Book Review

DB Cooper and the FBI:

A Case Study of America's Only Unsolved Skyjacking

by Bruce A. Smith

By now, a lot of people know about the DB Cooper case. As far as unsolved crimes go, this one is a fascinating story because so little, in fact almost nothing, is known about the perpetrator and, by some estimates, he appears to have gotten away with the skyjacking. With so many unanswered questions, it inevitably attracts a large number of hobbyists, amateur sleuths, conspiracy theorists, and cranks. Of the latter category, it is tempting to include Bruce A. Smith, author of DB Cooper and the FBI: A Case Study of America’s Only Unsolved Skyjacking.

This book starts off with a standard account of the DB Cooper adventure. The day before Thanksgiving in 1971, a solitary man checked onto an airplane in Portland, Oregon. After the flight took off, he told a stewardess he had a bomb in his suitcase. He demanded the plane be grounded and also requested four parachutes and $200,000 in cash. The FBI handed over the money and parachutes, then the plane took off again in the direction of Mexico City. But en route to the Land of Manana, DB Cooper jumped out of the plane, disappearing into the freezing cold night. He and his money were never to be seen again, except for a small stash of bills that were found at a beach on the Columbia River seven years later. Ever since then, the skyjacker has been an endless source of fascination for certain kinds of people. The beginning of Smith’s book does an adequate job of telling the story, but this is no great literary feat. The same story has been told dozens of times in other books so no new ground is broken here.

From there, the author tracks down other people who might have knowledge of the case including FBI officers and other authors who have covered the DB Cooper case. Things start to get a little creepy while he stalks Tina Mucklow, the stewardess who spent the most time with Cooper during the flight. At this point, the author’s sanity comes into question. He not only stalks this woman, who clearly wants to be left alone, but he also states his pet theory that she and everyone else in the Cooper case were part of a brainwashing program conducted by the CIA.

From there a big chunk of the book is dedicated to people who have either admitted to being DB Cooper or have been identified by family members as the unknown skyjacker. Yes, believe it or not, there have been hundreds of people who were suspected of this crime by their own families. Some of the evidence is as flimsy as can possibly be; typically some dysfunctional family in rural Washington or Oregon wonders why Uncle Joe unexpectedly didn’t show up for Thanksgiving and then they later found out he had gone on a gambling spree in Las Vegas or something like that. People who admitted to being Cooper are no more promising. The most interesting one was a transgendered pilot who supposedly carried out the skyjacking for therapeutic reasons; after having the surgery, he needed to do something macho to feel like the transition to manhood was complete. The evidence linking this lady who became a dude is flimsy. The author takes himself pretty seriously when stating that this pilot and Cooper could have been the same because both of them wore loafers and smoked cigarettes. I could never imagine this kind of evidence being considered admissible in court.

Then we get to the really kooky stuff. Smith presents his conspiracy theory that DB Cooper was a participant in the CIA’s MKUltra mind control experiments. I guess they wanted to brainwash people into skyjacking commercial American airliners for some incomprehensible purpose and DB Cooper happened to be their most successful experiment. He entertains the thought that this was done to force the privately owned airline companies into taking safety a little more seriously. There is also something about Cooper’s clip-on tie, which he left behind before parachuting into the wilderness. Smith believes that everyone who has come into physical contact with the tie has developed amnesia regarding details of the case via post-hypnotic suggestion. There is also a lot about clandestine military operations in the Vietnam War and an FBI plot to avoid solving the case to cover up the activities of the CIA. To Smith’s credit, at least he is man enough to admit that he has no evidence to support any of this bunk.

But then it gets even weirder. Bruce Smith, admitting to being a member of the Ramtha the Enlightened One cult in Washington, has some meditation and hypnotherapy sessions in which he claims to meet DB Cooper somewhere in the afterlife. This doesn’t yield any useful information, except that it vaguely justifies the author’s conspiracy theories. I suppose DB Cooper was some kind of supernatural being from another dimension and the author has pursued him so vigorously because he thinks of him as some kind of long-lost (imaginary) friend.

