Db Cooper Only Unsolved American

The Disappearance of D.B. Cooper

The Case of D.B. Cooper is the only unsolved American hijacking ever, and has lasted almost 47 years. D.B. Cooper jumped out of a plane with $200,000 dollars in November of 1971. He was never seen again and there are many theories to what happened to him. The FBI have investigated almost 1,000 suspects in the case and no one has been a significant lead in the case. There are websites of people dedicated to finding him and have uncovered new data in the case. D.B. Cooper may have died in the fall from the plane, but many believe he survived and is living among us.

D.B. Cooper is a mystery man. On November 24th,1971 a man named Dan Cooper boarded a plane from Portland,OR to Seattle, WA. When he boarded the plane

Cooper did not survive the jump off the plane. Cooper jumped from the plane into a storm and would have landed in the Washington wilderness. Cooper jumped with 2 of the 4 parachutes given , but one of the parachutes he took was a non-working training chute that did not open and it had been given to him on accident(“D.B. Cooper”). If he had relied on that chute he would have fallen to his death. The 2 parachutes that D.B. left on the plane was the 2 best parachutes that the FBI had provided him. When Cooper jumped the plane was going 196 miles per hour when he jumped and when he hit the air at the speed it was going, Cooper would have been tossed around by the wind(“D.B. Cooper”). Where he supposedly jumped was a heavily wooded area and would have been very difficult to land in especially if Cooper was an inexperienced jumper like the FBI concluded. Even if Cooper did land it could have been catastrophic for him only if he had just sprained an ankle in the landing it could have been a death sentence for him(“D.B. Cooper”). Although, if he had died the body was never found or the parachute. But, Small animals would have eaten the flesh of his remains and scattered his bones which would have made it harder to find. Also, none of serial numbers of the bills the FBI gave him was ever spent. The FBI found no trace of his body, parachute, and the money was never

Cooper. There has been some lead suspects but none have turned out to be him. In 1972 a man name Richard Floyd McCoy Jr. was accused of having hijacked a united airlines plane flying from Newark to Los Angeles(Katz 263). Although, even with the hijackings being almost identical, he was ruled out as a suspect due to him not matching the description the attendants gave of him(Katz 264). One other main suspect was Duane Weber. He told his wife that he was the man they called D.B. Cooper on his deathbed. The similarities between him and cooper where that they both drank bourbon, had black hair, and he chain-smoked(Katz 266). Also, Jo had been told by Duane that he hurt his knee from jumping out of a plane. Jo told the FBI that she woke up one night when Weber was sleep talking about him leaving fingerprints on the aft stairs of an airplane. After a while, Jo was doing the couples taxes and while doing them she came across an old plane ticket that said SEA-TAC and northwest airlines. Also on his deathbed “as he lay dying in the hospital in March 1995, Weber said that he forgot where he buried $173,000 in a bucket”(Katz 266). These are only 2 suspects of the 1,000 the FBI have investigated, but many people believe D.B. Cooper was one of these 2