What Would It Take?

What would it take for someone to commit this hijacking?

💣 What would make someone wake up, get ready and actually board a plane and threaten dozens of people with a bomb, for cold cash? How many people that you know personally would really do what D. B. Cooper did?

💼 Would you do it yourself? You know you've always wanted to build a briefcase bomb, skyjack a jet, kidnap over 40 people, extort a sackful of cash, and jump from 10,000 feet into a dark rainy night... haven't you...? Haven't you? If your answer was Yes, then the FBI would like a word.

Artist's depiction of D. B. Cooper

🪂 Plenty of other copycat skyjackers did soon follow Cooper's lead. Sadly, most of them were returned combat veterans suffering from untreated PTSD. In many cases they were clearly not in their right mind while committing their crimes. All were quickly captured. Cooper looks like the rare unicorn among this herd of imitators: rather a comparitively cool, calm and original criminal, as the only one still unidentified and uncaught.

🧨 It should be noted, too, that most of these copycat hijackers were also much younger than Cooper. The majority were in their 20s, whereas Cooper was described as middle-aged. Professional and recreational skydivers in their 40s-ish were extremely rare in those days, FBI investigators learned. Hijacking and jumping out of a jet seems bizarre for someone in D. B. Cooper's demographic!

🤔 And yet, surprisingly, the concept of parachuting out of a jet was something that many middle-aged men were thinking about at that time, in the early 1970s! Clearly there were plenty of dudes back then with a military background, skilled in aviation, and trained by Uncle Sam to wear parachutes. Many could have had the confidence and abilty to commit an aerial heist like Cooper's... or thought they had. Additionally, one expert FBI consultant estimated that there were also at least 1,000 non-military skydivers in the country who had the experience & skills to pull off Cooper's jump. Still, capability does not directly lead to culpability!

😎 Fascinatingly, FBI documents released recently reveal that, unique as Cooper's heist seemed, there genuinely were also already a lot of other men of the era daydreaming about jet jumps. Maybe imagining James Bond airplane action scenarios was more common in Cooper's demographic after all! Even though most of us would never plan to actually commit a violent crime, particularly not a capital offense, many of us may relate to fantasizing about being a daring dashing action hero, or antihero. If D. B. Cooper didn't commit this crime solely out of mental illness, desperation or greed, perhaps he did it too for the thrill, or for the satisfaction of planning and executing the "perfect crime."

✈️ Let's look at a few interesting examples of para-jacking progenitors.

🎞 Case Study One: The Burbank Scriptwriter. Date: November 8th, 1971 - just over 2 weeks before Cooper's skyjacking. A tall, middle-aged white male with dark hair, dressed in a brown business suit and tie, and carrying an attache case, flew from San Diego to Burbank. This unnamed man, who claimed to be a movie script writer interested in writing comedy, asked the pilots on his flight about flying depressurized and throwing a package to an accomplice on the ground at an isolated location. Pilots advised him that flying low and slow would be most effective. Mr Comedy Scriptwriter doesn't sound 100% like Dan Cooper - but tantalizingly close enough to show us that there were multiple people in November 1971 with similar ideas in their heads of "funny stuff" involving planes. 

📕 Case Study Two: The Aspiring Novelist. In early December, 1971 - just over a week after D. B. Cooper's hijacking - the FBI received a tip-off about a writer whose (unpublished) novel strongly resembled the Cooper skyjacking! The author, who was described as "6 ft. 1 in., 180 lbs" and black-haired, had written a book whose plot was "the exact story" of the hijacking. Upon interviewing the writer, it was determined that his physical description didn't match Cooper. He also claimed to have only ever had the two copies of his manuscript... so he definitely must have figured out who tipped off the police! Interesting, though, to see evidence of yet another guy thinking up the same type of skyjacking plot, pre-Cooper heist!

📺 Case Study Three: The TV Script Rip-Off. Another odd but entertaining tip from the FBI's case file Vault. This tipster believed that Cooper was his old buddy who had copied the informant's TV script concept. He claimed that back in 1962-1963, he conceived the parachute hijacking idea as a possible TV script. He had shared his hijacking script idea, which involved an accomplice on the ground, with only the one friend. They discussed it together about four times, before he abandoned it, due to the "hazard of jumping from side doors of commercial jets in existence at the time." Once again, this tip-off, if true, suggests Cooper was not alone in dreaming up jetliner parachute heist schemes.

✏️ Case Study Four: The Nosy Journalist. Oddly also in San Diego, like the movie script writer, a man claiming to be a reporter had allegedly questioned a Naval air station officer "about the possibility of bailing out" (parachuting) from a 727 jet several weeks prior to Cooper's skyjacking! This supposed journalist received information on how such a jump could be done. Again, this shows an eerily precient pre-Cooper jet-jump concept.

👤 In addition to these records of early literary Cooper-wannabes, there are also FBI investigative case files showing much more shady-looking characters.

🚬 The story of the "Elsinore Ghost" - a middle-aged man who smoked Raleigh cigarettes and wore jump boots, is also now legendary in Cooper sleuthing circles. This unknown man was reportedly spotted at the Lake Elsinore skydive center in California in July/August of 1971, asking advice on how to jump out of passenger jets. FBI agents investigated, but found no trace of the man - who seemingly appeared briefly out of nowhere, then vanished, just like Cooper!

🤕 The FBI also analyzed the "Doomsday Flight" hijacking crime, committed in Canada by Paul Cini less than two weeks before D. B. Cooper skyjacked Northwest Airlines Flight 305. Cini was the first to actually attempt (unsuccessfully) what Cooper went on to complete: hijacking a plane for ransom money and then jumping from it. Cini, who later claimed he was too frightened to really jump, was captured before he could complete his plan, when the plane's crew hit him on the head and overpowered him.

🚨 Add to these examples of jet-jump parachute fantasists and preppers, that the early '70s was a wild time of almost constant politically motivated hijackings. It seemed hardly a month went by without yet another news story of a plane being comandeered by desperados, bound for Cuba and other overseas destinations. Moreover, the U.S. government itself had secretly trained men to jump out of 727s, as part of their covert airdrops program. The NORJAK hijacking easily fits the zeitgeist of its era.

D. B. Cooper's crime seems unique, yet we now know that he was just one of many like-minded middle-aged men of his era.

💭 With so many men dreaming up exciting jet & parachute schemes in the same time period, it was only a matter of time before one of them took action to turn the dream into reality. It now seems clear that, if D. B. Cooper himself hadn't committed his skyjacking, then somebody else soon would have. 

🤨 What kind of guy in 1971 had what it took to actually commit this crime? Most probably it was somebody with a certain amount of aviation and parachuting experience and skills. It could also be that the man who called himself Dan Cooper was someone troubled enough to feel he had everything to gain, and nothing to lose, in acting on a common daydream. Perhaps, further, what gave Cooper the edge to be the first was a strong dash of cold criminality. While others wrote novels and did research for scripts, Dan Cooper went ahead and was the first, and seemingly the most successful, to ruthlessly make the fantasy into reality. 

🕶 Whatever key peculiarity Cooper possessed that drove him to skyjack that jet in November of '71, he also definitely had what it takes to keep us mystified, and still intrigued, and discussing him over 50 years later.

~ D. B. Cooper Investigator😎🔍🐊