Hello, friends!
24 November, 1971. In America, a Northwest Orient Airlines flight took off from Portland. This is a small, 30-minute flight to Seattle city nearby. Not many passengers were on this flight. It was carrying only 36 passengers and six crew members. However, these passengers were unaware that a hijacker was present on this flight. Who hijacked this plane.
A man named D.B. Cooper. The hijacker looked like a typical businessman. He was dressed like that. A business suit, white shirt, and black pants. He must have been in his mid-forties. He intentionally sat in the plane’s last row—seat number 18E. As soon as the plane took off, this guy introduced himself to an air hostess. He mentions his name, Dan Cooper.
The hostess’s name was Florence Schaffner. And with a big smile, he handed a note to the air hostess. Schaffner was a 23-year-old woman who thought this man was trying to flirt with her. So, she took that note and kept it without reading it. Seeing this, Cooper told her that she should read the note. He said that he had a b0mb.
When Schaffner opened the note, it was written in neat handwriting, “Miss, I have a b0mb in my briefcase, and I want you to sit by me.” Schaffner quietly sat beside Cooper, but she still couldn’t believe he had a bomb. So Cooper opened his suitcase to show it to her. The briefcase contained red cylinders, wires, and a big cylindrical battery. There was no doubt that it was a b0mb.
Cooper made his demands to the air hostess. He wanted $200,000 by 5 pm that evening. That too in cash or bills. He wanted all that cash in a bag, along with two parachutes in the back and two in the front. When they eventually landed, he wanted a fuel truck ready to refuel the plane. He warned her against trying anything strange that threatened to blow up the plane otherwise.
The other passengers on the plane were unaware of this, and Air Hostess Schaffner didn’t want the other passengers to know.
She quietly entered the cockpit and showed Cooper’s note to the pilots. Another Air Hostess, Tina Mucklow, was informed about this and sat beside Cooper. With the help of these two air hostesses, the contact between the plane’s cockpit and Cooper could be maintained. The pilots informed the air traffic controller, and soon, the news reached the airline’s president, Donald Nairob. He was the decision-maker, and he made an exciting decision.
He told the staff to ensure full compliance with Cooper’s demands. To fulfil all demands made by this hijacker. After coordinating with the FBI, he contacted a Seattle bank to arrange the money. The bank had a huge bundle of money for such emergencies. But there was something special about this bundle of money. We will talk about it later in the video. But you must wonder why the airline’s president cooperated with the hijackers. The reason behind this was Reputation. The airline’s president didn’t want the news of the hijack to spread worldwide, leading to heavy losses for his company.
So, to keep this issue under wraps, he was willing to fulfil the hijackers’ demands. The only problem was that they needed time to arrange the money, but this flight was supposed to be half an hour long. So the pilots were told that instead of landing the plane, they would keep circling Seattle until they could arrange the money on the ground. This half-hour flight gradually became 3 hours long. Passengers were still unaware of what was happening. Flight pilots announced they were facing minor technical difficulties, causing the delay.
The other passengers believed this. Finally, this flight landed at Seattle airport at 5.46 pm. According to Cooper’s instructions, the plane was parked far from the main terminal building. One airline representative approached the aircraft with a bag of money and the parachutes. When the four parachutes and the bag of money were given to Cooper, he allowed the passengers and flight attendants to leave the plane except Tina Mucklow. After this, according to the plan, the plane was refuelled and took off again.
Only the pilots, Cooper and Tina, were on the plane this time. Cooper started giving instructions to the pilots again. For the destination of the flight, the speed of the flight is down to the very angle. He directs them to fly the plane towards Mexico City. At an altitude of 10,000 feet in the air. With the wings positioned at 15°. As for the plane’s speed, he wanted to fly as slowly as possible.
The pilots told Cooper that flying with these configurations would make reaching Mexico City difficult. There wasn’t enough fuel in the plane. But Cooper was not worried about it. Cooper told them to fly as he directed. Friends, what happened next is entirely unbelievable. No less than a film’s story. Cooper told Tina to go to the cockpit and lock the door. Cooper was the only person outside the cockpit.
He took out his parachutes and prepared to dive. A few minutes later, a warning light flashed in the cockpit, indicating that the rear staircase had been deployed. This was a unique feature of these planes; the Boeing 727 planes had an aft staircase at the back. In the photos, you can see how the stairs are deployed from the back. Cooper deployed these stairs and jumped out with the parachutes and the money. The pilots and the air hostesses did not see this happening because they were locked in the cockpit, and back then, there was no hole in the cockpit door through which they could see outside.
