50 years ago today, a man calling himself Dan Cooper hijacked a Boeing 727 flying between Portland and Seattle. He claimed to have a bomb and demanded $200,000 in cash and 4 parachutes. He received the money and parachutes when he forced the pilots to land for refueling. Cooper then made them take off again, and jumped out the rear stairwell of the 727 over a forest in Washington state. No trace of him has ever been found.
Amateur detectives have proposed several suspects in the years since the incident, but the FBI has long maintained that Cooper probably did not survive the jump. Some of the ransom money was found in the woods in 1980. Without any physical remains or even his parachute, however, it is impossible to say that he died in the woods. Cooper have survived and gotten away with one of the most audacious crimes in American history.
Are there any other mystery enthusiasts in the house? I think the FBI made a solid case for Cooper not surviving the jump. The weather was awful, he didn’t have any kind of protective clothing to jump in those conditions, and even if he made it to the ground alive he still would have needed to find a way out of the forest before dying of exposure. The area is remote enough that finding his remains (whatever the scavengers didn’t eat) would be a matter of pure luck.
Still, we have no way to know what happened to Cooper with any certainty. He could have survived and gone right back to his life before the hijacking, being careful not to spend enough money at once to draw attention to himself.
It was found by boy digging in the beach along the Columbia river.
There are some who believe that DB buried the money along the banks of the river after the jump. Shortly afterwords there was a 100 year flood that drastically changed the river and rose the water levels. Some believe that where the money was buried is now under water.
There’s been plenty of evidence to show that the jump can be made. Many enthusiasts have duplicated the jump since.
The belief he died in the jump came from the expert (Earl Cossey) who rigged the parachutes he used in the jump. Earl was murdered in 2013 by the way. Earl believed it was impossible to survive that jump but he has been proven wrong by enthusiasts.
The FBI has eliminated many suspects with DNA results but there is one man they couldn’t. He was a sky diving stunt man.
I think this case may actually be solved at some point.
I am actually the last person to work with the FBI civilian team on this case, though it was 10 years ago. We were approached at that time with what was then classified info about the microscopic analysis of the tie Cooper left on the plane. We conducted research in the field at a place I can’t talk about and it led us to a local large business that had been in existence since the 40s. The C level people were super nice when our team took our research and started out talking about the general aspects of their business. When they opened up about the hypothesis that Cooper worked in that industry and may have worked there, they were politely but forcefully told to leave interview over.
I can tell you that the serial numbers on those bills were recorded.
None have ever been returned to the Federal Reserve, not one.
This is not proof he died.
The hijacker had a $200,000 problem in his life, else why do it.
He was familiar with a French-Canadian comic book ( written in French) about a skydiver hero named Dan Cooper.
He timed this so that he had a 4 day weekend to travel back to where he came from. This is a point very often overlooked.
Cooper’s request was for “Negotiable American Currency”. Leads us to believe he was not from the US originally.
The proprietary info at the time about the microscopic analysis of the tie is now public, in that there were pure titanium shavings on his tie. The places in 1972 that used pure titanium were pretty much defense and aerospace and a few chemical companies.
No one has been reported missing that fits the general age/description of Cooper from that timeframe.
My personal opinion is that 1) Odds are he is dead by now. He would be between 85 and 95 if alive. 2) The crap you see on TV, about Cooper especially the series by Brad Meltzer, is absolute trash in that case and not real good investigative work, unsurprisingly, as it’s not that, it’s infotainment. 3) The money has’nt been seen by the Fed because it wasn’t spent in the US. This doesn’t mean other countries don’t send bills back, they do, but not all countries. 4) I don’t think there is a great chance of it being solved in a definitive manner less a confession with some of the bills.
I know there are similarities to this comic book but it could be coincidence too.
One suspect who is believed to be DB is a former military guy who lost a class mate in the war named Dan Cooper. Some believe he used his dead friends name because he knew it couldn’t be traced to a live person. Or out of respect for him and that the comic book is just coincidental.
Most likely if exposed to the elements the money hasn’t survived. So I doubt it’s ever found. But I think the Columbia River maybe the main reason why the money has never been found. Did he land in the river and lose the money in the current or did he bury it just before the river flooded and lost it as a result. This hypothesis makes the most sense to me since the money that did survive was found buried in the mud there.
This info has been public for some time and they’ve never been able to link anyone from that industry to cooper.
I read something about this years ago and if I recall they had indeed traced it back to one place but couldn’t connect anyone there to him.
