- Have you ever heard the story of DB Cooper?
This is the story of DB Cooper, or what we know of it.
It was November 24th, 1971 at the Portland international airport, when Dan Cooper boarded flight 305 to Seattle.
Passengers described him as an unremarkable man. Just a Caucasian male in a dark suit with a black tie and a briefcase. One the plane, he ordered a Bourbon and soda and wore sunglasses.
Everything was going well with the flight is. That is, until Cooper handed a note to the flight attendant.
The note said he had a bomb and instructs her to sit next to him. He shows her the bomb.
She saw about 8 sticks of dynamite, a battery and wires. Cooper demands 4 parachutes and $200,000 ransom when they land.
The flight is short, so ground traffic keeps plane circling so that the money and parachutes can be gathered. When the plane lands, Cooper sends another flight attendant out for the money and parachutes.
Passengers and two flight attendants who asked to leave, left the plane. The rest were to stay as hostages and the crew was to fly him to Mexico City, or so they thought.
Cooper wants to fly, wind flaps in downward position and landing gear down, just under 10,000 feet.
The pilots say no and tell him that the plane will fly out of the sky. Cooper forces them to do it. During the flight, Cooper lowers the aft stairs and jumps out.
He has never been seen again.
The story spreads like wildfire. And Washington, Oregon and Nevada sheriffs, state troopers and police from all three states come together to assist.
The FBI starts looking into him.
Dan Cooper was the name he used for plane ticket. When checking into it, Portland police realize they know of a petty criminal going by the name DB Cooper.
The man has a minor record so police have him in the system. When they go to his house to check him out, he is already at home in his Dalles house.
It seems that he couldn’t have done the skyjacking, jumped out of the plane and made it home. So timeline doesn’t fit and DB Cooper is ruled out.
But the name isn’t.
An error from James Long of the Oregon Journal accidentally wrote D.B. Cooper in place of the original “Dan Cooper.” And that was that, from then on, the case was known everywhere as the D. B. Cooper Mystery.
Back on the plane, authorities find 66 latent fingerprints, all unidentifiable. They also find the black tie and tie clips, cigarette butts and two of the four parachutes.
In 1971, there are no fingerprint databases or DNA.
A large Scale manhunt begins because they have no idea where to really start. They begin searching in a thick forest north of Portland.
The air force loans them a sr71 blackbird to photograph the flight area and hopefully find a clue. But they didn’t find anything.
An additional 200 US Army soldiers search the forest on foot. There was even a submarine used at the bottom of Lake Merwin to see if they could find something in the water. But this search for DB Cooper was fruitless as well.
Since they have no picture to go on, they have a sketch artist draw one up and it generates hundreds, if not thousands, of leads.
A bunch of names come in. There is even a man, McCoy, who comes forward and explains that he was talking with a friend in the bar. His friend explained his plan on how to hijack a plane.
Digging into McCoy makes investigators think that this could be their guy. His background is similar to that of Cooper’s as McCoy knows bombs, planes and skydiving.
Want to hear the rest of the story? Follow the link to read Who Is DB Cooper and What Do We Know: Part Two.