I do not believe so... The interviewer would have already done that for us. The earlier posts were in reference to how we could help standardize and refine the witness's identification of what they saw. This would be taking those results along with other pertinent data and collating it all into a useful data set that could be applied in a map of area sighted, a time period of sightings, and any changes to those categories over a given time.
Say you had a sample base that was centered on the SLV region. These numbers are for example only, but lets play with it....
In 1980 there are 6 cases, 2 featuring bell 47's, and 3 with jet rangers, and one UFO.
In 1981 there are 3 cases, 1 one of each
In 1982 there are 9 cases, with 3 bell 47's, 2 Jet rangers, 4 R44's, and 1 UFO.
1983 has nothing
1984 has only 2 cases, both R44's
1985 has 4 cases, 1 Jet Ranger and 4 R-44s
For simplicity we will consider that there are only 2 general classes of mutilations, meaning two different methods or other similar characteristics that we can use to classify mutes.
Class 1 was mostly jet rangers and R44's. Class two had all types .
From this we could deduce that there are probably two operators, one of which likely stopped using bell-47's in the region in or after 1982, and started to use R44's.
The other used Jet rangers, but also included UFO's, which in this case simple means unidentified aircraft in both cases.
We are actually lucky in the fact that helicopters by nature are all regional aircraft, and so should generally stay within a certain area, say west of the rockies, for many years. They are capable of coast to coast travel, but that is not often done in a helicopters life. Even the army tends to pack them up for long distance transport. If an entity moves its operations, it will usually do so as a group and not as singles. Not always, but usually. The laws of economics still apply, and all entities have bean counters.
We can the look at the FAA registration archives for companies or entities that changed or experienced changes to its aircraft within this time period. Their fleets will probably be larger than just 3-4 helicopters, so it will create a relatively large list, say 30 companies. As we document other regions and other time data however, we can start to see where groups may have started to operate in one area, only to change to another at a later time. Eventually, we can get an idea of the fleet makeup, which might give us a lead in narrowing down entities with those matching data. Even if you end up with 10 separate entities across the whole country that match the profile, that's still only 10 companies to start researching for various ties to anything else, such as whether they are only flight contractors, are they part of a larger entity, like Monsanto or GE, or even just happen to be fully privately owned. Where are these companies based? Who does the maintenance? Are any of the aircraft leased? This and lots more information is readily available if you know where to look. Just ask any bank loan officer who needs to keep track of collateral for larger loans or financing. Lots of this can be found on a states SOS site, FAA, and public financial disclosure with respect to stock ownership and dividend payouts. Its actually the entities that are fully privately owned that most likely will be the best evidence for a groups identity, and hence a possible motive.
Case in point, the old Southern Air Transport. They were a private contractor company in the eighties and ninties. They had one primary client, the CIA. Their operations were mostly at nightat the airports they did operate out of regularly, and even though they only had about 30 aircraft, mostly c130 civilian models, there were aircraft spotters (a wonderful group of guys and gals whose hobby is tracking aircraft in and out of airports and careers) who counted many times that number of aircraft tail numbers, and at times the same numbers in different locations of the world at the same time. Hence a fleet of 30 would appear to be actually a fleet of over a 100. The very concept is to make tracking particular aircraft impossible. It is likely that what we are looking for will have similar behavior, or be a small fleet that spread over a large area, say the western united states. Also, we need to be looking for several small companies all owned by a larger entity.
This would ultimately be a bear of a project that will possibly add up to little knew information, but just identifying patterns and behaviors over time could be very revealing, itself. Chris is correct that this should ideally be a 3-4 person project, preferably with different talents and career experiences. I thought about this due to my younger aviation background before I got into computers, and my wife works at a bank as a collateral tracking agent. It has amazed me what she has shown me is publicly available on those ends.
Its 6 am here and my medication has not really allowed me to sleep much tonight, so I apologize if what makes sense in my head right now is complete rubbish in the afternoon, lol. I had my first, ever so eagerly anticipated, right of passage yesterday referred to as "kidney stones". As the doc says, "just let it pass, just let it pass... and take these tramadol, too" Yeah, first time with that medicine, too. Oh, what fun it is.
