D.B. Cooper

On November 24, 1971, a man using the name Dan Cooper boarded Northwest Orient Flight 305 from Portland to Seattle, carrying a briefcase and ordering a bourbon and soda. After takeoff, he handed a flight attendant a note stating that he had a bomb and calmly explained his demands: $200,000 in cash, four parachutes, and a fuel truck standing by in Seattle.

Authorities complied, and after the aircraft landed in Seattle, Cooper released the passengers and some crew while keeping a smaller flight crew onboard. He then ordered the plane back into the air toward Mexico at low altitude with the rear stairs lowered. Somewhere over the dark, rainy Pacific Northwest, he jumped into the night with the ransom money strapped to him.

The hijacking triggered one of the largest manhunts in FBI history. Search teams examined likely drop zones, rivers, forests, and flight-path calculations, but no confirmed body, parachute, or intact cache of ransom money was found in the immediate aftermath. The terrain and weather made the search punishing, and the uncertainty about the exact jump point haunted the case from the start.

Over time, investigators debated whether Cooper was a skilled parachutist, a reckless amateur who got lucky, or a man who did not survive the descent at all. In 1980, a child discovered a portion of the ransom money buried along the Columbia River at Tina Bar, proving at least some of the cash had reached the ground but answering almost nothing about Cooper's fate.

The case remains compelling because almost every theory can explain one part of the evidence while colliding with another. Some suspects resemble the composite sketches, others fit the aviation or military profile, and others align with later confessions or family stories. Yet the central question has never changed: who was the hijacker, and did he actually escape?