Scientists with 'Citizen Sleuths' Claim Breakthrough in DB Cooper Mystery Lauren McMah - The Daily Telegraph
go to original January 23, 2017

Who was DB Cooper? Amateur detectives think they’re a major step closer to finding out (Associated Press)

Even after the FBI shut the book on the mysterious case of DB Cooper, armchair detectives have refused to give up the search for answers. And now they’ve stumbled across an exciting new lead.

Last week, scientists working for Citizen Sleuths — a group that took up its own investigation into the Cooper case in 2007 — claimed they had a breakthrough.

For the past decade, Citizen Sleuths have been working away on the case, publishing their exhaustive research online.

Key members of the Citizen Sleuths team are scientists, including principal investigator Tom Kaye, a palaeontologist and spectroscopy specialist, as well as experts in optical miscrosopy, metallurgical engineering and biological illustration.

Their work has attracted the attention of an impressed FBI, which some years ago let them examine clues, including a tie.

The black, JC Penney clip-on necktie had been left behind on Cooper’s seat — 18E.

And that tie, the citizen sleuths said, has given them a solid clue about the man’s identity.

“A tie is one of the only articles of clothing that isn’t washed on a regular basis,” the group explained on their website.

“It picks up dirt and grime just like any other piece of clothing, but that accumulation never truly gets ‘reset’ in the washing machine. Each of those particles comes from something and somewhere and can tell a story if the proper instruments like electron microscopes are used.”

The scientists used a powerful electron microscope to find more than 100,000 particles of “rare earth elements” on the tie, including pure titanium, which most caught their eye.

A microscopic image of titanium found on DB Cooper’s tie (Citizensleuths.com)

They said titanium was a rare metal in 1971, and linked Cooper to a “limited number of managers or engineers in the titanium field that would wear ties to work”.

Based on this finding, the scientists said they believed Cooper worked for Boeing — the maker of the very plane he hijacked.

At the time, Boeing happened to be working on a Super Sonic Transport plane that used those elements.

“The tie went with him into these manufacturing environments, for sure, so he was not one of the people running these [manufacturing machines],” the group’s lead researcher, Tom Kaye, told Seattle’s King 5 News.

“He was either an engineer or a manager in one of the plants.”

The group is now asking for public help to develop their theory Cooper was a Boeing employee.

Read the rest at The Daily Telegraph

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