding.
(We were sooooo Steampunk and didn’t even know it!!!)
Anyway, yup…people were just a few days away from seeing other people, (well…all we could see were the space suits…NO i’m not a conspiracy theorist. But inside those suits on the moon…how do we know real humans were in there? Not mechanical “men”. ok, now I sound like Descartes.) walking upon the moon.
But it was a very exciting time for a teenager interested in science and in love with vehicles of many types. And now we look back on a time that seems rather “primitive” technically. We are now “advanced”, yet soon will not be able,as a nation, to send our astro-nauts outside the earth’s dense atmophere for more loops round and round and round the two-manifold. What’s that? Try reading Poincare’s Conjecture – I will finish it, someday. Understand it? not so much.
Yup…we somethin’ all right. We got onStar, iPod, Bluetooth, and HDMI – not to mention a lot of pharmaceuticals advertised every night at the same time-slot that the big tobacco companies used to push their cigarettes at us over the TV. (That’s funny…I don’t care who ya’ are.)
And…we were worried when so many goods were labeled “Made in Japan”. Were we…worried? If we were, then we must be now. Target, Wallmart, and CostCo are just outlet stores for China.
And imagine this! Going to the airport, walking up to a counter, buying a ticket for the next flight to East Cupcake, and actually boarding the aircraft and traveling to your destination – all on the same day, if not all in the same morning or afternoon. It depends where you lived and where you were going, obviously. And all the deregulation $ crunchers will show that flying is now way more affordable and accessible for way more folks. True maybe. And flying commercially is also way more a lot of things (painful, literally, in those micro-seats)
Well…Hey! watch out y’all. I think I just heard Sisyphus hollering “look out below!” and Dammit…my watch just stopped.
