D.B. Cooper

He jumped into a storm with the ransom and became the only unsolved hijacking in American history. The FBI closed the file in 2016. Open, say the sleuths.

It's the night before Thanksgiving, 1971. Rain over the Pacific Northwest. A man in a dark suit and a skinny black tie is sitting in the back of a Boeing 727, sipping bourbon, a cigarette in his hand. He is calm. He is polite. And in a few hours he is going to jump out of that plane into a freezing storm with two hundred thousand dollars strapped to his body, and no one, not the FBI, not for the next 45 years, will ever figure out who he was or whether he lived. So here's where it gets strange. DOCUMENTED: On November 24, 1971, a man who bought his ticket under the name Dan Cooper (misreported and forever remembered as D.B. Cooper) boarded Northwest Orient Flight 305 from Portland to Seattle. He handed a flight attendant a note. He claimed he had a bomb in his briefcase, and he opened it just enough to show her a tangle of wires and red cylinders. His demands were precise: $200,000 in twenty-dollar bills, and four parachutes. On the ground in Seattle, the FBI complied. The passengers were released in exchange for the money and the chutes. Then Cooper ordered the crew to take off again, heading toward Mexico City, low and slow, with the landing gear down and the cabin unpressurized. Here's where you feel the floor drop, literally. Somewhere over the wilderness of southwest Washington, in the dark, in the rain, Cooper lowered the aft airstair of the 727 and stepped out into the night. When the plane landed, the back was open and the man was gone. DOCUMENTED: What followed was one of the most exhaustive manhunts in FBI history. Agents searched the forests. They interviewed thousands. They tracked the serial numbers of every ransom bill. And for years, nothing. No body. No parachute. No confirmed suspect. The case, codenamed NORJAK, became the only unsolved air piracy in American history. Then, in February 1980, a break that only deepened the mystery. An eight-year-old boy named Brian Ingram, digging in the sand along the Columbia River at a spot called Tena Bar, uncovered rotting bundles of cash. The FBI confirmed it: $5,800 in decaying twenties, serial numbers matching the Cooper ransom exactly. How the money got to that riverbank, whether it drifted, was buried, or was placed, has never been satisfactorily explained. DOCUMENTED: In July 2016, the FBI officially closed the active investigation, saying its resources were better spent elsewhere. The case remains unsolved. Cooper's fate, dead in the woods or vanished into a new life, is genuinely unknown. SPECULATION: Dozens of suspects have been proposed over the decades. None has been confirmed. Treat every named candidate as a theory. And this is where the story reaches outward. It's a case that lives forever in the files of the FBI, and it belongs to that eerie catalog of people who walk into the wilderness and are never explained, the terrain of MISSING 411. On the map, D.B. Cooper sits as the perfect unsolved mystery: one line to the FBI, one to Missing 411. A polite man, a black tie, and a jump into the dark. It goes deeper.