rooger":1kyui08r said:
The seller may be telling the truth. Read on (SCROLL all the way down):
http://www.pe.com/localnews/yahoo/stori ... e2b70.html
HA HA HA! That is one of the OLDEST TRICKS AROUND! Find a story...any story... and then tie the object to it!
I once nearly bought an airplane that had none of it's early maintenance records (logbooks). The story told was that the books were lost twenty years earlier in a hangar fire while the airplane was out on a flight.
I called the librarian in that town and asked them to research old newspaper articles about a hangar fire. Next day, my fax machine had a COPY of the original article detailing how the hangar completely burned and the flight school lost all it's aircraft-records. Feeling confident about the story, I called the seller to make an appointment to close the deal, and then called the librarian to thank her for the research and pay the research-fee. She was very polite and asked me why I was so interested in that story, and I told her I was buying one of the old flight school's airplanes, and she mentioned how "ironic" she felt it was because her ex-husband (now divorced) was a former airplane mechanic at that flight school. She mentioned he taught aircraft maintenance at the junior college in St Louis. So I called the college and asked for the professor, and he also confimed the story. GREAT, I thought.... but the prof kept talking. Which tail (registration) number airplane are you buying?, he asked. I told him.
He said..."funny... I can't recall that particular tail number....I thought I'd be able to remember better than this!"
Well...I said, here's what you wrote in it's logbook.... and I read it to him.
"That doesn't sound like the way I'd word a sentence", so I got his fax number, and sent him a copy. He called me back to tell me "THAT's not my signature! That's a forgery!"
Someone, some where, KNEW of that hangar fire, and they had an airplane with a sorry maintenance history, so they tossed those logbooks years ago and created NEW logs, the first entry relating the hangar fire and then continuing for several years to the present time. The airplane being sold....was NOT the airplane the logbooks claimed to represent!
I was just lucky that while in college, I had worked as a library research-assistant and knew libraries would do research for a fee.... and I was VERY lucky that by pure chance, the librarian I had called in Ohio had by pure coincidence been married to a mechanic at that hangar, and that I could find and talk to him!
Of course, guns don't have logbooks. But the point is, that a good liar, knows how to create the image that the lie will fit. Just like a good magician will make you believe you saw what he wants you to believe you saw. :twisted:
. 
