3.Most people can’t pronnounce the name, and like Americans saying Moscow it sets my teeth on edge.

A homeless man knocked on my door and said he’d do any chores that needed doing if I’d give him dinner. I gave him a bucket of white housepaint, told him to paint the porch out back and we had a deal.

He was back in half an hour, which I thought was amazingly quick, but he said no problem, it was an easy job. “And by the way,” he said, “that ain’t a Porch, it’s a Ferrari.”

Okay, the true part is that my book “The Gold-Plated Porsche: How I Spent a Small Fortune on a Used Car, and Other Misadventures” is available through amazon.com. Lots of flying in it as well…

I know what they meant, just never seen it called that before…

The tailplane, as you term it, is routinely called the horizontal stabilizer in the U.S., just as we save the word “boot” for things cowboys wear, nor do we have “wings” on our automobiles.

To us, the vertical stabilizer is…wait for it…the fin.

But then we invented the airplane and can call its parts anything we wish.

Was this airplane in any sense restored, or was it simply taken out of storage and prepared for flight? (Not that that’s as simple as it might sound, I fully understand…)

Whether the witness is a military veteran, a devout priest or a convicted criminal their statements all carry the same weight until proven or otherwise – that is how it works.

It has always amused me that extraterrestrial-object sightings are always given vastly greater weight when the witness is a priest, a cop or an airline pilot–three of the most raffish professions I can think of…

Tighar has never, -never- shirked from saying that the one thing they need, and without which they are simply theorists (and I think they’ve been quite forthright about this) is a piece of metal with a serial number. DNA would also do, but even that wouldn’t be as inarguable as that unmistakable number stamped into aluminum a digit at a time.

I continue to be amazed by the unconditional loathing of Tighar–no, please don’t tell my why you feel that way, I’ve heard it all and I really don’t care–displayed by many contributors to this forum. It seems to me to be the product of jealousy and resentment over the fact that Ric Gillespie and Pat Thrasher have been able to make a career out of this and other historic-airplane hunts, which is a little like hating somebody because they’ve made a handsome living out of developing idiotic smartphone apps about birds.

Yes, Tighar is definitely an adventure-travel company. But I have yet to hear a single “client” who paid considerable money to participate in a Nikumaroro expedition complain that they were screwed, they didn’t get their money’s worth, Tighar lied to them. They have all loved the challenge, the hunt, the companionship.

Ric and Pat have made a business out of it. They did and you didn’t. Get over it.

scepticism is a healthy thing but it is not in itself a research methodology because if it becomes too dominant in one’s thinking it simply impedes any scientific and objective analysis. You have simply dismissed the TIGHAR hypothesis not by providing conclusive evidence but by simply providing another hypothesis equally unproven. That doesn’t give an answer it only creates something else which needs an answer.

Most intelligent thing I’ve read on this thread so far.

I wonder why it was placed on Gunbroker

It’s also on e-Bay and I think other places as well.

The Ranger engine was a turkey, as I recall.