1971 · Pacific Northwest D.B. Cooper, The Man Who Made History.
He hijacked a plane, got $200,000 and plunged into the stormy night sky – and never was seen again.
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It was the night before Thanksgiving. November 24, 1971.
The kind of day when most Americans would be thinking about turkey and family and the warmth of home. The airports were full of people trying to get to their place. No one seemed to notice the quiet man in the black suit who walked up to the counter at Portland International Airport and bought a one-way ticket to Seattle.
He stated his name was Dan Cooper.
He looked like no one. That was the plan.
He found his seat, ordered a bourbon and soda and leaned back as if he had no worries in the world. Courteous. Peaceful. Nothing much. The kind of passenger flight attendants forget the moment the plane touches down.
But Dan Cooper hadn’t come to be remembered for his manners.
He passed a note to a flight attendant named Florence Schaffner shortly after takeoff. She thought it was his phone number. Men did that sometimes, slipped notes to flight attendants, hoping for something. She pocketed it, unread.
He bent towards her gently and said, ‘Miss, you would better look at that note. “I have a bomb.”
She read it. Her face went white.
Cooper opened his briefcase a bit, so she could see in. Red tubes. Wires. One battery. It looked terribly real. Whether or not it was, no one on that plane wanted to find out.
He wanted only one thing, and he wanted it badly. 200,000 in cash. Four chutes. Main, back-up. Back-up. Fuel trucks lined up in Seattle. And no tricks, or the bomb would go off.
The airline contacted the FBI. The F.B.I. called the airline back. The two of them agreed they really had no choice.
They would give him anything he wanted.
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The plane landed on Seattle. But Cooper kept his word, and he let every last one of those passengers off that plane. Whatever he was, he had come to do no one harm. As the money was being loaded on board he sat quietly, counted the cash and checked the parachutes, then gave the pilots their new instructions.
Head south. Stay down! Take it easy. Head on down to Mexico.
The plane once more lifted off into the night sky with only Cooper and the pilots, and a few of the crew members who had stayed on.
Somewhere over the black forests of south-west Washington, thick, wet, freezing cold, invisible from the air, Cooper strapped a parachute to his back, fastened the bag of money to his body, and walked to the rear of the plane.
He opened the rear ladder. The night came on, black and wet and brutishly cold.
Then he jumped.
Into a rain-storm. Into near freezing temperatures. Into woods so thick and dark that nothing could be found in them. Almost. Into a night that seemed to have been made to swallow a person whole.
The pilots did not realize he was gone until they got to the ground.
—
Next came the biggest manhunt in FBI history up to that point.
Agents swarmed the forests of Washington and Oregon. His fingerprints had been lifted off the bourbon glass. A piece of DNA from his tie. Crew detail descriptions They had the serial numbers of every single bill in that two hundred grand.
In the decades that followed they questioned hundreds of suspects. Pilots . Troopers. Parachutists. Criminals . Average men with exceptional lies. Every few years a new name would turn up — someone who looked like the sketch, someone who had disappeared about that time, someone his family spoke about in hushed tones after he died.
None were ever proven to be Dan Cooper.
In 1980, a little boy playing near the Columbia River found a small bundle of rotting banknotes half-buried in the mud. When investigators checked the serial numbers, they must have had a heart attack — it was Cooper’s money. Weathered and falling apart, like it sat there on the riverbank for years. About $5,800 worth.
That was the last physical evidence ever found of D.B. Cooper.
No parachute. No body. No camp for survival. No confession on his deathbed. No bones in the woods.
“Nothing.
—
The FBI kept the case open for 45 years. Forty-five years of following leads, eliminating suspects, and coming up empty. By 2016, they finally shut the investigation down—not because they had any answers, but because they’d run out of new places to look.
D.B. Cooper is the only unsolved air piracy case in the history of American aviation.
Just think about that. In all the decades since that night, fingerprint databases, DNA technology, satellite imaging and the full weight of federal law enforcement have been unable to determine with certainty who this man was, whether he lived or died, or whatever became of that money.
Did he escape? That sounds so impossible. He jumped into the frigid blackness of some of the most merciless terrain in the Pacific Northwest, in the middle of a rainstorm, at night, with a bag of cash strapped to his chest. Most experts say no human could have survived that jump and disappeared without a trace.
But then, no-one was ever found either.
Maybe he died in those dark woods, and the forest took him all the way, as forests sometimes do. Maybe his bones are still out there, somewhere under decades of moss and fallen pine needles, slowly becoming part of the ground he landed on.
Or maybe—and this is the part that has had people scratching their heads for fifty years—maybe he stepped out of those trees, found a road, changed his name and lived out the rest of his life as someone else. A silent man. Some nobody. Someone nobody would ever look twice at.
He is, somewhere. Or maybe he doesn’t.
And no one – not the FBI, not the historians, not the thousands of amateur detectives who have spent years of their lives on this mystery – has ever been able to say which one is true.
Dan Cooper vanished into the night.
And he never did get it back.
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*D.B. Cooper · November 24, 1971 · Northwest Orient Flight 305* $200,000 ransom (20/10/23) · Never fully recovered · Case closed 2016* *Identity unknown · Fate unknown · The only unsolved skyjacking in US history*
