D. B. Cooper Investigators

What was the fate of the infamous unidentified 1971 hijacker? 💵 Did D. B. Cooper escape with his extorted loot, to live out a life of ill-gotten luxury? Or did the skyjacker end up buried beside the Columbia River like a portion of his ransom money? Or was his fate something else again? Today, let's consider some of the many ways Cooper could have died. 🥶 (I will not, however, be focusing on the more fringe theories this time. Freezing to death on the 10,000 foot parachute jump through the night air, or death by bear attack after landing may be sensational and entertaining, but there are other far more plausible and intriguing explanations for the end of the man known to the world as D. B. Cooper.) What was skyjacker D. B. Cooper's fate? 🏴‍☠️ The unidentified air pirate may have hoped to escape scot free, perhaps pay off debts, then live large until he passed from peaceful old age. How likely is it, though, that a man who threatened people with a briefcase bomb, stole hundre...

❓️ 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...

The biggest debate in the D. B. Cooper world, other than his true identity, is undoubtedly: Did the hijacker live, or die, after his jump from the jet? 🤷‍♂️ Since no confirmed trace has been found of either a living hijacker or his dead body post-skyjacking, either could be true. 📦 Some of us are reminded of the thought experiment known as Schrödinger's Cat. Until we open the box to verify, we don't know whether this cat's dead, or it survived. Physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who originated the hypothetical feline as an analogy for quantum states, intended to show the absurdity of supposing a cat to exist simultaneously in a state of both dead and aliveness until examined by an observer. 😎 And yet here we are, and here Cooper isn't. D. B. Coopaw? 🏕 Most followers of the case, however, seem to belong firmly to the school of thought that Cooper survived; or else subscribe to the Dead Camp. This second camp - which believes Cooper didn't survive after his crime - is ...