D.B. Cooper: The True Story of the 1971 Hijacking and the Man Who Vanished

By Domonique Luchin · Published October 28, 2026 · 14 min read

Watch: He Jumped With $200,000 and Vanished | D.B. Cooper #shorts

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On the afternoon of November 24, 1971, the day before Thanksgiving, a quiet man in a dark suit paid cash for a one-way ticket at the Northwest Orient Airlines counter in Portland, Oregon. He gave his name as "Dan Cooper." A few hours later he had $200,000 in twenty-dollar bills, four parachutes, and a Boeing 727 flying south through the dark over southwest Washington with its rear stairs hanging open. Somewhere north of Portland, he stepped off those stairs into the night and was never identified. More than half a century later, the case the FBI code-named NORJAK is still the only documented unsolved hijacking in the history of U.S. commercial aviation. This is the true story of D.B. Cooper, from the note he handed a flight attendant to the money a child found buried in the sand, the suspects, and the theories that keep the case alive.

Here at The Sealed Docket, host Domonique Luchin usually works through Prohibition and Depression-era files, from John Dillinger to Judge Crater. D.B. Cooper fits the same pattern. Like Crater, he is a man who walked off the edge of the record. Like the "perfect crime" of Leopold and Loeb, it was meticulously planned. Unlike them, this one has never been solved.

Who Was "Dan Cooper"? The Man in Seat 18-E

The ticket and the description

The man bought a seat on Northwest Orient Flight 305, a scheduled 30-minute hop from Portland International Airport to Seattle–Tacoma International Airport. The FBI later described him as a quiet man who appeared to be in his mid-40s, wearing a business suit with a white shirt and black tie. Witnesses added a black raincoat, brown shoes, dark hair, and brown eyes. He carried a black attaché case and a brown paper bag. He took seat 18-E, in the last row of the cabin, and ordered a bourbon and soda.

The plane and the crew

The aircraft was a Boeing 727-100, FAA registration N467US. Counting Cooper, Flight 305 carried 36 passengers and a crew of six: Captain William A. Scott, First Officer William "Bill" Rataczak, flight engineer Harold E. Anderson, and flight attendants Alice Hancock, Tina Mucklow, and Florence Schaffner. It left Portland on schedule at 2:50 p.m. Pacific time.

The Hijacking of Northwest Orient Flight 305

"I have a bomb"

Shortly after takeoff, Cooper handed a note to Florence Schaffner, who was sitting in the jump seat behind him. She assumed it was a businessman's phone number and dropped it into her purse unread. According to her account, he leaned over and told her she had better look at it. The note, printed in neat capital letters with a felt-tip pen, said he had a bomb in his briefcase and wanted her to sit with him.

Schaffner sat down and asked to see the bomb. Cooper opened the case just long enough for her to see wires, a large battery, and red cylinders she took to be dynamite. (Agents later suspected the cylinders may have been road or railroad flares, but no one could be sure, so no one was going to test it.) He then dictated his demands, which she wrote down and carried to the cockpit: $200,000 in "negotiable American currency," two back parachutes and two front parachutes, and a fuel truck waiting in Seattle.

Why four parachutes?

The number was a tactic. By asking for two full sets, Cooper implied he might force a crew member to jump with him. That made it far too dangerous for authorities to hand him sabotaged equipment.

Two hours over Puget Sound

Captain Scott radioed the demands to Northwest's flight operations in Minnesota. Passengers were told the plane would be late because of a "minor mechanical difficulty." Northwest president Donald Nyrop authorized the ransom and ordered employees to cooperate. For about two hours, Flight 305 circled Puget Sound while the Seattle Police Department and the FBI gathered the cash and the parachutes.

Tina Mucklow sat beside Cooper and became the go-between. She later told investigators he seemed calm and familiar with the area. He recognized Tacoma from the air, and when she said the parachutes were coming from McChord Air Force Base, he knew McChord was about 20 minutes from Sea-Tac. Asked why he chose Northwest, he reportedly laughed and said it was not a grudge against the airline. He just had a grudge.

The ransom: 10,000 twenty-dollar bills

Seattle First National Bank supplied the $200,000 as 10,000 unmarked $20 bills. The bag weighed about 19 pounds. Before handing it over, the FBI photographed every bill on microfilm. Most of the serial numbers began with the letter L, which means they were issued by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. That record would matter nine years later. Seattle police got the two front (reserve) parachutes from a local skydiving school and the two back (main) parachutes from a local pilot.

