The D.B. Cooper Hijacking
On the evening of November 24, 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper purchased a one-way ticket on Northwest Orient Flight 305 from Portland to Seattle. Mid-flight, he handed a flight attendant a note claiming he had a bomb in his briefcase and demanding $200,000 in cash and four parachutes upon landing. After the plane landed in Seattle, Cooper released the passengers in exchange for the ransom and two parachutes. The plane then took off again bound for Mexico City. Somewhere over the forests of southwestern Washington, Cooper opened the rear stairs and jumped into the night. He was never seen again. The FBI launched one of the longest investigations in its history — code-named NORJAK — interviewing hundreds of suspects over more than four decades. In 1980, a young boy found a small bundle of deteriorating $20 bills along the Columbia River that matched the serial numbers of the Cooper ransom. No other trace of the money or the man was ever found. The discovery raised more questions than it answered about the direction of his jump and whether he survived. Over 800 suspects were investigated without a conclusive match. In 2016, the FBI announced it was suspending active investigation of the case to redirect resources, though it remains technically open. Numerous individuals have come forward over the years claiming either to be Cooper themselves or to know his identity, and investigators periodically revisit new DNA evidence and physical analysis of the retrieved bills. The case remains the only unsolved case of air piracy in American commercial aviation history. D.B. Cooper — a name mistakenly applied by a wire service reporter and permanently stuck — has become a folk antihero celebrated in books, films, songs, and an annual festival in Ariel, Washington. The romantic appeal of the audacious heist, the clean disappearance, and the total evasion of justice has made Cooper one of the most mythologized figures in American crime history. Whether he survived his parachute jump into the November wilderness remains officially unknown.