But at 8.13 pm, the pilots noticed that the back part of the plane suddenly tilted upwards, and the pilots had to recalibrate and re-level the aircraft. After this, the pilots flew the plane to Nevada and landed in Reno. The police were informed, and they investigated the plane. But they didn’t find any trace of Cooper. The only things the police could find were a tie with a clip on it and some torn parts of the parachutes, which Cooper had used to cover the bag of money.
Apart from this, they found some personal items belonging to Cooper, like the cigarettes he smoked on the plane. Smoking was allowed in aeroplanes back then. Investigators investigated everything thoroughly, and they found 66 unidentified fingerprints. Fingerprints belonging to neither the crew members nor to the other passengers. But the suitcase with the b0mb, the bag of money, and the parachutes were all missing, like Cooper.
From that day, the FBI started its investigation to find Cooper, but no trace of Cooper was found. This investigation went on for 45 years. It was officially closed in 2016, but the answers to many questions are still unanswered. This is the only hijack in history that no one has been able to solve. One of the greatest mysteries for the FBI. Who was Cooper? What happened to him?
Did the police ever recover the money? There are too many questions.
Let’s try to unravel this mystery. 2 things are exciting about this incident. First, during this hijack, no other passenger knew that their plane was hijacked. Neither was anyone killed nor was anyone injured in this hijack. Many people claim this was due to Tina Mucklow. They call her the hero of this hijack because she was the one to ensure that Cooper remained calm throughout the flight, his demands were met, and no panic situation could be created, which could cause a stir or get someone injured. The co-pilot of the plane, Rataczak, later said, “She was so calm and relaxed and collected,
I could not think of anyone who would have been better to sit next to someone who would commit a criminal act like [this].”
The second exciting thing was the name DB Cooper. As I told you initially, that guy’s name was Dan Cooper. But today, most people call this the Mystery of DB Cooper. How did Dan become DB? This is because of a mistake by a news reporter. Back then, a reporter named James Long was late to meet his deadline. So, in a hurry, while talking to his police source, he misheard the name.
The police said the hijacker’s name was Dan Cooper, but this reporter heard DB Cooper and used this name for his news report. This report was picked up by other journalists who were talking about this news in their newspapers and channels and started using DB Cooper. This is how the name of the hijacker changed. In psychology, the process is known as Anchoring. As Anchoring is a cognitive bias that states that humans rely too heavily on the first piece of information. The first piece of news you hear about any breaking news, you tend to believe it.
In 2013, a joke theory related to this was published, Brandolini’s Law, also called the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle. It states that correcting this anchoring effect can be very difficult. “The amount of energy needed to correct bullshit is of much higher magnitude than to produce it.” In broad terms, spreading lies is relatively more straightforward, but having people believe the truth to correct that lie is much more difficult. But in the case of Cooper, it wasn’t a huge mistake.
Only the name was wrong. Anyway, a hijacker shouldn’t be expected to use his real name.
FBI’s initial investigations showed that when Cooper jumped out of the plane, Cooper had strapped the cash around him. The cash weighed around 10 kilos. Cooper used two parachutes to jump, one strapped in front and one behind. The police had an idea of the area in which Cooper jumped. He jumped in the southwest area of Washington State. Pine forests, lakes, and canyons were in the area; bears lived there.
So, in the beginning, the investigators said Cooper could not survive. He was jumping from a height of 10,000 feet and in pitch darkness. It was completely dark at 8 in the night. Second, Cooper’s clothes were not at all suitable for jumping. Jumping in pants and shirt when it was raining outside. There were heavy, black clouds in the sky at 5,000 feet. It means that Cooper could not see anything while falling. On top of that, the wind speed was critical, too.
It was estimated that when Cooper jumped, he had to travel at 320 km per hour. The United States Parachute Association believed that there was another problem on top of all this: the cold water. In November, the temperature in this American region is very low. If Cooper had fallen into a lake, escaping from there would have been almost impossible. Hypothermia would have set in in such cold water within a few minutes. On top of that, the weight strapped on Cooper would have made it more difficult to swim. But despite all these, some such reasons surfaced later, which force us to think that perhaps Cooper survived this jump.
This was because there were many similar incidents after Cooper’s incident. When Cooper’s hijacking made news nationwide, more hijackers considered using the same tactics. At least five people did the same copycat hijackings. And all these five people survived after jumping off the plane. One of them was Martin McNally, who hijacked a plane on 24 June 1972. He used the same modus operandi. He demanded a sum of $500,000. When the plane took off, they used a parachute to jump off like Cooper.
