D.B. Cooper Vanishes: $200,000 Disappears Mid-Air

A man in a dark suit, sunglasses, and a thin black tie hijacked a Boeing 727, extorted $200,000 in ransom, and parachuted into a thunderstorm over the Pacific Northwest. He was never seen again. The hijacking of Northwest Orient Flight 305 on November 24, 1971, by a passenger who identified himself as Dan Cooper, remains the only unsolved case of air piracy in American commercial aviation history. Cooper boarded the Portland-to-Seattle flight, ordered a bourbon and soda, and handed a note to the flight attendant stating he had a bomb. He opened his briefcase to reveal a tangle of red cylinders and wires. His demands were modest by hijacking standards: $200,000 in twenty-dollar bills and four parachutes. He was calm, polite, and methodical. Flight attendant Tina Mucklow later described him as thoughtful and not threatening. He even insisted the crew be fed dinner during the refueling stop in Seattle. After the passengers deplaned in Seattle and the ransom was delivered, Cooper directed the crew to fly toward Mexico City at low altitude with the landing gear down and the rear stairway lowered. Somewhere over southwestern Washington State, in darkness and freezing rain, he jumped. The crew felt the plane shift as he departed. Fighter jets trailing the 727 saw nothing. Search teams found no body, no parachute, and no trace of Cooper in the dense forests below. The FBI investigated more than a thousand suspects over 45 years without solving the case. In 1980, an eight-year-old boy found $5,800 in deteriorating twenty-dollar bills along the Columbia River, matching the serial numbers from the ransom. No other money ever surfaced. The Bureau officially closed the case in 2016. Whether Cooper survived the jump into a November storm at 10,000 feet with a wind chill of negative 70 degrees, wearing loafers and a trench coat, remains an open question that continues to captivate amateur sleuths.