Who was D.B. Cooper? The FBI investigated the 1971 hijacking of Northwest Orient Flight 305 for forty-five years and kept everything: forty parts, 13,783 pages, all of it public and almost none of it read.
On the twenty-fourth of November, nineteen seventy-one, a man hijacked an airliner between Portland and Seattle, took two hundred thousand dollars, and jumped out of the back of it into the dark. Nobody has ever established who he was. That is the part everybody knows. Here is the part almost nobody has looked at.
The FBI investigated this for forty-five years and kept everything. The case file runs to forty separate parts and thirteen thousand seven hundred and eighty-three pages. All of it is public. It is a work of the United States government, so there is no copyright on any of it, and anyone with an internet connection can download the whole thing this afternoon.
Almost nobody does. The Bureau gave the case a name of its own: NORJAK, short for Northwest hijacking. It filed it under a classification that reads, in the language of nineteen seventy-one, aircraft piracy and extortion. The Bureau file number is one six four dash two one one one.
The office of origin - the field office that owns a case and to which every other office reports - is Seattle. This film is not going to tell you who he was. Nobody can. What it is going to do is open the file: what he actually did, what he left on the aeroplane, what was tested, what came back, and what the investigation had in its hands at the end of forty-five years.
The first thing the file tells you is that the name is wrong. He was not called D.B. Cooper. He never used that name, and no witness ever heard it.
The name on the Bureau's own paperwork - the subject line typed at the top of thousands of these pages - is this: unknown subject, also known as Dan Cooper. In FBI usage an unknown subject is an UNSUB: a person the Bureau is certain exists and cannot identify. For forty-five years the subject line on this case has read UNSUB, aka Dan Cooper. Dan Cooper is the name he gave at the ticket counter in Portland.
Where the D.B. came from, the Bureau has explained itself, and its explanation is short. It was apparently a myth created by the press. In the first hours, reporters chasing the story got hold of a man whose initials were D.B., the Bureau questioned him, and he was not the hijacker - and by then the wrong initials had been printed, and they never came off.
The name the whole world uses for this man is a transcription error from the first news cycle. He paid cash for a one-way ticket. He was quiet, appeared to be in his mid-forties, and wore a business suit with a white shirt and a black tie. While the aircraft sat waiting to take off he ordered a drink: bourbon and soda.
There were thirty-six other passengers aboard. The aircraft was a Boeing 727. A short time after three in the afternoon he handed a note to a flight attendant. The note said he had a bomb in his briefcase and asked her to sit down beside him.
She did.
He opened the case far enough for her to see what was inside - a mass of wires and red-coloured sticks - and then told her to write down what he said next. What she carried up to the captain was a demand in two parts. Two hundred thousand dollars, in twenty-dollar bills. And four parachutes.
Set against that were the thirty-six passengers. The Bureau's own summary of the case puts it in a single sentence, and that sentence is repeated word for word on page after page of the file as it was passed between field offices: the hijacker demanded two hundred thousand dollars and four parachutes in exchange for the safety of the thirty-six passengers aboard the plane. The airline agreed. That decision was made on the ground in a few hours, and it is the reason the rest of this happened at all.
From the moment Northwest Orient said yes, the aircraft was going to land, be resupplied, and take off again with him still on it. The aircraft did not land immediately. It held in a pattern over Seattle for several hours while the money and the parachutes were assembled on the ground, and only then was it permitted to land and refuel. The exchange happened there.
He released all of the passengers, and all but four members of the crew.
Then he gave the flight deck its next instruction, and this is the first thing in the case that does not look like a man improvising. He ordered them to set course for Mexico City, and the aircraft proceeded south through Washington toward Reno, Nevada. There has been an argument ever since about whether Mexico City was a real destination or a way of guaranteeing a long, slow flight south. The file does not settle it.
What the file establishes is what he asked for - and what he asked for next is very specific indeed. The four parachutes were the other half of the demand, and five years later somebody in the Seattle office decided the details should not be lost. On the second of February, nineteen seventy-six, an agent typed a memorandum and filed it under a heading of its own: parachute information. It exists, in its own words, for future information concerning parachutes
used in this matter. It is one page. It is the most concrete page in thirteen thousand. Chest pack number one.