When he jumped, McNally’s plane’s speed was around 400-500 km per hour. This was twice the speed of Cooper’s dive. But still, McNally survived his jump using only a reserve parachute. Another similar hijack was done in January 1972 by Richard Lapoint. He wore identical clothes in January,
jumped and landed safely in the snow. It’s irrelevant that the police later caught these two hijackers. That’s how we know their stories. However, the FBI thought these people could jump in conditions worse than when Cooper jumped. They managed to survive, and then DB Cooper might have survived that night.
Especially if you consider that when Tina Mucklow gave the parachutes to Cooper, there were instructions on how to use them, but Cooper told Tina that she didn’t need to read the instructions. He knew how to use them. So now, since the FBI started assuming Cooper could be alive, their next task was to search where he had jumped. The police had begun searching those jungles the day after the hijack.
The police were looking for a body, a torn piece of the parachute, or a $20 bill. At the beginning of the video, I told you that the money given to Cooper was special. The unique thing was that there were $20 bills—ten thousand notes of $20, $200,000. The bank noted down the serial numbers of these notes. The FBI spread the list of serial numbers throughout the country. From banks to casinos, everyone was told to inform the FBI if they got the notes of those serial numbers. But it was becoming increasingly difficult for the investigators to find Copper because where could the search area be drawn?
There were many variables. What was the wind speed while the plane was flying? How dark was it? What was the exact location of the aircraft when Cooper jumped? After jumping, at what height did Cooper deploy his parachutes? And in which directions could the parachutes have gone? The investigators’ best estimate was that it would have landed near Lake Merwin in Washington State.
The FBI ran a practical experiment. Suppose we fly the same aircraft with the same configurations and push out a 91 kg sledge through the stairs
based on where the sledge landed. In that case, we can get a better idea of the area where Cooper could have landed. Due to this, door-to-door searches were conducted in this area. In the local farmhouses, the police knocked on every door to investigate and ask people. Petrol boats were running on Lake Mervin and Lake Yale.
One company used its submarine for the search. Two hundred feet under Lake Mervin, they continued to look for him. They wanted to find the money, a piece of the parachute, or a body, but they couldn’t find anything.
Eventually, the investigators published the serial numbers of the notes in the local newspaper. They announced that the first person to find a note with those serial numbers would be awarded $1,000. This offer remained for three years, but no single note could be found.
Now, let’s skip to 1979. Eight years since the hijack. Suddenly, a pilot contacted the FBI. His name was Tom Bohan, and he worked for Continental Airlines. The night of the hijack, 4 minutes behind Cooper’s aircraft and 4,000 feet above, another plane was flying, which was being flown by Tom. Tom recalled the storm that night and said he had never seen such a storm in his entire career. He said the FBI’s Cooper drop zone calculations were off by 80°. Since he was on a plane that night, he better understood where Copper landed. He told the FBI they should be searching near the drainage area of the Washougal River.
A few months later, Tom’s suspicion was proven right. An 8-year-old boy found some $20 notes lying on the bank of the Columbia River. All of these were $20 bills; some were still in bundles held together with rubber bands. “Hijacker DB Cooper, the first break in the only unsolved aeroplane hijacking in United States history, came on a Columbia River beach. An 8-year-old boy dug up the shreds of $3,000 on Sunday!”
As soon as the police checked the serial numbers of these notes, it was immediately confirmed that this was the same money from years ago that had been given to Cooper. Another search was conducted around this place, but they couldn’t find all the money. In total, they could find only $5,800. Tom’s hypothesis of Cooper landing in this area was also proven correct. Tom had said that Cooper must have landed somewhere near the Washougal River.
And the money found was downstream of the same river. After this, the FBI searched the area in the hope of finding a body or some pieces of the parachute. But they couldn’t find anything. FBI agent Richard Tosaw believed that Cooper must have drowned in the cold water of the river that night. An interesting fact here was that the 8-year-old boy who found these notes was given some portions of these notes as a reward.
And in 2008, when the boy grew up, he sold 15 notes in an online auction. And in return for these $20 notes, he got $37,000. Because Cooper’s case was so famous worldwide, people were ready to pay such a high amount for these notes. Another big question is, regardless of what happened to Cooper after jumping from the plane, who was Cooper?
We must have some background information about where this guy came from and what was his identity? The FBI did not have much to help answer this question. Cooper left behind a tie and tie clip. That tie clip was golden, and they found some specific microscopic particles. In March 2009, a research team started researching these microscopic particles using new technology. A palaeontologist, a scientific illustrator, and a metallurgist were on this team. They used electron microscopy to examine these particles.
