Symposium Recap
Well, Symposium day has come and gone. For those who didn't make it, a basic recap: from most accounts, there were roughly 200 hundred of us there throughout the day, giving and listening to presentations, first hand accounts, speculations and some spectacular poems from an eclectic bunch.
One lucky paleontologist won a parachute canopy. One lucky parachutist won a very old (and quite precious) twenty dollar bill.
It was a Cooperathalon: We soldiered for nearly nine straight hours, and could have gone longer.
We learned several things. The most newsworthy, perhaps: the FBI appears to be taking Marla Cooper's lead about her Uncle Lynn Doyle Cooper very seriously. So seriously that according to Marla, the feds went to the great length of re-interviewing original crew members on the flight and showed them photos of her uncle.
One, Marla said, was Tina Mucklow, the stewardess who became Cooper's liaison on the hijacked flight and who later became a nun.
An FBI spokesperson could not confirm or deny that agents are re-interviewing the flight crew, citing "a pending investigation" and the Bureau's policy of declining to comment on ongoing probes.
If true though, it might be the first time the feds have interviewed members of the flight crew in roughly ten years, when Jo Weber first went public with her belief that ex-husband Duane was the hijacker.
Nothing conclusive, but if the feds are knocking on Tina's door after all these years it's a significant development here in Cooperland.
Back to the Symposium. The emergence of some new leads, the benefit of accounts from folks who showed up and had a part in the case, all lead many of us to the conclusion we should all come back next year and keep the Symposium going.
As part of an inaugural tradition, I passed the first clip-on tie to Doug Kenck-Crispin, a local historian, who proved his bonafides as a true Cooper aficionado by sleeping in his car outside the Ariel Tavern after the party there as a means to simulate what Cooper might have gone through—and woken up to—if he survived the jump and spent the night in the woods.
Now that there's a year to go, my thoughts: it wouldn't be such a bad idea if any computer literate sleuths out there could come up with a kind of community-sleuthing website, so we could put all our detective work under the same roof, so to speak. Ideas?