At least the author was smart enough to save his most loony ideas for the end. He is probably sane enough to know that he would lose any of his more skeptical readers if he had mentioned that stuff in the beginning. Then again, maybe he just thought he was saving the best parts for last, thereby making a horrible miscalculation. To be fair, the majority of the book is about relaying information he found during his own research. He presents his ideas clearly and in an orderly fashion which is great if you’re writing something for a freshman composition class. But for the world outside of community college writing classes, the ideas presented need to carry a little more weight to be plausible unless you are a conspiracy theories or a religious nut. The conspiracy theories and mysticism might appeal to other cranks, but for people who actually want a realistic theory of what happened with DB Cooper, this information just ruins the whole book which was nothing exceptional to begin with.

DB Cooper and the FBI is not the best book to read if you want to learn about this skyjacking. There are plenty of other books on the subject and most of them are shorter too because they aren’t bulked up with nonsense. Actually, all the facts that are known are readily available on the DB Cooper Wikipedia page. In the end, this book is more like a chronicle of a Ramtha cult member who spends too much time going down internet rabbit holes and associating with too many other online kooks.

If you really want to know who DB Cooper was and what happened to him after he jumped out of the plane with the money, you aren’t going to find the answers here. You aren’t going to find them anywhere because there isn’t enough evidence to solve the case and it happened so long ago that the surfacing of new evidence is extremely unlikely. But this is the appeal of it all. Just reading the story will make you try to fit the pieces together and fill in the blanks while the uncomfortable lack of closure will leave you wondering about it for long stretches of time. In the end, my gut feeling is that DB Cooper survived the jump and escaped with most of the money, but then again, I am the kind of person who places little value on gut feelings. Maybe DB Cooper lost all his money in a poker game with Bigfoot. My personal theory is that DB Cooper and Thomas Pynchon are the same man. 

Book Review

The Monkey Wrench Gang

by Edward Abbey

     Who hasn’t felt like blowing things up from time to time? I know I have, not that I would actually do something like that. I don’t want to end up in jail and it probably wouldn’t do much to make the world a better place in the long run anyways. Besides, my weapon-making skills are non-existent, I’m clumsy, have shaky hands, and can’t tell the difference between saltpetre and cialis so you wouldn’t want to be near me while I’m carrying a box of high-powered explosives. But really, if you haven’t fantasized about blowing something up at some point in your life, you’re probably not paying much attention to what’s happening in the world. Edward Abbey was certainly paying attention to the destruction of nature and he felt like blowing things up. Instead of doing that, he wrote a counter-cultural novel called The Monkey Wrench Gang and it is all about people who blow things up. It is hard not to cheer them on along the way even though it is obvious from the beginning they are on a quixotic mission.

During a white water rafting trip in Utah, four trickster-type individuals start drinking by their campfire and talk about how great it would be to sabotage all the industrial development taking place across the American Southwest. One is the rafting guide, Seldom Seen Smith, a Mormon with questionable morals and marginal commitments to the Church of LSD, oops I mean LDS. He is basically a clever redneck who wants to preserve nature as it is without the intrusive exploitation of the capitalist system. Doc Sarvis is a surgeon who is fed up with having to treat patients suffering from diseases and injuries caused by the chemicals and pollutants of the modern world. His much younger lover, Bonnie Abzug, no relation to Bella Abzug, is a Jewish hippy feminist from New York who just wants to burn down civilization and start everything over from scratch. Then there is Hayduke, a crude and primitive-minded wildman who just returned from Vietnam. He wants revenge for the nightmare of living through the war and sees a parallel between the way the US military invaded Southeast Asia and the way big corporations are invading the American wilderness. He wants to free himself from society and live like an animal in the desert. His name is derived from “hajduk” which, in Slavic and other Eastern European languages means “outlaw”. Each one represents a different facet of the environmental movement as it was in the 1970s and one of this novel’s strengths is that these are the most memorable characters ever created by this author. While their conversations and personalities alternate between clashing and harmonizing with a lot of punning and humor along the way, they fit together like pieces of a multi-dimensional puzzle.

