On the afternoon of November 24, 1971 — Thanksgiving Eve — a nondescript man in a dark suit and black clip-on tie walked up to the Northwest Orient Airlines counter at Portland International Airport. He paid cash for a one-way ticket to Seattle. He gave his name as Dan Cooper. Nobody asked for ID. He took seat 18-E at the very back of the Boeing 727, ordered a bourbon and soda, and told the flight attendant to keep the change. He smoked Raleigh cigarettes and looked like any other businessman on a short hop up the coast.
Shortly after takeoff, he handed flight attendant Florence Schaffner a folded note. She put it in her pocket without reading it. He leaned over and said quietly that she’d better look at it. It said he had a bomb in his briefcase. He opened the case slightly and showed her what looked like red cylinders, wires, and a battery. The crew believed him. He never raised his voice. He told her to take a note to the captain. His demands were $200,000 in $20 bills and 4 parachutes. Both were delivered to him in Seattle in exchange for 36 passengers. He kept the crew. He asked for 4 parachutes. He jumped with 2. 1 of them had been sewn shut — it was a training chute that couldn’t open. A real skydiver would’ve checked.
The plane took off again heading toward Mexico City at low altitude. Cooper told the remaining flight attendant to show him how to operate the rear airstair. Then he sent her to the cockpit. Somewhere over the dark forests of southwestern Washington — in a driving thunderstorm at 10,000 feet with temperatures well below zero — he lowered the rear stairs and jumped into the night. The Air Force had scrambled jets to follow the plane. They saw nothing. When the crew landed in Reno, there was no sign of him. Just his clip-on tie and 8 cigarette butts. The butts were collected as evidence and later disappeared. The tie is the only physical evidence that survives.
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The FBI launched what became 1 of the longest investigations in its history. The name “D.B. Cooper” was a press error — a reporter confused him with a different man, and it stuck. His real name has never been established.
In 1980, a child found $5,800 of the ransom money buried along the Columbia River north of Portland — the serial numbers matched — but the rest of the $200,000 has never surfaced. Boeing modified every 727 in its fleet after the hijacking to stop the rear stairs from being lowered in flight. The device is called the Cooper Vane. He’s the reason every commercial jet you’ve ever flown on can’t open its rear stairs mid-flight.
The Case Nobody Could Close
The FBI officially suspended its investigation in July 2016 after 45 years and more than 800 considered suspects. When they closed it, they said they believed he didn’t survive the jump. They closed it anyway. The case remains the only unsolved air hijacking in American history.
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The FBI tested the tie for DNA for decades. They said the sample was partial and they couldn’t even confirm it was Cooper’s. That’s all 45 years of forensic work produced. Researchers still gather in Vancouver, Washington — just miles from where Cooper likely landed — for an annual conference dedicated to figuring out who he was. The next 1 runs November 13-15, 2026. He’d be in his 90s or older if they were wrong. Nobody knows.
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