The Exchange at Sea-Tac

Flight 305 landed at Sea-Tac at 5:46 p.m. and parked on a partly lit section of the airfield, away from the terminal. Northwest's Seattle operations manager, Al Lee, changed out of his uniform so Cooper would not mistake him for a police officer, and brought the money to the foot of the stairs. Mucklow carried the bag down the aisle to the last row. Cooper then let all 36 passengers off, along with Schaffner and Hancock. Mucklow made three more trips for the parachutes. When she offered him printed instructions for using them, he said he did not need them.

During a long refueling delay, Cooper complained that the money had come in a cloth bank bag instead of the knapsack he had asked for. According to Mucklow, he cut the canopy out of one reserve parachute with a pocketknife and stuffed some of the cash into the empty container. That reserve, it turned out, was a sewn-shut classroom dummy, a detail the FBI later took as a sign that he was not an expert jumper.

The flight plan

Cooper's instructions to the cockpit showed real knowledge of the 727. He wanted to fly toward Mexico City at the lowest speed the plane could hold without stalling, about 100 knots, at no more than 10,000 feet, with the landing gear down, the wing flaps at 15 degrees, and the cabin unpressurized. Rataczak told him that in that configuration the jet's range was only about 1,000 miles, so they agreed on a refueling stop in Reno, Nevada. Cooper also wanted to take off with the rear airstair down. Northwest objected, so he said he would lower it himself once they were in the air.

The Jump: What Happened After Takeoff

At about 7:40 p.m., Flight 305 left Seattle with five people aboard: Cooper, Mucklow, Scott, Rataczak, and Anderson. Two F-106 fighters from McChord and a T-33 trainer followed at a distance. None of their pilots saw anyone jump.

Once they were airborne, Cooper sent Mucklow to the cockpit and told her to close the curtain and stay there. As she turned to pull the curtain, she saw him standing in the aisle tying what looked like the money bag around his waist. She was the last person known to have seen him.

At around 8:00 p.m., a warning light in the cockpit showed that the aft airstair had been lowered. The crew's ears popped as the cabin pressure changed. At about 8:13 p.m., the tail suddenly pitched upward and the pilots had to trim the plane level. Rataczak later told the FBI this happened near Portland's northern suburbs. In a later test flight of the same aircraft in the same configuration, agents pushed a 200-pound sled off the stairs and got the same upward kick. Most investigators believe that was the moment Cooper jumped.

The 727 landed in Reno at 11:02 p.m. with the stairs still down. Officers surrounded the plane. Captain Scott searched the cabin, and Cooper was gone, along with the money and two of the four parachutes.

How "Dan Cooper" Became "D.B. Cooper"

The hijacker never called himself D.B. Cooper. Early on, Portland police questioned a local man named D.B. Cooper, who was quickly cleared. In the rush of a deadline, reporter James Long of The Oregon Journal printed "Dan Cooper" as "D.B. Cooper," a United Press International reporter repeated the error, and the name stuck. The FBI's own history page calls the initials a myth created by the press. Investigators also noticed that "Dan Cooper" was the hero of a French-language Belgian comic series about a test pilot, one cover of which showed him parachuting. They speculated that the hijacker might have come across the comics while serving overseas.

The Search for D.B. Cooper

Hunting the drop zone

No one knew exactly where Cooper jumped. That depended on the plane's speed, the winds, and how long he fell before opening his parachute, and only Cooper knew that last part. The first estimates centered on the area near Ariel, Washington, and Lake Merwin, a reservoir on the Lewis River in Clark and Cowlitz counties. FBI agents and sheriff's deputies searched on foot and by helicopter, went door to door at farmhouses, and patrolled the lakes by boat. On December 6, 1971, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover approved an Air Force SR-71 Blackbird to photograph the flight path. It made five flights, and poor visibility ruined the attempts.

In the spring of 1972, FBI agents and about 200 soldiers from Fort Lewis, along with Air Force personnel, National Guard members, and volunteers, searched Clark and Cowlitz counties for 18 days in March and another 18 days in April. A salvage firm even sent a small submarine into Lake Merwin. They found nothing tied to the hijacking. Later analysis, including data from a Continental Airlines pilot who had been flying behind Flight 305, suggested the original drop zone was wrong and that Cooper probably came down farther east, over the Washougal River watershed.