Some portions of the tie-clip were unalloyed titanium, with traces of aluminium and titanium antimony alloy. Their findings suggested Cooper worked in a chemical or metal manufacturing plant or an aeronautical engineering company. Maybe he worked in Boeing itself. Because of the unalloyed titanium that was used in the tie-clip, back then, it was used in aircraft fabrication facilities. “The Periodical Table of clue, say scientists, indicates Cooper had access to a manufacturing firm that made aeroplanes. Like the one he jumped from. Perhaps a company with a connection to Boeing.”
In the first year of the investigation, the FBI talked to the passengers and flight crew to sketch Cooper’s face. What did Cooper look like? The first sketch, created on 28 November 1971, looked like this. But Air Hostess Schaffer and many witnesses said that it was not an accurate representation. It took another year to make a new sketch. This wasn’t very accurate either. On 2 January 1973, the FBI made their third and final sketch of Cooper. After seeing this new sketch, an air hostess said this photo was accurate.
Looking at this drawing, it can be easily said that Cooper looked like this. Dan Cooper’s natural face and possible profession were revealed to the world. Many people started making new theories about his identity. About who Cooper was. Larry Carr, who had led the investigative team from 2006-2009, believed Cooper was an aircraft cargo loader in the Air Force because cargo loaders were given basic jump training. How to wear parachutes, and how to deploy parachutes. Even when working on the plane, they know how to deploy the stairs. The FBI released a list of more than 800 suspects based on these descriptions. Eight hundred people, any of them could be DB Cooper.
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But 20 of them were seriously considered. 2-3 of them have interesting stories. One of them was Richard McCoy, an army veteran of the Vietnam War. 5 months after Cooper’s hijack, he hijacked a plane in a manner eerily similar to Cooper’s. A Boeing 727 plane, he demanded four parachutes and $500,000. “The young man wanted $500,000 and requested four parachutes.” After taking the money, he deployed the rear stairs and jumped. But the only difference was that just two days after the hijack, the FBI found him and arrested him. He was sentenced to 45 years in jail, and the FBI thought that he was Cooper.
And that this was his second attempt at hijacking. “He was arrested here in his home in Provo, Utah, early this morning. When the FBI men came, he did not resist.” In 1991, a book was published, DB Cooper, The Real McCoy. Former FBI agent Russell Caleme wrote to him. This book states that when McCoy’s family was shown the tie and tie clip belonging to Cooper, they believed that those were McCoy’s. However, when McCoy was asked if he was DB Cooper, he refused to admit or deny it.
After spending two years in jail, McCoy attempted a jailbreak, which led to a shootout in which he was killed. After hearing all this, you may feel that the mystery is solved. But there are more twists in our story. Today, the FBI does not officially consider McCoy as DB Cooper. There are two primary reasons behind this. First, based on the sketch they made, the description of DB Cooper does not match McCoy. Second, the FBI later found evidence of McCoy’s whereabouts during Cooper’s hijacking. He was in Las Vegas. The next day, he was at his home with his family.
Since there is evidence of this, it is clear that McCoy cannot be DB Cooper. The second suspect was a Vietnam War veteran named Robert Rackstraw. He was arrested multiple times for fraud, aircraft theft, and possession of explosives. But he was always found not guilty after the arrest. TV producer Thomas Colbert wrote a book in 2016, The Last Master Outlaw. To prove that, Rackstraw was DB Cooper. He made a documentary on the History Channel, DB Cooper: Case Closed, where he said the same thing. Colbert worked with a team of 40 people, including many former FBI agents.
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All of them believed that Rackstraw was the honest DB Cooper. What is the evidence for this? When the FBI began the investigation in the 1970s, Rackstraw was high on the list of initial suspects. In those days, Rackstraw commented jokingly to the media about the possibility that he was the hijacker. However, many years later, he denied these claims. His face matched the sketches. But the FBI let him go after 1979 and removed him from the suspect list because they couldn’t get substantial evidence. TV producer Colbert believed that the FBI should have kept investigating this guy.
With more FBI investigation, they could have uncovered the evidence. On 11 July 2016, Colbert launched his new book on DB Cooper; the next day, on 12 July 2016, the FBI closed the case. In 2016, Rackstraw was 73 years old, and because of the allegations against him in this book, he lost his job. Later in 2019, he passed away due to natural causes.
So, friends, we are back at the same point. Even today, this mystery of DB Cooper is a mystery. No one knows who DB Cooper was, where he came from, and where he went. Now that you know about this mystery, what do you think? When DB Cooper jumped off the plane that night, could Cooper survive that jump? Write in the comments below.
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Surprisingly, there were many similar hijackings after Cooper’s hijacking. But in all those hijackings, the hijackers who used parachutes to jump off the plane, first of all, always survived. Second, he was always caught by the police or the FBI. But what about Cooper?
Thank you very much!
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