D. B. COOPER MYSTERY CONTINUES

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V18 2015 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 18, Number 48, November 29, 2015, Article 43

A perennial topic this time of year is the search for the identity of "D.B.Cooper", the infamous airplane hijacker who disappeared without a trace on November 24, 1971. $200,000 in ransom money disappeared with him, and several notes traceable to that payment have entered numismatic circles. Here's an article from The Daily Mail about an author who claims to have identified the hijacker. -Editor

Most Americans have heard of the case of DB Cooper, who is accused of pulling off the only plane hijacking in the history of the United States that has never been solved.

Now, 44 years after the brazen air heist, a Michigan author has put forward a new theory linking the mystery of DB Cooper to an obscure missing person case involving a married father of four who vanished two years before the skyjacking and was never heard from again.

Over the years, the facts of the skyjacking history have become the stuff of legends: on November 24, 1971, a man known by the name Dan Cooper bought a ticket at Portland International Airport in Oregon and boarded a Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 to Seattle, Washington.

He ordered a bourbon and lit a cigarette before asking flight attendant Florence Schaffner to write down the following: 'I HAVE A BOMB IN MY BRIEFCASE. I WILL USE IT IF NECESSARY. I WANT YOU TO SIT NEXT TO ME. YOU ARE BING (sic) HIJACKED.'

While the plane was being refueled, Cooper was handed $200,000 in cash and four parachutes, which he had demanded in return for allowing 36 passengers to leave the plane when it landed. Cooper then ordered the captain to fly towards Mexico at an altitude of under 10,000 feet.

Somewhere between Seattle and Reno, Nevada, Cooper tied the bag of cash to himself and jumped out the back of the plane in stormy weather.

With the help of Florence Schaffner, the stewardess who passed on Cooper's ransom note to the captain, FBI was able to create a composite sketch, which is the only known image of DB Cooper in existence.

Cooper's fate remains unknown to this day, despite a decades-long FBI investigation and hundreds of possible leads.

In 1980, an 8-year-old boy named Brian Ingram was having a picnic with his parents along the Columbia River when he came across three rotting wads of $20 bills totaling $5,800 bearing serial numbers that matched the ransom money given to DB Cooper.

As years passed, many people connected with the probe have come to believe that DB Cooper never survived that fateful parachute jump, but no remains were ever recovered.

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