Was Cooper a Comic Book Villain?

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 Caniff, and after whom the Ravens recruitment program was named; Dan Cooper, the heroic RCAF comic book pilot created by Albert Weinberg.

🇨🇦 I've never been a particular fan of the D.B. Cooper-Canadian comic book connection theory. I've tended to think that the name Dan Cooper was bland enough to have been a pseudonym chosen randomly by the mystery hijacker, not in honor of the comic book test pilot. But the coincidence of yet another heroic pilot comic character connected to yet another CIA-adjacent aviation group, after reading up on Dan Cooper and the government's secret Boeing 727 test jumps by the CIA's covert Southern Air Transport and Air America airlines, was interesting!

✈️ Do I believe that a skyjacker who knew of the covert U.S. aviation operations in Vietnam, and had heard of both the Steve Canyon Program and the 727 test drops, might choose a similar but Canadian character's name for his own 'Dan Cooper Program' aerial heist? Possibly. The comic strip name Steve Canyon was still well known in the States at the time, and would not be a good choice to use at an airport!

Left: A statue of cartoon pilot Steve Canyon, which stands in Courtney Ryley Cooper Park, in Idaho Springs, Colorado. Right: A statue of the skyjacker who gave his name as Dan Cooper, which stands at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, Washington.

🌀 This may all just be a very Vortexy coincidence. But I haven't seen Steve Canyon discussed before in the Vortex, so I thought I'd bring him up, and see: What do other D. B. Cooper investigators think?

~ D. B. Cooper Investigator 😎🔍🐊

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