Much like the Oak Island mystery, the story of D.B. Cooper was regularly presented within the context of the broader Mysterious Phenomenon discussion despite having no paranormal elements. Even so, my young mind filed it away alongside the cryptids, UFO, and ghost stories all the same as a thing that I knew about and would be perfectly willing to read about in all the books. So, alongside the imagery of Mothmen and Jersey Devils was a police sketch of a unassuming looking middle-aged man from 1971, all iconography of the strange world we lived in, and they fit together in my imagination without much question (in grade school, I read the book Sasquatch by Roland Smith, which featured D.B. Cooper living with a Bigfoot family at the base of Mt. Saint Helens—made perfect sense to me at the time.) Who knows, maybe it was a precursor to my days watching TV documentaries about true crime and cold cases a little later in adolescence(years and years before they suddenly became one of the biggest sources of entertainment around—I’m just that much ahead of the curve), a slightly seedier variation of the sensationalism of the other shows.
As part of the Unsolved package, the D.B. Cooper case has a major leg up on the others simply by being an event that actually did happen, without question, and one where the big mystery is about what happened afterwards. It’s also very clear why it would become a pseudo-obsession for some in the decades afterwards: it’s a pretty dramatic caper, almost movie-like, with so many little details that could potentially be analyzed and formulated into theories about who the criminal was and where he went. It was an unusual crime, the kind that would obviously become a national news story, and the fact that it has remained unsolved only gives it an even more mythic quality (I note that the Wikipedia page even includes a link to the “Gentleman Thief” among the “See Also” recommendations, which does seem to be a bit overly flattering to the guy.) It’s also a decently significant piece of history, as this event and a series of copycat skyjackings that happened in the year following it led to major changes in airport security, leading not just to proper baggage checks and the installation of metal detectors, but also a piece of plane equipment named after Cooper. Much like the Tunguska explosion, this is a genuinely fascinating piece of the past that holds interest beyond the silliness seen elsewhere on shows like In Search Of…
And if the actual details don’t convince you that this is one of the most Seventies stories ever, Leonard Nimoy’s moustache sure will.
Season 4, Episode 11 (December 6th, 1979)
THE BASICS:
The night before Thanksgiving 1971, a plane flying between Portland and Seattle found itself in a bit of a pickle mid-flight: a passenger under the alias of Dan Cooper (which may or may not have been based on a Franco-Belgian comic character, a pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force) has informed a stewardess that he was carrying a bomb, and is demanding $200,000 (over $1.3 million these days) in twenty dollar bills alongside four parachutes. Air control, the police, and the FBI complied, giving him his money and his equipment at the Seattle airport and, after letting the other passengers off the plane, let him then be shipped off to Mexico City after a stop in Reno. Before they could get there, though, Cooper evidently jumped out over the sprawling wilderness of the Pacific Northwest with money in tow. Thorough searches of the multiple suspected landing sites brought up nothing, and despite the FBI keeping the file open for years, by the time this episode aired little to no new evidence indicating what could have happened to Cooper afterwards had been found.
Amusingly, the name “D.B. Cooper” was an error on the part of the news media of the time—D.B. Cooper was the name of an early potential suspect that was contacted and then swiftly dismissed, but the name ended up sticking. So, despite being one of the most notorious escaped criminals of all time, the guy who called himself Dan Cooper is not only not known by his actual name, but is not even known by the fake name he chose for himself, but the name of a completely different innocent person. What a wacky situation that no one ever bothered to correct!
The first section of the episode is taken up by a recreation of the events, all tight shots of a semi-crowded airport pervaded by the ambient noise of modern travel—the face of the actor playing Dan Cooper never shown (sometimes shot in shadow), but much attention is lavished on his mysterious luggage, the one that in 1971 no one would bother to check before boarding. The series usual synth wailing is replaced in this episode with a more low-key orchestral score, giving it the feel of a real adult thriller. Subsequently, there are interviews with fellow passengers, FBI investigators, the sheriff of the closest town where Cooper may have landed, wilderness survival experts, parachutists, and psychiatrists, all in a great obsessive chase to figure out Cooper’s background, and how he could have pulled off a complicated crime like that and still not be found.
