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...

The Man Who Was Not D. B. Cooper 🗃 The topic of Suspect Number One has come up again in the Vortex. I've been interested in this character, and the FBI's investigation into him, for a while now, especially since a large number of documents on him were released in August 2024. Joseph H. Johnston was one of the FBI's earliest leads, and was rigorously investigated before being eliminated. Eliminated Suspect #1 had the perfect alibi . 🪂 Key points of interest that have drawn the attention of the FBI and amateur sleuths to Johnston include: he was a career criminal who had committed armed robbery; he was said to have recently taken parachuting lessons; he was familiar with Portland vicinity and had recently moved there; he was an unlicensed pilot; he had shown an interest in hijackings; and he had allegedly recently got aerial maps of Portland and Seattle! 🥃 However, Suspect Number One had an unbreakable alibi, having been in jail at the time of D. B. Cooper's skyjacking...

❓️ 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 ...

Why Were Twenty Dollar Bills D. B. Cooper's Denomination of Choice? Twenty dollar bills were D. B. Cooper's currency of choice on hijack day. 💵 An interesting point about DB Cooper, is that he had a supply of $20 bills before he even got the ransom money. 🥃 Paid for his one-way airplane ticket with a 20, and broke another 20 for his bourbon and soda that he ordered on the plane. That's like walking round with 100s today, and apparently no smaller change! 🤔 It makes me wonder why, and where he got those 20s? Mercenary pay-out? Bank robbery? International currency exchange coming from overseas? Withdrew his savings as a heist investment? Pawned some stuff... (maybe a distinctive watch, since he wasn't seen wearing any watch or jewellery on the plane)? What do we all think? 🕵‍♂️ I've posed this question to a bunch of smart D. B. Cooper investigators, and brainstorming the topic has proven interesting and educational! The $200,000 of ransom money that D. B. Cooper d...

Unpopular opinion: Many of the usual popular suspects in the D. B. Cooper case have rather... large... problems. 🤥  And don't even get me started on jumbo-sized noses! 😅 Now, let me say at the outset, I'm not looking to pick on anyone here - if you love McCoy, Weber, Rackstraw, or Reca, be my guest! 🐘 But time to address the elephant in the room: in the excitement of pursuing certain suspects, folks can tend to overlook certain features. For example, witnesses said McCoy looked too young, and his ears and nose were too big for Cooper. 👂Thus, if  I fancy bedroom-eyes Rackstraw, I'm probably looking in the wrong age bracket.  If  we love Reca, we're ignoring that a wide nose is ruled out by eyewitnesses . And if you're eyeing up Wingnut Weber as Cooper, your theory is likely to fall on deaf ears . 😎 So the question is: Just how far can we reasonably stretch the key witness descriptions of Cooper's facial features etc, before we're clearly off into dumbo t...

From time to time, someone always asks the question. "Do you really want this case to be solved?" The hijacked Boeing 727, Northwest Flight 305, on the tarmac at Sea-Tac Airport, Washington, November 24, 1971. ❓️ Maybe they're thinking, with no obvious investigative progress in 53 years, we can't realistically expect it to be solved. Everyone has got used to this eternal mystery. If ever the solution to the case, namely Cooper's identity, were suddenly announced, would we all be disappointed? Our favourite mystery hobby would be gone, all our swirling theories wiped out by fact. 💯 My answer is simple. Do I want this mystery solved? 100 percent Yes! 🔎 It's endlessly fascinating to me to learn facts about the case; and more than the facts, I want to learn the truth. 😎 Quite apart from the satisfaction for me as an investigator finally knowing the answer to this mystery, more importantly there are people out there who deserve to know the truth about the crimin...