The FBI has released a new dossier hundreds of pages long with extra information on one of the most mystifying crimes in US history.
On November 24, 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper got on board a one-way flight from Portland in Oregon to Seattle, Washington, without having to show identification.
Halfway through the journey, he passed a note to a flight attendant sitting behind him and told her he had a bomb which he would set off unless he was given $200,000 and several parachutes.
The plane circled for two hours while his demands were arranged, then it landed and let off the 35 other passengers.
Four crew members joined the mysterious man on a second flight that was supposed to take him to Mexico City – but somewhere over Washington state, he donned a parachute and leapt out into the night.
No trace of him has ever been found, and the case remains the only unsolved commercial airline hijacking ever.
A reporter who misheard the alias given for the man’s ticket dubbed him DB Cooper – which is the name most associated with the puzzle.
Over the years, a few clues have popped up even if Cooper himself has not. In 1980, a boy found a package of rotting $20 bills along the Columbia River worth $5,800 that matched the ransom money serial numbers.
The FBI’s case file is already thousands of pages long, but earlier this month 472 pages were added to it.
Although heavily redacted, they contain some morsels of clues that will keep internet detectives busy.
News site Popular Mechanics, which reviewed the new pages, flagged that one suspect was eliminated from the investigation as he was too bald, while another had too much of a ‘pot belly’.
A man from Pittsburgh who had links to the Portland area, appeared to have sprained his ankle after the hijacking, and fitted the description of the ‘UNSUB’ – an FBI term for ‘unknown subject’ – was nevertheless ruled out.
Two men with links to aviation, Seattle pilot Jay Whiteford and skydiver Charles Whittaker, were looked at extensively by agents before they were also eliminated.
The pages also contain an intriguing letter from legendary FBI director J Edgar Hoover to a senator called Henry Jackson, thanking him for his suggestions on the case – though the details are redacted.
Unsurprisingly, the tantalising tale has spawned many wild theories on the internet.
But some potential suspects appear more plausible than others. Richard Floyd McCoy carried out a similar hijacking and escaped by parachute less than five months after the Cooper flight.
The FBI ruled him out as a suspect for not matching witness descriptions, but in November last year, amateur sleuth and YouTuber Dan Gryder said McCoy’s family had handed the agency a massive clue.
He claimed investigators were given the parachute used in the heist, and uploaded footage of himself with the surplus bailout rig in McCoy’s mother’s home.
‘We just solved it,’ Gryder remarked. ‘Literally. This is the rig because they know what rig he used when he jumped that night. They supplied him the rigs.’
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