One of the central questions that underlies the D.B. Cooper case, and is suffused throughout the episode, is just how competent Cooper actually was. The fact that he was able to accomplish his skyjacking so smoothly, and then get away with it, lead to the far more romanticized ideal of him as someone who had extensive knowledge of planes, the land between Portland and Seattle, and even the proper parachutes to use—a hyper-competent, well-prepared criminal, the kind that could have a link to the “Gentleman Thief” page on Wikipedia. Nimoy’s narration offers the idea that he was a pilot during the Vietnam War, and had possibly flown a Boeing 727 (the plane he hijacked) during his service. The story becomes about a stealth mastermind, and would therefore necessitate the attention the FBI lavished on it, compiling a ton of data and inputting them into computers to figure out where he might have landed, as is told here.
The competing view is that, despite his apparent success, Cooper was actually not that knowledgeable, and was in fact a desperate person who was able to luck his way into getting his money, but likely couldn’t stick the landing, as it were. While it’s mentioned that Cooper seemed to understand the kind of parachutes he needed, he was mistakenly given an unusable dummy parachute among the four, a potentially disastrous error that he seemingly didn’t notice. Although much is made of the potential landmarks he may have used to plan his landing site, it’s not entirely clear if he actually managed to jump at that specific point, let alone if he could tell where he was during the heavy rainfall of that night—and, although not mentioned here, it later turned out the calculations investigators used to narrow down his landing point were off, anyway. Although we later see that a man wearing a loudly plaid shirt found a piece of a plane door’s warning label in the general area of where Cooper could have landed, there’s not a whole lot of evidence that he actually survived said landing, aside from a lack of a body. This is a possibility presented in the episode (the psychiatrist they interview doesn’t seem to think much of the guy), but since it’s a far less impressive ending to this story, they don’t necessarily emphasize it.
There’s an ambivalence here, not just in the slick-heist-vs.-comedy-of-errors filtering of the facts, but also in the degree to which the people interested in the case maybe want to admire Cooper. Early in the episode, Nimoy monologues about how, unlike the terrorist skyjackings that were front page news throughout the seventies, Cooper’s crime was not ideological, but a product of “pure greed.” This is as much a baseless assertion as anything else, but there’s something that sounds simultaneously castigating and intrigued in this evaluation—he was a true individual, out only for Number One, and one who possibly came out on top despite all the uncertainties. Cooper had a unique place among sky crimes, and in way, it almost seemed to be uniquely American.
MOST RIDICULOUS CLAIM(S):
There aren’t really any major claims in the episode. If you read up on the case, you can see a large list of potential suspects through the years—it seems like at some point, everyone had an uncle or a dad’s weird friend who they thought could be D.B. Cooper—but only one, who is quickly dismissed, is brought up. As much fun as it would be for them to throw a bunch of cockamamie theories at us, there are probably some libel-related reasons why they didn’t.
So, instead, I want to zone in on something else I found funny: Nimoy mentions one of the small towns in Washington near Cooper’s potential landing site, and says that he could have sneaked his way through without being noticed because “everyone had crammed into the Evangelical Free Church to attend the wedding of their popular high school music teacher.”
WHAT WE HAVE FIGURED OUT SINCE THEN:
Two months after this episode aired, a small chunk of the ransom money was found along the Columbia River, which is not actually close to where investigators had suspected Dan Cooper had landed, and in turn mucked things up even more. No other major evidence has been collected since, with only minor analysis of existing evidence inching us towards possible bits of completely trivial information—there is some speculation that the eruption of Mt. Saint Helens in 1980 might have destroyed much of the physical evidence that was there. The one suspect mentioned in the episode was dragged back into the case decades later when an overenthusiastic author (backed by a History Channel show) claimed to have evidence that implicated him, only to completely fail to provide that evidence, as is expected of someone backed by the History Channel. The FBI officially suspended active investigation in 2016. If D.B. (or Dan or whatever) survived the fall, which he didn’t, he could still be out there, probably not doing anything particularly interesting (unless he’s reading this, of course!)
A Scrapbook of Infinite Noise 