Submitted By: Devansh Dhawan

Class: IX B

Article for School Magazine

Field: SCIENCE
Topic: Vanishing Skyjacker

Overview: The only unsolved mystery in American Aviation history is the D. B.

Cooper incident. Flight attendants noted that Cooper was very well dressed and
never took off his sunglasses. Before announcing he had a bomb in his attaché
case, he calmly ordered bourbon, and then later asked for a second one. After his
ransom demands were met, Cooper removed his tie, opened the door at the rear
of the plane, and parachuted into the night, never to be seen again.

Elaborated Story: On the night before Thanksgiving 1971, a middle-aged man

wearing a business suit boarded a commercial flight headed from Portland,
Oregon, to Seattle in the US. He ordered a bourbon and soda, then calmly
informed a flight attendant that he had a bomb in his attaché case. Having gotten
her attention, he dictated the following message to the cockpit: “I want $200,000
by 5 p.m. in cash. Put it in a knapsack. I want two back parachutes and two front
parachutes. When we land, I want a fuel truck ready to refuel. No funny stuff, or
I’ll do the job.”
His boarding pass read “Dan Cooper,” but thanks to a communication error, the
newspapers identified him more cryptically as “D. B.”. Over the next two hours, D.
B. Cooper never took off his dark glasses. He nursed a second bourbon and waited
patiently while the plane circled Puget Sound. (“He seemed rather nice,” one of
the hijacked flight attendants later said.) On the ground, authorities scrambled to
assemble the cash, parachutes and fuel truck while the 36 passengers on board
were led to believe the delay was entirely routine.
Upon landing in Seattle and receiving a knapsack full of $20 bills and four
parachutes, Cooper released the passengers and all but four of the crew. He
demanded to be flown on to Mexico City, but first he had one final instruction: He
was to be left alone in the cabin.
As the plane took off at about 7:40 p.m., the four-person crew huddled in the
cockpit. Per Cooper, the plane flew below 10,000 feet at a speed slower than 200
knots—too low and slow for military jets to follow closely. Just 20 minutes later, a
warning light flashed, indicating that the rear door had been opened and its
staircase deployed. When the plane landed in Reno, Nevada, for refuelling, the
cabin was empty. Cooper had taken his knapsack and parachuted off into the
night. Not a single witness saw him jump. He was never seen again. The ransom
money, identifiable through serial numbers, was never used.
Did Cooper plummet to his death? Did he survive only to somehow lose the
knapsack? Or had the money been merely an afterthought, more of a means of
spinning a story for the newspapers—and for history?
The FBI spent the next nine years trying to find the answers. Then, in 1980, a boy
camping in rural Washington discovered three wads of cash along the banks of the
Columbia River, which the FBI later identified as a portion of the ransom. But the
trail remained cold until 2018, when a man named Carl Laurin presented the FBI
with an audio tape of his deceased friend Walter Reca confessing to being D. B.
Cooper. Around the same time, a documentary film-maker named Thomas Colbert
was building a case that Cooper was actually 74-year-old Robert Rackstraw.
Rackstraw, a former Special Forces paratrooper with 22 different aliases, had been
a person of interest early on, but he was cleared in 1979. Colbert based his claim in
part on a letter Cooper allegedly sent to the Washington Post that included the
number 717171. In Vietnam, Rackstraw was in the 371st regiment—or three 71s.
Neither of those stories was enough to convince the FBI, which is why the case of
D. B. Cooper remains the only unsolved skyjacking in the history of American
aviation.