Vanished: The Mystery Files of D.B. Cooper

On November twenty-fourth, 1971, a man in a business suit used the alias Dan Cooper to buy a one-way ticket on Northwest Orient Flight 305. He never used the return half. Last week we talked about the kind of questions that can keep a case file open for decades. Well, tonight's file is built on maybe the boldest question of them all: how does a man jump out of a commercial airliner with two hundred thousand dollars... and simply cease to exist? The flight was short, just thirty minutes from Portland to Seattle. Cooper ordered a bourbon and soda. Then he passed a note to the flight attendant.

She thought he was giving her his phone number, so she slipped it into her pocket. He leaned closer. "Miss, you'd better look at that note. I have a bomb." The note, written in block letters with a felt pen, was direct. He showed her his briefcase—a mess of wires and red sticks. His demands were just as direct: two hundred thousand dollars in twenty-dollar bills, and four parachutes. When the plane landed in Seattle, he made the exchange. The thirty-six passengers got off. The money and parachutes came on. He kept a few crew members, and ordered the pilot to take off again, this time for Mexico City.

So, here’s the thing you have to picture. It's just after eight p.m. The plane is flying low, under ten thousand feet, with the landing gear down to keep the speed under two hundred knots. The cabin is depressurized. And somewhere over the forests of the Pacific Northwest, in the middle of a rainstorm, Dan Cooper walks to the back of the Boeing 727, lowers the rear airstair, and steps out into the night. And vanishes. The FBI called the investigation NORJAK. It became one of the longest, most exhaustive in the Bureau's history. They interviewed over eight hundred suspects in the first five years alone.

They had his DNA from a black J.C. Penney clip-on tie he left on his seat. But it never matched anyone. For nine years, there was NOTHING. Then, in 1980, a young boy is digging in the sand on the bank of the Columbia River. He finds three packets of rotting cash. It’s fifty-eight hundred dollars. The FBI checks the serial numbers. It’s Cooper's money. It’s the only piece of physical evidence from the jump ever found. Now, you're a detective. What's your first move? You look for patterns. You look for similar crimes. And just a few months later, in 1972, a man named Richard Floyd McCoy Junior pulls off an almost identical hijacking.

Same type of plane, similar ransom demand. It has to be him, right? But it wasn't. The FBI looked hard at McCoy. But his alibi for the Cooper hijacking was solid—he was home with his family. The physical descriptions didn't match. McCoy was a copycat, not the original. So the most obvious historical parallel… the most direct analogy… breaks. Other names have come up over the years—Duane Weber, whose wife claimed he confessed on his deathbed—but the DNA from that tie has ruled out every major suspect. So what does that leave you with? Two theories. One: he was an expert skydiver who planned everything perfectly and survived.

Or two: he was an amateur who had no idea what he was doing and died the second he hit the freezing wind. The evidence points both ways. He requested a specific parachute setup, suggesting knowledge. But he jumped into a terrible storm, and one of the parachutes he was given was a training unit that had been SEWN shut. He didn't know. In July 2016, the FBI announced it was redirecting resources. The active case was closed. The file sits on a shelf. It remains the only unsolved commercial airplane hijacking in history. We have a few thousand dollars of his money, but no body, no briefcase, and no parachute.

The file is closed, but the story isn’t over. The void he left in the sky over Washington state is still there.