D.B. COOPER

THE CLAIM

There is no conspiracy claim here — only a mystery, and it is exactly as advertised: a man hijacked a Boeing 727, collected $200,000, parachuted into the night, and was never identified or found, dead or alive.

WHAT IS KNOWN

A passenger who bought his ticket as "Dan Cooper" (a wire-service error made him "D.B.") boarded Northwest Orient Flight 305 in Portland, ordered a bourbon and soda, and handed a flight attendant a note saying his briefcase contained a bomb. He showed her a mass of wires and red cylinders, and demanded $200,000 in "negotiable American currency" and four parachutes, delivered at Seattle in exchange for the passengers.

He got both. The plane took off again toward Mexico City at his instructed configuration — 10,000 feet, gear down, flaps 15, cabin unpressurized — and somewhere north of Portland, in darkness and heavy rain, he lowered the 727's rear airstair and jumped with the money tied to his body. A fighter escort saw nothing. The FBI's initial view was that an experienced jumper wouldn't have jumped into that weather in loafers and a trench coat — and that he probably didn't survive. No body, parachute, or briefcase has ever been found.

In February 1980, a boy digging a fire pit on Tena Bar, a Columbia River beach northwest of Vancouver, WA, uncovered three bundles of deteriorating twenties — $5,800 whose serial numbers matched the ransom. It remains the only piece of the case ever recovered, and it surfaced miles from the projected drop zone, which has fueled fifty years of argument about the flight path, the river, and dredging spoils.

LEADING THEORIES & SUSPECTS

• He died in the jump. The FBI's working assumption. Explains the total silence; doesn't cleanly explain the money's location.
• Richard Floyd McCoy Jr. — pulled a near-identical 727 airstair hijacking five months later, was caught, escaped prison, died in a 1974 shootout. The FBI formally considered and excluded him on appearance; his family has continued to press the claim, most recently with DNA and parachute-evidence stories in 2024.
• Confession candidates — Duane Weber, Kenneth Christiansen, Robert Rackstraw, Barbara Dayton, and a dozen others, each with a deathbed confession, family suspicion, or amateur dossier. None has survived FBI or forensic scrutiny.
• The tie particles. Cooper left a clip-on tie on seat 18E. Civilian researchers granted access in the 2000s found unalloyed titanium and rare-earth particles on it, suggesting work around aerospace or metal fabrication — the closest thing to a profile the case has.

ASSESSMENT

Open, and honestly so. Every few years a documentary crowns a new Cooper; every few years the identification dissolves on contact with the evidence. The stubborn facts remain the ones from 1971 and 1980: a competent, calm hijacker; a jump survivable only with luck; and $5,800 in the wrong place. Anyone claiming certainty about this case is selling something. The OSA keeps the folder on the open shelf.

FURTHER READING

• Wikipedia: D. B. Cooper
• FBI: the D.B. Cooper hijacking (case summary and file excerpts)
• Wikipedia: Richard Floyd McCoy Jr.