You can't be serious : R. is well documented; JC hardly so.
This is not even a debatable similarity.
They are both dead. You can't be serious that Collins is a fake.
We have a first-hand interview from Payne with lots and lots of
details that bolster his case.
No, no (or "nooope"

), this is absurd : we have an
alleged story of a "Collins" (bolstered by your research
into Navy files, yes); this is nothing like all of the
documentation about Rosendahl. And, as for an
"interview", according to the --challenged-- account
of brother Lee, Bob is who informed Lee of JC, and
I think it is that Bob simply recounts a long-ago
story. (Or did he recall and re-contact ... ?)
Many thanks for contacting Boating;

many laments for the reply of loss --a dead end.

When considering the strength of a chain one regards
the weakest links, not the sum of them.
False analogy. Very false. Every time a translation or a relay is made,
errors and misrepresentations can come into play.
I concur but only in degree --so, not "very" but
possibly; there is still merit to assessing each link's
credibility (like assigning probabilities).
The first of your trio is aburd, the other two remain, with resp.
slight and even slighter chances of recovery.
What? Where's the letter that refers to the Rosendahl letter?
Where's the purported Rosendahl letter? Let's SEE it.
We have : Boating asserting <Collins says ...>;
Wingfoot asserting <Lee Payne says ...>. And
in neither can we go further by direct pursuit
(unless the less-likely, Wingfoot, can yet yield
results somehow).
In short, I give high credibility/probability to Giles's
account of (vice the on-line/etc. copy of Boating...)
Wingfoot --yes, another "layer" but w/o decrease
in believability IMO.
We have a magazine's hearsay that there was a Joe
Collins
Not hearsay. It was a first-person interview. Both brothers contributed to the article, remember?
The brothers' names are given, but it needn't be the
case that both are so involved (they might not care
to show any separation in this regard --why bother?).
More to the point (against my citing "long-ago" story
by JC recalled by Bob P) is that the article asserts a
(then)
current status of Joe Collins (and we can find
some information on the (USS)
President Madison).
And beyond all of this, we have the serious questions
about how such a knot would be employed at all,
irrespective of knot origins. For that, there is likely
a great deal of information that will find the use of
an end-2-end knot bearing heavy loading simply
not much at all in practice (so, hardly the sort of
thing to be given such special instructional emphasis!).
I don't know about you, but I need to make ropes longer or join ropes all the time.
And this is quite contrary to X1's & Inkanyezi's boating
experience. One should expect the regular operations
of a zeppelin to have been anticipated with appropriate
cordage lengths, not needing adjustment on any sort
of regular frequency. Further ...
My previous links showing the many ropes used on blimps
should make it obvious that bends would get tied.
Not at all. Recall the alleged emphasis of the supposed
zeppelin knot use in cases of mooring and withstanding
surges of the entire craft --not some small-stuff use.
So, please, articulate the circumstances in which some
large ropes of the blimp are handled and needed to be
tied --where, when, by whom--, AND are needed to be
"UNtied in a hurry" after great force had been put on
it by the blimp (when being moved in/out of a hangar)!?
E.g., sometimes a sailor needs to extend his anchor
rhode, and so out goes the extended line, the knot
somewhere in the drink : where's the in-a-hurry need
for this? Or the Alaskan crabbers' extending pot warps
with lines with a
carrick bend, which also goes out
and down into the drink, and is hardly accessible for
any "in a hurry" untying. Now, with the blimp, I'm
trying to conceive of a joined line being accessible
for untying. And, again, of such extension being needed
when the circumstances I think will be shown to be
pretty consistently set/sized --docking anticipating
the vessel and all.
And note that Giles, who made a Ph.D thesis study of
it all, is similarly puzzled by this.
It's an interesting thought that someonElse might've
written under Rosendahl's or Payne's name in order
to dent the legend of a knot.
What if the letter was from a relative of Rosendahl, ...

And this person would bother to write because ... ??!
Really, this is reaching beyond the pail (you might
accidentally kick the bucket on such a reach!).
Why do you think historians insist on seeing the original document
rather than trusting some intermediary's boneheaded relay? AD FONTES!
And so I'd like to see some "original
document", too!
A magazine article doesn't count so much as that;
so, I look to navy records as a hope.
--dl*
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