52 years ago in the USA, a criminal stole a plane, received a $200K ransom, and jumped out of the plane with a parachute. Neither he nor all the money was ever found. Hereʼs the incredible story of D. B. Cooper

On November 24, 1971, a passenger on a Boeing 727 flight from Portland to Seattle with a ticket in the name of Dan Cooper claimed that he had a bomb in his suitcase. He demanded a $200 thousand ransom, two sets of parachutes and ordered the pilots to fly to Mexico. On the way there, he jumped out of a plane with a parachute over the forest and mountains. Since then, no one has seen him again. The police and the FBI have been looking for him for more than 40 years, and they had more than a thousand suspects, but Cooperʼs identity was never established. The investigation assumed that he did not survive the jump, but neither the body, nor the parachute, nor any other evidence was ever found. The kidnapper had many fans and imitators, books were written about him, documentaries and feature films were shot. One of the last references was in the Loki series. After that, security measures were enhanced at the airports. 45 years later, the FBI decided to suspend the investigation — "until new evidence and details appear." Babel tells about the only unsolved hijacking of a plane in the history of civil aviation.

An inconspicuous thief with unusual demands

On the afternoon of November 24, 1971, the day before Thanksgiving, a middle-aged man named Dan Cooper bought a cash ticket to Seattle on a Northwest Orient Airlines Boeing 727 at the Portland airport. He was unremarkable in appearance. Age — about 40 years, height — about 180 centimeters, weight — about 80 kilograms, brown eyes, dark skin, wearing a light black coat, dark suit, white shirt, black tie with a clasp and mother-of-pearl pin, on feet moccasins, in hands a small suitcase-portfolio — this is how witnesses will describe it.

The plane was about a third full, except for Cooper, there were 36 passengers in the cabin. Cooper took his place in the tail of the plane, not far from the flight attendantʼs folding chair. After takeoff, he smoked a cigarette—you could still smoke in the cabins then—and ordered a bourbon and soda. And then he handed a note to one of the flight attendants. But she decided that this was another flirtation, and the note contained an offer to go on a date and a phone number, so she put it in her pocket without reading it. But the passenger quietly said that she had better read the note, because he had a bomb with him.

After that, he asked the frightened flight attendant to sit next to him and opened the briefcase. Inside, several cylinders were visible, from which wires wrapped in insulating tape went, and a large battery. After that, Cooper asked the flight attendant to hand over the demands to the pilots: $200,000 in unmarked $20 bills and two sets of parachutes, each with a main and spare parachute, and they must be sports, not military. And added that the plane will land in Seattle only after money and parachutes are prepared. Otherwise he will detonate the bomb.

The flight attendant quietly passed everything on to the pilots, who contacted the dispatcher, and then the police and the FBI got involved. It was about half an hour to fly from Portland to Seattle, but while they collected money and looked for parachutes, the plane circled over the airport for more than two hours. To prevent panic in the cabin, passengers were told that boarding was delayed for technical reasons. Cooper himself behaved calmly and politely communicated with the flight attendants. He put on big sunglasses, ordered a bourbon and paid for his drink with a generous tip. And he even asked that the pilots be given food after landing, because, according to him, "a show was planned."

When the plane landed, Cooper ordered that it be refueled and that the lights in the cabin were turned off so that the snipers who were scattered around the airport could not see what was happening inside. When he was handed the money and the parachutes, he let go of all the passengers and the two flight attendants. Another flight attendant, two pilots and a flight engineer remained on the plane. Now Cooper put forward new requirements: to fly to the southeast — towards Mexico City, at the minimum possible speed — about 185 kilometers per hour, and at an altitude of no more than three thousand meters. At the same time, the landing gear of the aircraft should be released, and the wing flaps should be lowered by 15 degrees. The pilots immediately said that under these conditions they would run out of fuel before they reached the Mexican border. Then Cooper agreed to make a stop in the city of Reno, Nevada, for refueling. It was more than two hours to fly there.

Around 19:40 local time, the airliner took off from Seattle. A few minutes after takeoff, Cooper ordered the entire crew to lock themselves in the cockpit. The last thing the stewardess saw was Cooper tying something to his belt. Around 8:00 p.m., the pilots noticed that the pressure on board had dropped, and a warning light had flashed on the panel. This meant that the door with the onboard gangway in the tail of the plane opened, in the Boeing 727 this gangway was sometimes used for disembarking and boarding passengers. The crew chief asked over the speakerphone if everything was okay and if Cooper needed help. He responded with a sharp refusal. About 15 minutes later, the plane entered a dense thunderstorm front with virtually zero visibility. At this time, the tail part suddenly went up, so the pilots urgently had to level the plane.

