Strangest fact
D. B. Cooper jumped from a jet in 1971 with two parachutes. The FBI says one was a training parachute that had been sewn shut.
Why it is odd: The man who pulled off the only unsolved US airline hijacking may have jumped with a reserve that could never open.
On the afternoon of November 24, 1971, the day before Thanksgiving, a man in a business suit paid cash at the Northwest Orient Airlines counter in Portland, Oregon, for a one-way ticket to Seattle on Flight 305. He gave his name as Dan Cooper. The FBI describes him as a quiet man in his mid-forties who ordered a bourbon and soda while the plane waited to leave.
Soon after 3 p.m. he handed a flight attendant a note saying he had a bomb in his briefcase. He opened the case enough to show her wires and red sticks, then dictated his demands: $200,000 in twenty-dollar bills and four parachutes. When the Boeing 727 landed in Seattle, he let the 36 passengers go in exchange for the money and parachutes, kept several crew members on board and ordered the plane toward Mexico City.
The Boeing 727 had a stairway that could be lowered from the tail. Somewhere between Seattle and Reno, a little after 8 p.m., Cooper jumped out of the back of the plane into the night with a parachute and the money. The pilots landed safely. The FBI named the case NORJAK, short for Northwest hijacking, and within five years had looked at more than 800 suspects. A man named Richard McCoy, arrested for a similar parachute hijacking less than five months later, was ruled out because he did not match the flight attendants' descriptions.
The name D. B. Cooper was a mistake. The FBI says the initials were created by the press: agents had questioned a man with the initials D. B., who was not the hijacker, and the name got attached to the case. In 1980 an eight-year-old boy on a bank of the Columbia River near Vancouver, Washington, found rotting bundles of twenty-dollar bills, $5,800 in all, whose serial numbers matched the ransom money. Most of the money has never turned up.
On July 12, 2016, the FBI announced it was moving the people and money it had assigned to the case to other priorities, after 45 years of work. It is still the only unsolved airline hijacking in American history. Amateur investigators keep proposing suspects, but none has been confirmed.