It was also used in the medical field as well at the time but didn’t they trace it back to a company who supplied materials to the aerospace industry?
Correct me if I’m wrong…… I thought I read it was trace found on a tie clip not the actual tie itself? And that the tie clip was found in a seat. They don’t know if the tie clip actually belong to Cooper himself. I don’t think that’s ever been proven. So this could be a wild goose chase.
I agree that he’s likely dead by now but apparently they have his DNA and I think that’s the solution to solving the case.
I don’t believe the FBI concluded that the jump was not survivable, but that Cooper did not have the skill or equipment to do it. They question why he chose the chute he did when another of the set they gave him was better suited for the jump. He also chose one that had the reserve chute sewn shut. He did not request a helmet or protective clothing for jumping into very cold air and rain. The FBI thinks those decisions show that Cooper didn’t have the knowledge needed to survive the jump. Again though, that’s all from fragmentary knowledge since so little is known about him.
He clearly knew a lot about the 727. It was not widely known at the time that you could lower the rear stairwell while in flight. He told the pilots how he wanted the flaps set, so that the plane could fly as slow as possible without stalling. This knowledge combined with the titanium fragments point towards someone who worked in the aerospace sector. It still hasn’t been enough for the FBI to solve the case. I would imagine that they have a list of people that includes Cooper, but they aren’t going to put any of that information out there to satisfy public curiosity.
That assumption came from Earl Cossey. (See above post about it) He provided and packed the shoots that DB requested. The media and FBI ran with it early on until it was proven a false assumption.
I think you will like the linked site in my post. Here is an excerpt from the conclusions about the money found
The three bundles of 20 dollar bills found on Tena Bar in 1980 was the only evidence ever found after the hijacking. The simplest explanation that Cooper landed on or near Tena Bar would require that the published flight path was off by many miles, the jump timing would have to be off, and the pilots were not navigating in their normal manner via Victor Airway 23. There is currently no good data indicating that the flight path and timing of Cooper’s jump were off enough to have him landing on or near Tena Bar.
There is very little physical evidence and that both the FBI and Tom Kaye’s team to have come as far as they have is pretty amazing.
This info has been public for some time and they’ve never been able to link anyone from that industry to cooper.
Correct, it has been all of 10-11 year since we worked the case. The main person at the employer that was approached from our work was actually very helpful. He was not one of th eC-level guys there but a long time VP of Science and Tech…he is also a horse breeder and has some cool patents…
The material was found all along the tie, using tape strips. The tie was found in the seat Cooper paid for and sat in. No one ese sat within 3 rows of him. The statistical analysis of the airplane, it’s passengers and their seating shows a greater than 98% chance it was Cooper’s tie.
The DNA aspect is really fun in that So Many Old Cases are getting solved by DNA analysis OSINT work ( Open Source INtelligence) like Ancestry.com, 23 and Me etc and their matching service. You have to ok them to make your genome matchable, but my better half, who is a war orphan, ended up finding what is her either niece or half Sister in NYC and that her dad was not killed in Vietnam as was told the nuns by her birth mom when dropped off, but lived and eventually moved to Memphis among a large Vietnamese community there.
Having his DNA isn’t the same as sequencing his genome necessarily, so that may not be an avenue. I would figure they would already have done that and be checking it periodically…except that the FBI isn’t active on the case and hasn’t been for a long long time.
This would surprise me, as our NDA still applies and as far as I know, we were the last outside private agency to work with them. I’ll call Carol and find out if we are released by nature of it having been revealed. I just googled the name of the city and company along with Cooper and nothing came up though.
It seems the name of the company we pointed the team at and their contact is published as well. Haven’t been on the site in a long time. Maybe our NDA is no longer in force?
I do not follow it closely but I love unsolved mysteries and ancient mystery type of stuff so when I come across articles about them I tend to read it.
Same. Though, I’ve been in a curmudgeonly state the last few years and look at most of what I’ve read in the past and think…wow, that’s a lot of bullshit…
I’m going to stick with Edgar Cayce though.
And the dude that built the Coral Castle.
And some kind of nonstandard explanation about the Pyramids and Sphinx. I’ve been in the Kings Chamber(that is a very hot cramped climb, btw);and seeing that and the main gallery is one HTF is that possible, while standing next to the Great Pyramid on the outside is still not something my mind is settled with after 10 years passing from looking up at it from 5 ft away.
