The D.B. Cooper Hijacking

On the afternoon of 24 November 1971 — the day before Thanksgiving — a man who gave his name as Dan Cooper walked up to the Northwest Orient Airlines counter in Portland, Oregon, and paid cash for a one-way ticket on Flight 305 to Seattle.

The FBI's case history describes what happened next in plain terms. Once airborne, he told the crew he had a bomb. He wanted four parachutes and $200,000 in twenty-dollar bills.

The jump

The plane landed in Seattle, the demands were met, the passengers were released, and the aircraft took off again, bound for Reno, Nevada. Somewhere between the two cities, a little after 8 p.m., Cooper lowered the rear stairs and jumped — parachute on, ransom money with him — into a dark, cold, rain-soaked night over the Pacific Northwest. He was never seen again.

Eight hundred suspects

The FBI gave the case the name NORJAK. By the fifth anniversary of the hijacking, investigators had looked at more than 800 suspects and eliminated all but about two dozen.

One of them was Richard Floyd McCoy, arrested less than five months later for a strikingly similar hijacking and parachute escape. The Bureau later ruled him out.

The money

In 1980 a young boy found some of the stolen twenty-dollar bills. The serial numbers matched the ransom. It remains the only piece of the $200,000 ever recovered.

Where it stands

The FBI has said it has redirected resources away from the Cooper case to other investigative priorities. The file is not closed. Anyone holding specific physical evidence is asked to contact their local FBI field office. The name he gave, "Dan Cooper", became "D.B. Cooper" through an early press error, and stuck.

This article is confined to what the FBI has published about the case. The many private theories about Cooper's identity are not reported here because none has been confirmed by the investigating agency.