DB Cooper: One of the greatest unsolved mysteries in FBI history.
Story of DB Cooper : An unremarkable man with the name Dan Cooper walked up to the desk at Northwest Orient Airlines in Portland, Oregon on the afternoon of November 24th, 1971. The one-way ticket on Flight #305 to Seattle cost him all he had in cash.
Passengers and staff members alike characterised him as a man in his 40s dressed professionally in a dark suit, black tie with a mother-of-pearl tie-clip, and a freshly ironed white collared shirt. He paid cash for a bourbon and soda, sat down at a table, lit a cigarette, and relaxed. He gave a note to a flight attendant shortly after departure, but she just assumed it was the man’s phone number and didn’t bother to read it.
Please review the attached note, Miss,” As Dan Cooper put it, “I have a bomb.”
Since Cooper retrieved the note after the flight attendant read it, we don’t know its precise contents, but we do know that he demanded $200,000 in “negotiable American dollars” (equivalent to $1 million today), four parachutes, and a fuel truck waiting in Seattle to refuel the jet upon arrival. Requests were relayed to the captain via the flight attendant. The head of the airline gave his blessing for complete cooperation. Landing was delayed due to mechanical difficulties, so the other passengers had no idea what was going on.
When the plane arrived in Seattle at 5:39 p.m., DB Cooper traded the money and parachutes for the plane’s 36 passengers. Cooper kept some of the crew members and the jet took off again with instructions to head towards Mexico City.
If DB Cooper brings questions in your mind what about the Inuit Village that disappeared over night?
Cooper informed the crew of his plans while stopping for fuel: a southeasterly path toward Mexico with a subsequent refuelling stop in Nevada.
A little after 8 o’clock at night, somewhere between Seattle and Reno, he leaped out of the plane’s cargo hold with a parachute and the ransom money. Cooper vanished into thin air, and nobody knows for sure where he went or who he is. Cooper’s absence was discovered when the plane touched down in Reno. Cooper, who the media mistook with DB Cooper, vanished without a trace. The ransom money was never used because no parachute was ever located.
A little child visiting Oregon with his family in 1980 discovered numerous packets of the ransom money (identified by serial number), sparking a massive manhunt for Cooper or his remains in the region. Never did anything turn up. There was a time when it was thought that the real-life inspiration for the character of Don Draper from Mad Men was actually Cooper. A parachute strap was discovered in 2017 at a site that could have been one of Cooper’s landing spots.
You can read the case details and evidences on the FBI Page.