And whatever the hell is showing up in the gun camera video from the Navy pilots that the Pentagon and our Government has literally come out and said “We have no idea what the hell that is, we don’t know of anything even remotely like it”
I’d love to believe some stuff from Coast to Coast AM…but there’s only so many times you can listen to the Remote Viewer Guy calling the CME that fries the Earth revise his schedule…maybe his great grandpappy was a Millerite…
Ummm…what was the question? Oh yeah.
Why hijack a plane and jump out of it if you aren’t going to spend the 200k? But no one was ever reported missing either…That cash is either in thr mud or in a vault somewhere…
It’s that aspect of the case that makes me think the thrill seeker explanation could be correct. He didn’t care about the money. He did it because he wanted the adrenaline rush of a lifetime. Cooper stashed the money somewhere, and spent the rest of his life enjoying the futile efforts of law enforcement to find him. The idea of hijacking a plane and stealing $1.3 million (adjusted for inflation) just for shits and giggles sounds absurd, but what known facts about the case aren’t already absurd?
The whole case is like the Julia Wallace murder: There is no explanation that doesn’t have gaping flaws.
I think Cooper either died in the jump or never made it out of the woods. The money that was found in 1980 was either buried by him deliberately or landed there when Cooper’s gear fell apart, and then was buried by the shifting river.
But your right. Every explaination has flaws but it’s usually the simplest possibility that is the correct one.
I tend to lean towards the theory he buried it with the intent to recover it. He had to walk out of there. So he buried it in an area he could find it but then shortly after they had a 100 year flood that changed the river drastically. That’s most likely why the money was found in the mud. And the rest was never found.
It either washed away, is lost or unable to get to.
200k in $100 bills is of a size that a fit man should be able to carry. IiRC a million in 100s weighs like 20 pounds.
Research interlude-
22 pounds.
What was recovered was $100 bills.
If the money fell out if his grasp on the jump over a dispersed area…that’s still 100 packs of 20 100s…no one finds that and puts it into circulation ? Nah.
There is no evidence that the pilots deviated from their normal commercial flight path. The Tena River money site is far enough off that flight path that they would had to have deviated. If they didn’t then the money didn’t land there, it was either walked there and buried or was washed downstream. The current studies…like of that river current indicate that between the current and river traffic, it’s not a great fit.
The money has never shown up but no one has ever been reported missing in that time frame that remotely matches Coooers description and no remains or the chute or anything ahs ever been found.
UGH!
My theory is that the 200k was the price for the Alien Coyote that beamed his happy ass up after he jumped and re-settled him on Seti Alpha 6. He was counting the money out and a bundle dropped out the window of the flying saucer
This is important info that suggests that he survived the jump and hid the money.
The money was found at least 9 miles off the target from the flight path if I recall. It clearly didn’t get dropped and land there. It was clearly placed (hidden) near the river somewhere.
What I’ve never see any evidence of is how far wind could have pushed a parachute from that height off the flight path. I’ve always wondered that.
But I have read that the FBI has ruled out that he would have landed anywhere near there so I assume this was looked at. Can you verify that @Weaselpuppy ?
I do know the money was found along the banks of the river not far from a dirt road.
I tend to believe he made the jump successfully and hid the money near the river and it was lost in the flooding.
That is correct the actual distance is about 20 miles and he jumped from a is a pretty low altitude so there is no chance he was blown off course to any degree that could suggest he landed off corse.
The river where the money was found Is not the river he was closest to and he dropped so if he simply lost the money During the jump it would have to have dropped in one river and then worked its way down to the next river.
The chemical analysis of the rubber bands showed that the money that was found was deposited Within a relatively short time frame of the hijackingAnne was not placed there in a time frame closer to when it was found 9 years later
There’s also I new article and study on Algea that I have just found. It’s interesting.
“The diatoms that we found [on the Cooper money] are a spring species," Kaye continued, noting it means the money was in the river months after Cooper jumped. “They bloom in the spring. They do not bloom in November when Cooper jumped.”
Kaye suggested that since there was only one season of diatoms on the bills, it’s possible the money came out of the water and landed on the Tena Bar, a sand bar on the Columbia, after a short period of time.
“The money was not floating in the water for a year, otherwise we would have seen diatoms from the full range of the year," Kaye continued. "We only saw them from the spring … the springtime bloom. So, this puts a very narrow range on when the money got wet and was subsequently buried on Tena bar.”
This study proves the money was in the water prior to being deposited on the bar and buried there. It also proves it was not exposed to the air very long.