No further instructions came from Cooper. So, around 10:15 p.m., we had to land in Reno with the stern ladder out, because it was impossible to raise it from the cockpit. The plane was immediately surrounded by police and FBI agents. But Cooper, as before, was silent. After some time, the crew commander went into the cabin and did not see anyone there. Police searched the entire plane, but the hijacker disappeared with one set of parachutes, money and a suitcase containing a bomb. Since then, the further fate of Cooper remains a mystery.

A minimum of ten years of evidence

First, FBI agents thoroughly searched the plane. More than 60 fingerprints were found, which did not belong to either the passengers or the crew and were not listed in the FBI file. The note, which Cooper first handed to the flight attendant, he then took away. The glasses from which he could drink bourbon and the cigarette butts of the "Reli" brand, which the kidnapper smoked, also disappeared.

A second set of parachutes was also left in the cabin. Cooper cut several straps from one of them, presumably to tie a bag of money to himself.

But the main physical evidence found in the salon was the same tie with a clasp and a mother-of-pearl pin. She was lying in a chair next to the seat Cooper had bought a ticket for. DNA particles were found on the tie, which were then compared with the suspectsʼ samples, but there were no matches. Therefore, the FBI suggested that the particles might not have belonged to the kidnapper at all: he could have borrowed a tie or bought an old one.

Only in the 2010s, after new research, particles of titanium were found on the tie, after which there was a version that Cooper could have been an engineer or manager at a chemical or metalworking plant. Cerium and strontium sulfide were also found on the tie. So the version that Cooper was a Boeing employee was not ruled out, since these elements were used in the unfinished development of the Boeing 2707 supersonic passenger plane.

At the same time, a search team was sent to the area of Cooperʼs possible landing — in the forest and mountainous area in the area of the Columbia and Lewis rivers, about 50 kilometers from Portland. Thus, the hijacker actually returned to the place from where he took off. But the exact place of landing was difficult to determine. In addition, the kidnapper chose a good time — on the eve of Thanksgiving, the next three days were also a weekend, so many police and FBI employees went to their homes.

Plus, Cooper had about a two-hour head start by the time the plane reached Reno. A thorough combing of the area yielded no results. The law enforcement officers sent the serial numbers of the bills issued to Cooper to casinos, racetracks, banks and other institutions with a large circulation of money. But none of the banknotes ever surfaced.

In November 1978, a hunter found a poster near a forest road with instructions for lowering the aft stairs in Boeing 727 airplanes. The plane that Cooper hijacked flew over this place.

And in 1980, eight-year-old Brian Ingram was vacationing with his family on the Columbia River, right in the area where Cooper could have landed. While raking the sandy shore to build a fire, the boy found three packets of $20 bills.

Investigators determined by the numbers that these were bills issued to Cooper. And they lay exactly in the order in which they were put together for redemption. So it could be assumed that the packages had fallen during the jump and, judging by their poor condition, had been lying in the sand and water all this time. FBI agents scoured the bank of the Columbia River near the find, but found nothing else.

In 1986, after lengthy negotiations, part of the money was divided between the Ingram family and the insurer Northwest Orient Airlines. And the FBI kept 14 bills as evidence. In 2008, Brian Ingram, an adult, sold fifteen bills at auction for approximately $37,000. There were 290 bills in three packages on the river bank, the remaining 9,710 have not yet been found.

Could Cooper survive such a jump?

At first, investigators thought that the kidnapper had military training — he was a paratrooper or a pilot. In any case, he must have had experience in skydiving. He jumped right inside the storm front so that the pilots of the military planes following the hijacked Boeing 727 from Seattle could not notice the jump. And also Cooper, according to the witnesses, knew the area over which they flew very well and easily pointed to various landmarks even in the dark. Veterans of the Second World War and the Vietnam War confirmed that even in bad weather conditions such a jump with a parachute can be successful. All it takes is preparation and practice.

However, the more FBI investigators delved into the details, the more they doubted that Cooper could have survived. He was jumping in zero visibility, high winds with rain and sub-zero temperatures overboard in a light suit and moccasins. And he could land in cold water or on a snowy mountain top. At the same time, he did not even ask for a helmet along with parachutes.

