On November 24, 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper hijacked a plane between Portland and Seattle, collected $200,000, and parachuted into the forests of Washington. No one ever learned who he was. It remains the only unsolved airline hijacking in U.S. history.
It was the day before Thanksgiving. A man in a dark suit, in his mid-forties, paid cash for a one-way ticket on Northwest Orient Flight 305 from Portland to Seattle. He took a seat in the back row. Shortly after takeoff he handed a stewardess a note: he had a bomb in his briefcase.
He asked for $200,000 in twenties and four parachutes. In Seattle he traded the 36 passengers for the money and ordered the crew to fly south, slow and low, with the gear down. At about 8:13 p.m., somewhere over southwest Washington, he lowered the 727’s aft airstair and jumped into the rainy night.
The FBI searched for 45 years and considered more than 800 suspects. Only one solid clue ever surfaced: $5,800 of the ransom, buried on a bank of the Columbia River, found in 1980. In 2016 the Bureau stopped investigating. The file is still open.
FBI images, public domain.
Three zones calculated in fifty years, and no trace of Cooper. The airstair placard turned up in 1978; the money, in 1980, far from all of them.
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The FBI bulletin, Flight 305 hour by hour, the ticket, the Tena Bar money, the tie, the parachutes, the suspects, and the nine questions the file can’t explain. Twelve pages, as a PDF, in your inbox.
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Closed File 01
D. B. Cooper, the Man Who Never Existed
The odd-numbered chapters reconstruct the NORJAK file without a single invented line. The even-numbered ones tell a possible explanation, declared as such, that accounts for everything the file left unexplained.