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The Legend of D. B. Cooper Eye-Witness Accounts Are Fallible |
Ron and I do not claim that our book will prove the theory that Barbara Dayton was D. B. Cooper beyond the shadow of a doubt. The book ends with a question and lets the readers decide for themselves. We feel, however, we have enough circumstantial evidence to at least be worthy of a thorough investigation by the FBI.
According to an article by Joel Moreno, a reporter for KOMO Channel 4 News in Seattle, WA,
“…The FBI reviewed the claims and said
It is surprising to us that so much weight is being placed on the eye-witness accounts after all these years. It has been proven time and time again that eye witness reports are often not reliable. There have been several reports aired on television in recent years of individuals being released from prison after serving time based on erroneous eye-witness accounts and finally being proven innocent by DNA profiling.
I recall a time when as a teenager I was watching out the window waiting for a friend who was coming to walk to school with me. A rather handsome young man in a very nice car stopped and my friend walked toward the car to give him directions. It turned out that the young man was a flasher. My friend turned and ran into the house. We called the police and we were asked to go down after school to fill out a report. To our surprise, our descriptions of the young man were totally different. We couldn’t even agree on the color and make of the car. When the police arrested the young man after another incident we found that though my description was more accurate than my friend’s, neither one of us had all the details correct. I believe my description was more accurate because I was relaxed and my friend was scared.
Reports shortly after the hijacking stated that the stewardess thought the eye color may have been brown. As time went on, it was reported that the eyes were definitely a very dark brown. This is explainable by what the experts call “hindsight bias”. The term refers to the phenomena where the memory tends to remember things they hear from others as fact.
Height is difficult to judge, especially given that the hijacker was sitting for most of the time. Given the stress of the moment, it is easy to imagine that a person would appear bigger than under more normal circumstances.
Given the lighting on an aircraft at night, the stress of the moment, and the fact the skyjacker was wearing dark glasses most of the time; it is understandable that some details of a description could be inaccurate.
The only infallible way to prove the identity of the skyjacker would be by comparing the DNA profile from the cigarette butts that were left on the plane. But somehow, that has been lost.