A twenty-four-foot white nylon canopy. White nylon shrouds - the cords running from the canopy down to the harness - fourteen feet long. Container, olive drab green, ten inches by fourteen by six. Chest pack number two.
A pink canopy. And then the memorandum adds, in exactly the same flat register, the detail that tells you what was happening in the cabin: this was the canopy that was cut and used to hold the money. Backpack number one. A twenty-eight-foot white nylon canopy, rip-stop material, flat circular military type.
Olive drab military container. And a harness the memorandum describes as civilian luxury type, made of soft tan cotton. Backpack number two. White canopy.
He asked for four and he jumped with two. One of the two was a training rig - a parachute used for instruction on the ground, sewn shut so that it cannot open. He had no way of knowing that. He took it with him.
And the two hundred thousand dollars had to travel. The Bureau's account is that he used cord from one of the parachutes he was leaving behind to tie the money bag shut; the nineteen seventy-six memorandum records that the pink canopy was cut for the same job. Between them, those two documents describe a man on the floor of an aircraft cabin, in the dark, cutting up a parachute to make a sack. The Boeing 727 has a feature almost no other airliner has ever had.
Under the tail is a staircase that folds down out of the fuselage, so the aircraft can load and unload passengers at an airport with no equipment at all. On the 727 of nineteen seventy-one, that staircase could be lowered while the aircraft was flying. He knew that. And the way he configured the aeroplane says he knew more than that.
The Bureau's own words: the hijacker instructed that the flaps
and gear remain lowered and the rear stair door open. Flaps are the panels that extend from the back of the wing to let an aircraft fly slowly without falling out of the sky. Gear is the undercarriage. Lowering both, and leaving them lowered, holds a jet airliner at something close to its minimum flying speed.
He asked for an aeroplane deliberately held slow, held low, and held open at the back. Then, over La Center, Washington, a cabin pressure fluctuation was observed. That is the whole of it. That sentence, from the Bureau's own teletype, is the record of the most famous escape in American criminal history.
Nobody saw him go. There were no cameras aboard and no crew behind him. The moment he left is not an observation - it is an inference from a change in air pressure, noticed by four people facing the other way. The Bureau did go and ask a specialist what it should have looked like.
The parachute rigger it consulted, Earl Cossey, gave the opinion that the pilot of the jet would notice some oscillation when the hijacker departed the rear of the aircraft. A man stepping off the end of a staircase hanging in the airflow behind a jet changes how that jet sits in the air. The people at the front feel it. That movement is the timestamp.
Whether he lived through the next four minutes is a question the file does not answer, and this film is not going to answer it either. What can be said is what the conditions were. It was night. It was raining.
He was over wooded country. His clothing and his shoes were a business suit and street shoes. And one of the two parachutes he had taken could not open at all. There is one more thing in the file about that, and it cuts against the story everybody tells.
The popular version of this man is an ex-paratrooper - somebody with training, who knew exactly what he was doing. The Bureau's own assessment says the opposite, and gives its reasoning. The hijacker was probably not a sporting parachutist, it says, as he relied completely on airline personnel to furnish any type of parachute equipment available. As a result he was furnished a chute that would open quickly with a good possibility of tearing, a high rate of descent, and non-steerable.
One chute he jumped with was a dummy chute and would not open. And then the line that does the work: a parachutist with considerable experience would have been more specific in the type of chutes requested. He asked for four parachutes. He did not ask for particular parachutes.
Somebody who had jumped seriously would have. He left the aircraft. He also left evidence, and the evidence is why this case stayed open for forty-five years instead of five. Start with what he smoked.
The aircraft was searched at Reno, and near the seat the unknown subject had occupied the search produced eight cigarette butts. Seven were Raleigh eighty-five-millimetre filter-tipped. The laboratory logged them and was asked to process them for fingerprints. And then the Bureau did something in its own memorandum that tells you what kind of investigation this was.
It did the arithmetic. He had been on that aeroplane eight hours, under extremely tense conditions, at two and a half cigarettes an hour.