Following the money

A month after the hijacking, the FBI sent the ransom serial numbers to banks, casinos, racetracks, and police agencies around the world. Attorney General John N. Mitchell later made the list public. Newspapers in Portland and Seattle offered rewards for any genuine ransom bill. None turned up.

The 1980 Money Find at Tena Bar

On February 10, 1980, eight-year-old Brian Ingram was on a family outing along the Columbia River at a beach called Tena (or Tina) Bar, about nine miles downstream from Vancouver, Washington. While smoothing the sand for a campfire, he uncovered three decaying packets of twenty-dollar bills, still held together by rubber bands. The serial numbers matched the ransom. There were two packets of 100 bills and one of 90, $5,800 in all, the figure the FBI gives. The bills were still in the same order as when they were handed to Cooper.

The find raised more questions than it answered. How did three bundles end up together, apart from the rest of the money? One theory was that they washed down a tributary into the Columbia. Geologist Leonard Palmer of Portland State University found that the bills sat above a layer of dredge spoil laid down by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1974, which suggested they arrived years after the hijacking. A 2020 analysis of diatoms on the bills found only spring-blooming diatoms on the bills, which suggested the money went into the water months after a November jump at the earliest. In 1986 the bills were split between Ingram and the airline's insurer, with the FBI keeping 14 as evidence. Ingram sold 15 of his bills at auction in 2008 for about $37,000. The Tena Bar money is still the only confirmed physical evidence from the hijacking ever found outside the plane.

The Evidence Cooper Left Behind

The J.C. Penney clip-on tie

Cooper was careful. Before he jumped, he made Mucklow give back every note, and he even took back his empty matchbook. But he left his black clip-on tie, with a mother-of-pearl tie clip, on seat 18-E. The FBI traced the tie to J.C. Penney. In 2001 the Bureau got DNA samples from it and later built a partial profile, though agents cautioned that nothing proved the DNA was Cooper's. Starting in 2009, a team of citizen scientists, including paleontologist Tom Kaye, found hundreds of particles on the tie with an electron microscope. Among them were Lycopodium spores and rare metals such as unalloyed titanium, which in the 1970s was used mainly in aerospace and specialized chemical manufacturing. Some researchers take that as a hint that Cooper worked in or around that industry.

Lost hair and destroyed cigarette butts

Agents also collected a brown head hair from the headrest, which was later lost, and eight Raleigh cigarette butts from the armrest ashtray. The butts were destroyed in an FBI field office years before modern DNA testing could have been tried on them. In total, agents lifted 66 latent fingerprints from the aircraft.

The parachutes and the placard

Two of the four parachutes were left on the plane: an intact main and an opened reserve with shroud lines cut out. The FBI says Cooper used the cord to tie the money bag shut. The main parachute he took was a military-style, non-steerable rig, and the FBI's history page notes that he jumped with the sewn-shut training reserve. In November 1978, a deer hunter found a 727 placard with instructions for lowering the aft airstair near a logging road east of Castle Rock, Washington, within the plane's general flight path.

Did D.B. Cooper Survive the Jump?

The FBI has never taken an official position on Cooper's fate, and its own agents disagreed.

The case that he died

Larry Carr, who led the investigation from 2006 to 2009, argued that Cooper almost certainly did not survive. He jumped at night, in bad weather, into a cold wind at around 10,000 feet, in loafers and a raincoat, over rough wooded country, with a parachute he could not steer. He had no helmet, no clear way of knowing where he was, and no realistic way to have an accomplice waiting, because the flight path was set in the air. Carr also pointed out that the money never showed up in circulation. The FBI's history page makes the same argument: the parachute couldn't be steered, his clothes and shoes were wrong for a rough landing, and the evidence suggests he was not a seasoned skydiver.

The case that he made it

J. Earl Milnes, who ran the FBI's Seattle office at the time of the hijacking, said in 1976 that he thought Cooper got away with it. Earl Cossey, the rigger who packed the parachutes, told investigators that someone with only a handful of practice jumps could have done it, though he expected injuries. FBI agent Ralph Himmelsbach, the Bureau's lead investigator on the case until 1980, at first doubted Cooper survived. He changed his mind after watching copycat hijackers jump from airliners in 1972 and walk away.

