One I got completely wrong… I have written about why too at Facebook in 2011:
‘A new study from the UCLA Geography Department reportedly claims that the location of the elusive Mr Osama Bin Laden may be able to be pinpointed, or at least suggests a theoretical methodology for doing so. I am afraid I think such an ambition is unlikely to succeed because it neglects Aristotle’s advice “for the trained mind not to seek more precision than the subject of his study is intrinsically capable of granting to him”. (The quote is from my 1982 Cambridge doctoral thesis, p. 200; the original at Nicomachean Ethics Book 1 Chapter 3 says “it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits”.)
What I said once while chatting with a German Government official in Goa in October 2006 was this: if I had been Mr Bin Laden, I would have long ago moved to “a nice oasis in the Sahara Desert” or some similarly comfortable place in North Africa. In May 2007, I decided to publish that remark here as follows:
“Where I would have gone if I was Osama Bin Laden:
Mr Osama Bin Laden has been highly sought after for several years, against his will, yet he has thus far succeeded in maintaining his privacy. In October 2006 in Goa, I was chatting with a German Government official about this, and told him that, incidentally, I thought that how Mr Bin Laden has successfully eluded the paparazzi is by the time-honoured method of creating a red herring. He would have said his goodbyes to Mullah Omar, as Osama did in the winter of 2001, and then proceeded westward…. through Somalia towards North Africa…. all the way to a nice oasis in the Sahara Desert.”
Commonsense suggests that Mr Bin Laden would not have remained where most people would have ended up looking for him. Those who have been looking for him all these years seem not to have heard the old one about the drunk who looks for his lost car-keys under the lamp-post because that is where the light is…
Subroto Roy, Kolkata’
Independent Indian: Work & Life of Professor Subroto Roy 
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