Somebody sat down and worked out the smoking rate of a man nobody could name, because the rate was one of the few things about him that could be measured. Then the fingerprints. Eight latent prints - a latent print is the invisible mark skin leaves on a surface, brought up with powder - were obtained from and around the seat he had occupied. Two days after the hijacking, on the twenty-sixth of November nineteen seventy-one, an agent wrote down that they had dusted the aeroplane, and that he doubted the prints would be good enough for identification.
They were filed under latent case number A-forty-five-four-one-zero, and for years afterwards, every time a suspect's name came in, those eight prints were pulled and compared. Then the tie. The Bureau's description of what he wore records it in a bracket, and the bracket is the important part: a narrow black tie, clip-on type. A clip-on tie does not have to be untied.
It comes off in one movement. He took it off before he jumped and left it on the aircraft, and because it was a clip-on, the surfaces a man touches putting one on and taking it off were exactly the surfaces he had touched. Decades later, that tie produced a DNA sample. A sample is not an identification.
It is a profile with nothing on the other side to match against. The tie is still in the Bureau's possession, and so is the problem: they have his DNA and no name to put it against. And then the face. The sketches you have seen of D.B.
Cooper are not photographs of anybody. No photograph of this man exists. The Bureau built those drawings out of a face catalogue - a reference book of facial features - starting from a photograph indexed KK-five-one, and then revised it against what the witnesses kept telling them. The file contains the revisions in the flat language of a teletype: change the lips to KE nine dash one three; the subject had a slightly double chin.
The two versions, with glasses and without, are dated the twenty-third of August nineteen seventy-two - nine months after the hijacking, and still being corrected. There was a hair sample too, recovered from the aircraft. The laboratory reported it insufficient to determine overall hair colour. That is the evidence table.
Eight cigarette butts, eight fingerprints of doubtful quality, a clip-on tie, a hair that could not even give a colour, and a drawing assembled from a catalogue. There was one more thing done on the ground at Seattle, and it is the reason any part of this case ever closed at all. Before the money went aboard, its serial numbers were recorded. Every banknote carries a unique number, and a list of those numbers turns anonymous cash into two hundred thousand individually identifiable objects - money that can be recognised years later, by a bank teller, in another state.
On the third of December, nineteen seventy-one - nine days after the hijacking - the Attorney General of the United States, John N. Mitchell, announced the ransom list: the known serial-numbered bills given to the hijacker of Northwest Orient Flight 305 on the twenty-fourth of November. That list went to banks. It went to casinos.
It was reprinted in newspapers so ordinary people could check their own twenties against it. And for nine years nothing came back. Not one note. Two hundred thousand dollars in marked money went out of the back of an aircraft and did not reappear anywhere in the American banking system.
What the file mostly contains is people writing in. By the fifth anniversary of the hijacking the Bureau had considered more than eight hundred suspects and eliminated all but two dozen. The pages that record that work are the bulk of these thirteen thousand: airtels between field offices, follow-ups on tips, interviews with men who resembled a drawing, men who had jumped out of aircraft before, men who came into money, and men whose only qualification was that their surname was Cooper. You can watch the machinery work.
A name arrives. A field office is asked to obtain his fingerprints and compare them against latent case A-forty-five-four-one-zero. The credit bureau is checked, the sheriff's office is checked, the unions are checked, and a memorandum comes back saying no identifiable record could be located. Then the next name arrives.
One name has stayed at the front of
the amateur literature for fifty years: Richard Floyd McCoy. Less than five months after this hijacking, McCoy hijacked an airliner, demanded money, and left by parachute - a near-copy. The Bureau tracked him down and arrested him. And then it ruled him out.
The reason the Bureau gives is specific: he did not match the nearly identical physical descriptions of the hijacker that the two flight attendants had given, and, the Bureau says, for other reasons. That is where the record stops, and this film stops there too. McCoy has surviving family. In December of twenty twenty-five they gave the FBI a parachute found on family property; the Bureau took it, examined it, and handed it back without announcing what it had concluded.
Naming a man as the hijacker is something the investigation itself declined to do after eight hundred attempts, and doing it here, over his family's heads, on worse evidence than the Bureau had, would be indefensible. On Sunday the tenth of February, nineteen eighty, a family from Vancouver, Washington - Mr and Mrs Harold Dwayne Ingram, out for the day with their children - found the money on the bank of the Columbia River, about five miles downriver from the Interstate 5 bridge between Portland and Vancouver. They contacted the FBI. The bills bore serial numbers identical to a portion of those given to the hijacker.
