What really happened to D.B. Cooper?
On November 24, 1971, a man jumped from a hijacked passenger jet with $200,000 in ransom cash and vanished. It remains the only unsolved commercial skyjacking in U.S. history.
On November 24, 1971, a calm, well-dressed man calling himself Dan Cooper boarded Northwest Orient Flight 305 in Portland. Once airborne, he claimed to be carrying a bomb and demanded $200,000 in cash plus four parachutes. In Seattle the passengers were released — and then Cooper, with the money strapped to himself, jumped from the plane's lowered rear stairs into a stormy night over southwest Washington and was never seen again.
It remains the only unsolved commercial skyjacking in U.S. history. The FBI's 45-year investigation, code-named NORJAK, closed in 2016 without an answer. The one clue ever found: in 1980, eight-year-old Brian Ingram found $5,880 of the rotting ransom money on the Columbia River's bank.
The rest of the cash never surfaced.
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