Robert Vinson

[Lauren Johnson]

Thanks for the extra details from the book. It makes the story less credible than before.

1. Why would the CIA pilots fly to (or over) Nebraska? It is well north of their ostensible destination (Denver) and further north than they need to go to pretend that they are not going to Dallas. Why would the CIA pilots arbitrarily fly farther north if their true destination was Dallas and they are on an exfiltration mission to pick up agents there?

2. How does Vinson, who sits in the back, and does not communicate with the flight crew, know that he is somewhere over Nebraska? (More likely he looked at a map in the intervening years and made an arbitrary decision.)

3. Why in the world does Vinson set his pocket watch or wrist watch for Central Standard Tme? Just because he's flying over that time zone? No one does that.

4. Omaha Nebraska, the closest part of Nebraska to both Arlington AFB and Dallas, is 1430 miles from Arlington AFB as the crow flies. Giving Vinson the benefit of the doubt of a departure time of 8:30 AM EST and adding an hour as he flies west, he has been in the air for 5 hours at the point of the alleged "dramatic announcement and sharp turn". At normal cruising speed of 190 mph he can only have covered 950 miles. At the absolute top speed of the aircraft, 275 mph, he can only have covered 1375, so he is still well short of Nebraska.

There is absolutely no reason for the fearless CIA pilots to be stressing the aircraft for five full hours flying toward a point that is neither their true, or their cover, destination. Even if they did so, they can not have reached any point in Nebraska. Vinson is just flat wrong, or lying.

You can argue about Vinson's memory or his motivations, but you can't argue with mathematics.

Responding to your points:

1) You are arguing from a point of lack of knowledge. No I don't know. You don't know. No one knows. But then you proceed to use that to prove a point. Since I don't know, therefore I know. This is just weak.

2) How would he know where he was? Well, he says he was estimating. He also might have been looking out one of the windows of the plane. Weak.

3) Weak.

Now, on to point four.

4) Using Google Earth, measuring the distance to the closest point to Nebraska from Andrews AFB, the distance is almost exactly 1000 mi. Using the low number of 190 mph, and estimating 5 hrs. that gets the plane to Nebraska right on time. (Peter, in your book, is the departure time listed?)

On this point, you are mistaken.