And the most important thing. Of the two main parachutes, Cooper chose the oldest. When the police were selecting parachutes at one of Seattleʼs parachute schools, they hurriedly seized one training parachute model that was sewn shut and could not open. Cooper took him as a spare. Such layouts have special markings, and a professional parachutist should be familiar with them.

For nearly a decade, the FBI, along with the police and the military, combed the area for a possible landing. They even went down on submarines to the bottom of the nearest rivers and lakes. They found several human remains, established the identities of all the dead — none of them turned out to be the same kidnapper. The investigators did not even find a parachute, a suitcase with a bomb, or any other traces.

Who is Dan Cooper?

This question has been in the headlines of American newspapers for the past 50 years. And there is still no answer to it. From the very beginning, it became clear that Dan Cooper was not the real name of the kidnapper. But after a fruitless search for hot leads, the FBI just in case detained and interrogated one of the petty criminals, DB Cooper, who lived nearby. It quickly became clear that he was not involved in the hijacking of the plane. But one of the local journalists, in pursuit of a sensation, sent a message to the editorial office that a plane hijacker named DB Cooper had been arrested. The news was quickly picked up by other media — despite denials by the police and the FBI, the criminal entered American history under that name.

Three weeks after the hijacking of the plane, the Los Angeles Times received a letter from Dan Cooper, in which he said that he had about a year left to live, and hijacking the plane "was the fastest and most profitable way for me to ensure the last days of my life." Later, other letters appeared, different in style and content. In some of them, the author declared that the hijacking of the plane was "a victory over the system and a stupid government." "I had to somehow apply what Uncle Sam taught me, and here I am — a very rich man," read one of the messages. These letters did not provide any leads for the FBI.

But there was no shortage of suspects. Over the years, about 1,200 people have been involved in this case. More than a hundred surrendered to police and identified themselves as Dan Cooper. Several more people confessed to hijacking the plane before their death. Dozens of people said that the description of the criminal resembled someone from their relatives or acquaintances. There was even a version that Dan Cooper was actually a made-up female pilot. The investigation checked all these versions, but nothing came of it.

From this long list, the FBIʼs "most ideal" suspect was Vietnam War veteran Richard McCoy. In April 1972, he hijacked a Boeing 727 according to the same scenario, only instead of a bomb he had a pistol with a grenade and he demanded not $200, but $500,000. McCoy also parachuted out with the money, but was arrested two days later. However, they could not prove his connection with the previous kidnapping. He was younger and was not similar in character to the "polite" Cooper. In addition, on November 24, 1971, he had an alibi — he was in Las Vegas, one and a half thousand kilometers from the scene of the crime. McCoy was sentenced to 45 years in prison, two years later he escaped and died in a shootout with the police a few months later.

After 45 years, the list of suspects was reduced to ten people. 60 volumes of investigation materials have accumulated. But no one was charged, and Cooperʼs identity was not officially established. In July 2016, the FBI "redirected resources from the Cooper case to other high-profile crimes." However, if new details and evidence emerge, the bureau is ready to reopen the investigation.

Cooperʼs legacy

The criminal immediately had many fans and imitators. In 1972, there were 15 attempts to hijack planes using the same scenario. Therefore, already next year, security measures were strengthened at airports: there was a mandatory inspection of luggage and searches of suspicious passengers. They began to install a window in the doors of the pilot cabins, which allows the crew to observe what is happening in the cabin. The next time security rules were tightened after the terrorist attacks in New York on September 11, 2001.

In addition, the Boeing 727 and other aircraft had a special device that prevented the aft hatch from opening during flight. It was named after the kidnapper — "Cooperʼs blade".

Due to its wide popularity and, most importantly, many unsolved mysteries, the story of Dan Cooper has been reflected in cinema, literature and music. In addition to documentaries and investigative books, references also appear in works of art.

In 1981, the adventure film "The Pursuit of DB Cooper" was released in the USA, based on the novel "Free Fall" by the American writer JD Reed. DB Cooper is the surname and initials of FBI agent Dale Bartholomew Cooper from the television series Twin Peaks. And one of the fresh references is in the series of the Marvel Cinematic Universe "Loki" in 2021. According to the plot of the first series "A Glorious Mission", Cooper was Loki himself.

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