Another of the novel’s strengths is the descriptive language. Abbey was famous for his ability to describe the deserts of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona, and he never fails to deliver in that regard in this book. He engages all your senses to make it feel as if you are there, experiencing what the characters experience, feeling the wind they feel, walking where they walk, hiding behind the trees and rocks they use for cover, feeling the vastness of the starry desert sky and being absorbed into that stillness and quietude that one can only feel in the depths of that part of North America. And he describes industrial machinery and the development it brings with just as much detail. Obviously he took great care to use language for the construction of ugly, intrusive human inventions for the sake of taking grim delight in their destruction at the hands of the four heroes.

The plot is minimal and basic. The gang make plans to sabotage whatever machinery they can find, albeit without killing anybody, and proceed to do so. They get pursued throughout the desert by a posse of law enforcement villains and vigilantes who are more concerned with exploiting the land for money than they actually are with justice. All the while, the quartet of eco-warriors know they don’t have a chance of succeeding in tearing down civilization, but they feel compelled to keep monkey wrenching until they get caught.

There are some downsides to the writing. The main characters are brutally racist towards Native American people and politically correct readers of today will definitely whine about the sexist portrayal of Bonnie Abzug. This is a very macho, hyper-masculine novel, although in some ways that is part of its appeal. There was a time when American Leftists actually did have the balls to go toe to toe with the system, unlike today’s useless army of woke wimps who think that “online activism” is actually going to do some good in the world. Yeah, if you actually care about the world you should get off your social media asses and figure out ways to cancel global warming instead of bickering with inconsequential MAGA maggots on Twitter. But then again, there are times when the Monkey Wrench Gang come across as naive and a bit stupid too; for four people who care about preserving nature, they should be smart enough to know that burning construction equipment in the high esert, pushing earth movers into a lake, and blowing up bridges will do a hell of a lot of damage to the environment they want to protect.

But The Monkey Wrench Gang is a big wish-fulfillment fantasy. I don’t think it is meant to be taken in any other way, except maybe as a call to (responsible) action. This is, after all, the book that inspired the Earth First activist group. It really is an action-adventure story that reads like an updated, 1970s version of the traditional Western genre, complete with rough and tumble, whisky drinking, cigar chomping, poker playing outlaws who learn how to stick it to the lawman. They bomb construction sites rather than robbing banks and the whole thing reads like Abbey hoped someday this would be made into a movie. Not a chance of that happening today since the colossally big corporations that run the world now would never stand for any kind of entertainment that might inspire people to fight the system. Is it any surprise that Hollywood seems to be making nothing but junk food for the 21^st century mind these days? Anything that dazzles the senses and prevents people from thinking benefits the big shots at the top of the human society shit pile. There is plenty of room for destructive fantasies in our culture, especially when they critique our way of living or provide a means of catharsis. You can cheer this gang on as they sabotage machinery the same way you cheer on Tyler Durden when he blows uo the bank at the end of Fight Club.

Maybe it’s time for somebody to write a good science-fiction novel about blowing up the internet. There are millions of times I’ve fantasized about doing that.  

 

Michael Shermer

On the Future of Books

with Literary Critic & Publishing Insider Bethanne Patrick

 

Book Review

Fire On the Mountain

by Edward Abbey

     How far should one man go to preserve the land he holds sacred? John Vogelin, the protagonist of Edward Abbey’s second novel Fire On the Mountain, insists on fighting to the death to hold onto his ranch where he was born, where he spent all his life, and where he planned to die. If this sounds like a commentary on freedom and macho American individualism, you are right. If this sounds like the premise for a gripping story, don’t get your hopes up too high though.

Vogelin is an 87 year old man who owns a ranch and some land in southern New Mexico. The government’s plan is to expand the White Sands Missile Range and Vogelin’s property is the only obstacle holding them back. They insist on seizing the land under the law of eminent domain, but old man Vogelin won’t budge. The ranch is all he knows and removing him from it would make the end of his long life a miserable one.