The Bureau's first teletype is careful about the amount, and the care is the interesting part. Because of the decomposed nature of the bills, it says, an exact estimate of the recovered money is not possible pending a laboratory examination - however, it appears to be several thousand dollars. The final figure is five thousand eight hundred dollars. It is the only part of the two hundred thousand ever recovered, and nothing has been found since.
Two details in that teletype do more work than the amount. The first: the packaging and the numbered sequence were in much the same order as when the money was handed over.
Nine years in the ground, and the bundles had not been broken up, spent, split or sorted. Nobody had been through this money. The second: the Bureau's own reading of how it got there. It appears logical, the teletype says, that the package of bills could have been carried downstream on one of the Washington tributaries of the Columbia River to the site where they were found.
Those two sentences point in opposite directions, and both are probably true. Money that was never broken up is the strongest physical argument that the man carrying it did not walk away from the landing. And money that travelled downstream tells you nothing about where the landing was. Every attempt to work backwards from that riverbank to a drop point has produced a different answer.
Nine years of searching produced one package of ruined banknotes. That is the entire physical return on this investigation. There is one more thing this man left behind, and unlike the tie it is not in an evidence locker. It is bolted to aircraft.
The 727's rear staircase could be lowered in flight, and in nineteen seventy-one that was simply an unremarkable property of the aeroplane. Within months it stopped being unremarkable, because other men had noticed it too and started doing the same thing. So a device was designed to stop it. It is a small mechanical paddle fitted to the outside of the fuselage beside the stair.
On the ground it hangs free and the stairs work normally. In the air the airflow pushes the paddle back and it locks the mechanism, and the staircase cannot be lowered no matter what anybody in the cabin wants. It is purely mechanical. There is no switch and nothing to override.
It is called the Cooper vane. It was named after him, using the name that was never his, and it was fitted across the 727 fleet. He is the only person in this story whose name is on a piece of hardware. Every one of those aircraft still flying carries the correction that was made because of one night in November nineteen seventy-one.
The Bureau has never said it solved this. It has also never said it closed it. What it said, on the twelfth of July twenty sixteen, is that it had redirected resources allocated to the D.B. Cooper case to focus on other investigative priorities.
That is the whole statement. It is an administrative sentence about staffing, and it is routinely reported as the day the FBI gave up on D.B. Cooper. The file did not stop growing when the investigation did.
In March of twenty twenty-six the Bureau released four hundred and seventy-two further pages of it, and it is worth saying plainly what is in them, because a release of new pages sounds like a revelation and this one is not. They are airtels and memoranda, and they are overwhelmingly dated nineteen seventy-six and nineteen seventy-seven: field offices writing to each other about suspects, requests to obtain a man's fingerprints and compare them with latent case A-forty-five-four-one-zero, interviews with people who knew somebody who had come into money. Four hundred and seventy-two pages of an investigation still working through names five and six years after the aeroplane landed, and not getting there.
The one page in that release worth putting on screen is the parachute inventory - the pink canopy, cut up for a money sack, written down in nineteen seventy-six so it would not be lost. And the file cannot agree with itself. Across the pages read for this film, the flight number appears as three zero five thirty-one times and as three five zero fifteen times - on Bureau letterhead, in the formal subject line, in the same headings that carry the name Dan Cooper. The flight was three zero five.
Somebody typed it wrong early, and the wrong number was copied from memorandum to memorandum for years, by an organisation that was at that moment the most capable investigative body in the world. That is the shape of this case in one detail. Not a conspiracy. Not a cover-up.
A very large number of people doing careful work, on paper, with typewriters, at the edge of what could be known - and the errors that get in when anything is copied often enough. The man is not the interesting part. He is a description, a drawing assembled from a catalogue, a tie, and a DNA profile with nothing to match it against. The interesting part is thirteen thousand seven hundred and eighty-three pages of people trying, and a piece of metal on the back of an aeroplane.
He asked to be called Dan Cooper. It is the one thing about him anybody knows for certain, and it is the one thing nobody says.
Wonder Minute