D. B. Cooper Investigators

❓️ A question asked frequently about the D. B. Cooper hijacking cold case is: Why aren't there more women following this unsolved mystery? 🎧 This question is asked by host Darren Schaefer on every episode of The Cooper Vortex podcast. The Vortex - that is, the largely online community of researchers, theorists and mystery fans who listen to Cooper podcasts, read Cooper books, and investigate D. B. Cooper's true identity - is full of men. At first, it seems rare to find women following the case. ☯️ This disparity seems a pity, because the more diverse and varied knowledge, experiences, and ways of thinking we have among all the members of the Vortex, the stronger the Vortex as a crowd-source for helping to hopefully solve this case! Is the Cooper mystery overwhelmingly more interesting to men? Is an aviation and parachuting crime somehow more appealing to males? Is the Vortex equally welcoming to women? If D. B. Cooper were female, would more women be interested in this cold c...

One of the most annoying things in the FBI Vault's D. B. Cooper files is [                    ]. 😉 Yes, you guessed it: today I'm discussing the redactions. Dive in for the key to some FBI secrets! Good thing the FBI redacted all the sensitive information from this document that was anyway utterly illegible, otherwise we might have realized that their printer ink ran out. 🚫 For the past few years, the FBI has been gradually releasing documents to the public, from their D. B. Cooper investigative files. We've always understood that private personal details (e.g., names and addresses) in these documents are redacted, to protect innocent people mentioned in the FBI's files from unwanted publicity & intrusions. Sometimes, however, the size & quantity of the redactions seem quite puzzling, even suspicious . 🔎 I decided to attack this minor mystery, in the hope of better understanding what type of case information was hidden, and wh...

Or The Case of the Vortexy Coincidence 📕 Something intrigued me as soon as I started reading The Ravens , by Christopher Robbins. I highly recommend reading this book, and the Wikipedia article about the Raven Forward Air Controllers , who worked together with the CIA on covert and clandestine operations in Vietnam during the 1960s and '70s. The recruitment program for the Ravens was called the Steve Canyon Program . 👨‍✈️ The program was named for Steve Canyon, a comic strip hero who was a dashing all-American fly-boy character. Steve Canyon was a fearless pilot, square-jawed and always ready for adventure anywhere. As I learnt about him, he reminded me an awful lot of a certain Canadian comic book hero, patriotic flying ace Dan Cooper (who was created 7 years after Steve Canyon)! Vortexy connections, clockwise from top left: The Ravens , by Christopher Robbins; FBI sketch of the hijacker known as Dan Cooper; heroic comic strip pilot Steve Canyon, created by cartoonist Milton Can...

🧩 Do you ever get the feeling that everyone is missing something really big in the D. B. Cooper case? Some unconsidered factor or clue that has been missed, and which has prevented the mystery from being solved in over 50 years? Clues, clockwise, from top left: 👔Fragments of the pink cut-up front reserve parachute, beside the black clip-on JCPenney tie that were left behind on the plane hijacked by D. B. Cooper; ✈️the aft ventral stairs of the Boeing 727 open in flight, photographed during a test performed by Northwest Airlines together with the Air Force and the FBI, after the skyjacking; 🪂a military reserve NB [Navy Backpack] parachute rig of the type D. B. Cooper may have used for his jump; ✏️two different composite sketches based on eyewitness testimony, and disseminated by the FBI. 👤 Some researchers on the Cooper case discuss the so-called "missing missing" - meaning potential suspects who could be considered missing persons in 1971, but who never got reported as m...