The supporting characters are his grandson, Billy, who is also the narrator. The young boy is visiting his grandfather for the summer, taking a vacation from his home in Pennsylvania. Billy prefers life on the ranch to that in his school and he plans to take over the property when Vogelin dies. The other supporting character is Lee Mackie, Vogelin’s best friend. Lee is a businessman, a native to the region, and the one who tries to be a negotiator and voice of reason for Vogelin as he fights with the government. Vogelin is the most complete character of the three; he has a simple outlook on life but we learn his motivations, his feelings, and the reasoning behind his stubbornness. From the other two, we learn not so much. Grandfather Vogelin is Billy’s hero and the boy vows to fight by his side to the end, but you might wonder at times why he is even in the story to begin with. He is a shadow to the main character and little more. Even the narration, which reads as if Billy is recalling the story from the vantage point of adulthood, does not actually need the first person subjective style that Abbey employs. It would be fine if written in any other voice. Lee Mackie serves a more definite purpose, acting as the conscience and counterpoint to Vogelin’s struggles, but we never really learn who he is as a person. We never learn how he met Vogelin or why he is so attached to the old man, even though he thinks the old man should sell his property to the government and move on. Thankfully, Edward Abbey learned from the mistakes he made in his earlier writings and went on to write better developed characters in his later works.

So what is a reader to gain from reading this short story with a generic plot and weakly-drawn characters? The best part of it all is the beginning when Vogelin, Billy, and Lee Mackie ride on horseback out into the mountains in search of a pony that wandered away from the ranch. The author does here what he always does best: describe the desert with its scenery, its stillness, its vast landscapes, big sky, and unique ecosystems. Abbey never fails to capture the essence of the New Mexico desert and this book is no exception. If you have been to places he describes you will know exactly what I mean.

This long passage also introduces two themes, one of which is important to the plot and the other is something that never gets developed to completion. The latter of the two is Billy’s confrontation with the desert. When on top of a mountain, he comes face to face with a mountain lion. Paralyzed with fear, the two stare at each other and this event transforms Billy’s life. The problem here is that we never really learn how Billy changed after that. Abbey doesn’t describe the meaning of this encounter and he never develops this theme subsequently to its occurrence, although it does get mentioned from time to time. We also learn that Lee Mackie had a similar type of experience when he was younger, but no details are given as to what the event was and how it effected him.

The other theme that gets taken up during their trek into the wilderness is the trio’s encounter with the military. In one scene, they get confronted by some belligerent soldiers from the air force who almost start a gun fight with them. In another part they find their lost horse, only to see it had been tortured, murdered, and mutilated by the same soldiers when they were drunk and had nothing better to do. Abbey’s portrayal of the US military is in no way favorable. And why should it be? This book was written in the 1960s and the anarchist author needed some antagonists for the plot’s conflict anyways.

SPOILER ALERT HERE. The rest of the story is anti-climactic. Grandpa Vogelin gets into a gunfight with government officials, though no one gets killed. The burning of his body at the end seems both significant as closure to the novel and symbolic as well of temporal man’s relationship to the eternity of nature. The fact that starting a massive fire in the desert to cremate Vogelin is a colossal act of stupidity ruined the ending a little bit. Forest fires spread rapidly and in the dry heat of New Mexico, this is not something to be messed around with. It is surprising that an environmentalist like Edward Abbey couldn’t see the ignorance of making a funeral pyre in such a poorly situated located.

Fire On the Mountain is almost a Western. It reads like an interpretation of the Western genre as seen through the lens of the Cold War and post-World War II America with a touch of 1960s counter-cultural defiance of authority thrown in. By today’s standards it would be considered a right-wing anti-government screed, but in Abbey’s day, fighting the government was purely a left-wing undertaking. Keep that in mind when reading anything by this author. It isn’t quite a Western because there isn’t enough action in it to make it much more than a desert drama with a half-assed gunfight near the end. If Edward Abbey hadn’t gone on to write great books like Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang, this short novel would have been forgotten long ago. But if you can’t get enough of Abbey’s talent for descriptive writing, and I certainly can’t, this might be worth a quick read just once.