FF = 66, "sea" the King of helicopter

Forrest considers himself a maverick and since he is a fighter pilot that leads me to think of Maverick call sign in the movie Top Gun, which was made just a year prior to Mr. Fenn acquiring cancer and conceiving the poem/treasure hunt concept. One of the more interesting Top Gun scenes that relate to Forrest Fenn is Maverick and Goose’s ejection scene from the F-14 Tomcat. Search and rescue is my job, so naturally I am biased, but Mr. Fenn often talks about this ordeal and how grateful he is to the search and rescue team that extracted him from the hostile jungle. Coincidentally, the helicopter used to hoist Forrest from the jungle is a CH-3 Jolly Green Helicopter and the one that hoisted Maverick from the water was a Coast Guard Pelican H-3 variant.

The amphibious version of the CH-3 is the SH-3 Sea King helicopter. It wad used by the Navy and Marine Corp with two particularly interesting missions: Air Force 2 (transporting the POTUS) and the Apollo moon program. It hoisted astronauts from the ocean after they splashed down from the moon and returned them to the aircraft carrier. The most famous Sea King, airframe number “66” retrieved Apollo 8,10,11,12, and 13 astronauts from the ocean and is prominently featured in the recent movie, Apollo 11.

I have often written about the links to the moon and Apollo program and this is just one more piece that lines up with that theory because Forrest Fenn is always signing his initials “f” in his emails and every story written in his memoir the too far to walk ends with “ff.” F is the 6th letter of the alphabet and ff is code for 66, which feels like there is something significant about the “66” Sea King. For the recovery of the Apollo 11 astronauts, the underside of the fuselage was emblazoned with the words "Hail, Columbia.” Columbia was the name of the Apollo 11 command module and is possibly linked to one item in Forrest’s treasure chest. I speculate all items in the chest are hints to the clues and the pre-Columbian necklace is a hint to the Apollo 11 Columbia.

Has Mr. Fenn ever slipped in a subtle Seaking hint in his memoir to support this theory? I believe so. The quote, "a bunch of arrogant ravens kept flying around yawking at us." The word yawking or yaw-king does, as yaw is an aviation term meaning, twist or oscillate about a vertical axis and helicopters are noted for their yaw ability and the king of the yaw is obviously the Seaking.

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