D.B. Cooper Suspects

By the fifth anniversary of the hijacking, the FBI says it had considered more than 800 suspects and eliminated all but about two dozen. Some of the best-known names:

Richard Floyd McCoy Jr.

McCoy was a Vietnam veteran, Utah National Guard warrant officer, and skydiver. On April 7, 1972, less than five months after Flight 305, he hijacked a United Airlines 727 out of Denver, collected $500,000 in San Francisco, and parachuted over Utah. He was arrested two days later, escaped from Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in 1974, and was killed in a shootout with FBI agents in Virginia Beach. McCoy is still a favorite suspect for many people, but the FBI ruled him out because he did not match the flight attendants' descriptions. He was 29, not mid-40s, and witnesses said Cooper had dark eyes while McCoy's were light blue.

Kenneth Christiansen

Christiansen was a former Army paratrooper who later worked for Northwest Orient as a flight attendant and purser. His brother became convinced he was Cooper, and a 2010 book and a History channel episode made the case. He smoked and liked bourbon, but he was shorter and thinner than the witness descriptions, and the FBI has said there is no direct evidence against him.

Robert Rackstraw

Rackstraw was a Vietnam-era Army veteran and pilot with a criminal record. Investigators looked at him in the late 1970s and cleared him in 1979 for lack of evidence. A 2016 History channel program and a book by Thomas J. Colbert revived the theory. Rackstraw denied it, and he died in 2019.

Sheridan Peterson and Walter Reca

Peterson was a Boeing technical editor and former smokejumper who fit the age and look and liked to tease reporters about the case. A DNA comparison shown on a History channel program reportedly did not match him to the tie. Walter Reca, a former military paratrooper, was named by a friend in 2018 who had recorded Reca claiming to be the hijacker. Critics point out that Reca's claimed landing area near Cle Elum is far from the known flight path. The FBI has said no suspect has been proven responsible.

The Copycats and How D.B. Cooper Changed Air Travel

Cooper's apparent success set off a wave of imitators. Of the 31 hijackings in U.S. airspace in 1972, 19 were attempts to extort money, and in 15 of those the hijackers also demanded parachutes. All of them failed. Hijackers including Richard LaPoint, Richard McCoy, Frederick Hahneman, Robb Heady, and Martin McNally jumped and survived but were caught.

The response changed flying for good. In early 1973 the FAA began requiring airlines to screen all passengers and their bags. Courts upheld the searches as long as they were applied to everyone and limited to weapons and explosives. The FAA also required 727s to carry a spring-loaded aerodynamic lock, nicknamed the "Cooper vane," that keeps the aft airstair from being lowered in flight. Cockpit doors got peepholes. If you have ever put your bag on an airport X-ray belt, you are living with part of the D.B. Cooper case.

The FBI Closes the Active Case (2016)

On July 12, 2016, the FBI announced that it was redirecting the resources assigned to the Cooper case to other priorities. In effect, the 45-year active investigation was over. The Bureau said it would still accept physical evidence specifically related to the parachutes or the ransom money. The case file, which runs to dozens of volumes, is preserved for history, and the FBI has published a large portion of the records in its online Vault.

D.B. Cooper Timeline

• Nov. 24, 1971, 2:50 p.m.: Flight 305 leaves Portland. Cooper passes the bomb note soon after takeoff.
• Nov. 24, 5:46 p.m.: The plane lands at Sea-Tac. The ransom and parachutes are delivered and the 36 passengers are released.
• Nov. 24, about 7:40 p.m.: The plane takes off again toward Reno.
• Nov. 24, about 8:13 p.m.: The tail pitches upward, believed to be the moment Cooper jumped.
• Nov. 24, 11:02 p.m.: The plane lands in Reno. Cooper is gone.
• Dec. 6, 1971: Hoover approves SR-71 reconnaissance flights over the flight path.
• March–April 1972: Large ground searches in Clark and Cowlitz counties.
• April 7, 1972: Richard McCoy's copycat hijacking out of Denver.
• Early 1973: Universal passenger and baggage screening begins.
• Nov. 1978: The 727 airstair placard is found near Castle Rock, Washington.
• Feb. 10, 1980: Brian Ingram finds $5,800 of ransom money at Tena Bar.
• 2001: DNA samples obtained from the clip-on tie.
• July 12, 2016: The FBI redirects resources away from the active investigation.

Watch D.B. