Bin Laden's location: UCLA geographers named Parachinar as likely hide-out 2 years ago [Updated]

This post has been corrected. See the note at the bottom for details.

Did a team of UCLA geography professors and undergraduates correctly predict the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden two years ago?

No, but a blog post at Science Insider calls the crew's efforts "none too shabby."

UCLA geographers Thomas Gillespie and John Agnew and a class of undergraduates published a 2009 paper predicting the location of Bin Laden and guessing he would be in a large town rather than a cave.

Photos: Osama bin Laden dead

The paper named the city of Parachinar as his most likely hide-out, and the model the researchers used said there was an 88.9% chance Bin Laden was in Abbottabad, Pakistan, according to the blog by the publishers of the journal Science:

The Bin Laden tracking idea began as a project in an undergraduate class on remote sensing that Gillespie, whose expertise is using remote sensing data from satellites to study ecosystems, taught in 2009. Based on information from satellites and other remote sensing systems, and reports on his movements since his last known location, the students created a probabilistic model of where he was likely to be.

“The theory was basically that if you’re going to try and survive, you’re going to a region with a low extinction rate: a large town,” Gillespie says. “We hypothesized he wouldn’t be in a small town where people could report on him.”

So Gillespie said he was not surprised to hear U.S. forces had found Bin Laden in a larger town. But he told the blog Bin Laden could have made a better choice in real estate: “An inconspicuous house would have suited him better," he said.

[For the Record, 1:05 p.m. May 3: An earlier version of this post, and its headline, indicated that the UCLA team had named Abbottabad as a likely hide-out for Bin Laden. The team named the city of Parachinar as his most likely hide-out.]

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-- Tony Barboza

Comments

[BigJImSlade]

I predict California will still be broke two years from now with this crowd in charge.

Where's The Amazing Criswell when we need him?

[Andrew R.]

I just read the 2009 Paper that was linked to this article "Finding Osama bin Laden: An Application of Biogeographic Theories and Satellite Imagery." The city of Abbottabad is not mentioned once. How did the author of this article conclude that "there was an 88.9% chance Bin Laden was in Abbottabad, Pakistan." In fact, the 2009 Paper concludes that Bin Laden is within the Federal Adminstered Tribal Areas of Pakistan which is NOT where he was found on Sunday.

[Native Angeleno]

This remarkable non-coincidence began when the media/Pentagon p.r. dept, given the assignment to come up with a believable story how Obama got Osama, who was not needed any more as the defense industry's boogeyman, the Pentagon having brain-trained so many others at Gitmo to continue to take his place, came across and adopted the Ucla report.

Rest in pieces, Osama, 2001, dead in an American base hospital while on dialysis.

[Mike]

Funny thing about the US. Seems that the only people who are interested in what academics have to say are other academics. Maybe university-types should get their own reality TV shows.

I wonder what would have happened if big-mouth Donald Trump had said something about the UCLA geographers' paper.

[MICHAEL G]

Yep, knew it! It wasn't going to take UCLA long to somehow take credit for Bin Laden's capture and death... Now, if these Bruin cranks can only tract down the Easter Bunny...

[Michael B]

Here come the "I told you so" people.

Give it up. If you made a credible arguement the administration would have listened to you.

[Jen]

Good job UCLA Geographers!

[Da Maverick]

I faintly remember the Times covering this a couple of years ago. It's remarkable how undergrads were given an opportunity to endeavor into such an important and salient topic. More remarkable is how accurate their model turned out to be.

And Californians still want to turn their state into a Nevada clone? We say we can't fund these universities??

[Pete Sake]

That's great, a team of students could pinpoint Osama but the world's most sophisticated military could not. You'd think that this report, along with a coordinated search effort with the Pakistani military could have yielded a capture a long time ago. I mean, how hard could it be to search large residential houses in one or two probable towns in Pakistan?

[Cosmo Kramer]

Yeah well, at least UCLA students weren't spending their time having sex on campus building roof tops!!!

[NothingRight]

If you look at the maps on the original report, you will see that Abottabad actually fell more into the 80.9% category. It's easy for people to mock this type of analysis, but it is simply another method to add to an intelligence portfolio.

The reality is there were many people who believed he had been in Pakistan for many years, but we were basing it on hunches or our own data set. These folks used real data, probabilities, spatial analysis and other complex data sets to narrow down a probable target range.

This report was published in 2009. If the recommendations had been used in correlation with intelligence the UCLA crew did not have, maybe we would have cut a year off the time it took to get to Bin Laden.

I think the reason only intellectuals appreciate the work of intellectuals is they are the only ones with the ability to think beyond the bubble they live in. I am hoping if we keep pushing we can invite more people into the realm of the intellectual.