Hijacking • Unsolved • 1971 • Pacific Northwest
November 24th, 1971. The day before Thanksgiving. A man in a dark suit, white shirt, and a narrow black tie walks into Portland International Airport. He pays twenty dollars cash for a one-way ticket on Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 to Seattle. The name on the ticket: Dan Cooper.
He takes seat 18C, orders a bourbon and soda, and lights a Raleigh cigarette. Shortly after takeoff, Cooper hands the flight attendant a folded note. She assumes it's his phone number and drops it in her purse. Cooper leans across and says quietly: "Miss, you'd better look at that note. I have a bomb."
The note says he has a bomb in his briefcase. He wants two hundred thousand dollars in twenties, four parachutes, and a fuel truck standing by in Seattle. When the flight attendant looks at the briefcase, Cooper opens it just enough to show red cylinders, a battery, and wires. The airline decides to comply. As the plane circles over Puget Sound, the FBI assembles the ransom: ten thousand unmarked twenty-dollar bills. They photograph every single serial number.
At 5:39 PM, the plane lands at Seattle-Tacoma International. Cooper releases all 36 passengers. He collects his money and parachutes, then gives his next instruction: fly to Mexico City. Low altitude, under ten thousand feet. Flaps at fifteen degrees. Landing gear down. Speed under two hundred knots. Do not pressurize the cabin.
Cooper knew the exact aerodynamic specifications of a Boeing 727. He knew it had a rear airstair that could be lowered during flight — a feature unique to that aircraft. This was not an amateur.
At approximately 8:13 PM, somewhere over the Lewis River, the crew felt a sudden change in air pressure. The aft airstair had been lowered. When the plane landed in Reno, Cooper was gone. He had jumped into a November rainstorm, into darkness, into 200-mile-per-hour winds, wearing a business suit and loafers, carrying two hundred thousand dollars strapped to his body.
The FBI launched one of the most extensive investigations in its history. Codenamed NORJAK. Over the next 45 years, they investigated more than a thousand suspects. In 1980, eight-year-old Brian Ingram found three bundles of disintegrating twenty-dollar bills along the Columbia River — serial numbers matching Cooper's ransom. Five thousand eight hundred dollars out of two hundred thousand, buried in the sand twenty miles from the drop zone.
The rest of the money has never surfaced. Not a single bill from the remaining hundred and ninety-four thousand has ever been spent, deposited, or detected anywhere in the world.
Cooper's clip-on necktie, left on the plane, became the most analyzed piece of evidence. Under electron microscopy, investigators found over one hundred thousand microscopic particles, including rare earth metals: pure titanium, bismuth, and cerium. These metals pointed to someone who worked in specialized metallurgy or aerospace manufacturing — possibly at a Boeing subcontractor.
Richard Floyd McCoy Junior, a former Green Beret and helicopter pilot, pulled an almost identical stunt five months later — hijacking a United Airlines 727, demanding five hundred thousand dollars, and parachuting out the back. He was caught within two days. In 2023, his children turned over a parachute found in a family storage shed. The FBI tested the materials and returned them in December 2025 without explanation.
Other suspects emerged: Robert Rackstraw, a Vietnam veteran and con artist. Kenneth Christiansen, a former paratrooper who worked for Northwest Orient. Sheridan Peterson, a Boeing employee. All had pieces of the profile. None had everything.
A man walks onto a plane with a bomb in a briefcase. He collects two hundred thousand dollars, straps it to his chest, and jumps into the night. He is never seen again. Not one dollar of the ransom is ever spent. His real name is never confirmed. Fifty-five years later, D.B. Cooper remains the only unsolved hijacking in American aviation history. And somewhere in the forests of Washington State, the answers are either buried — or they walked away on a rainy night in November.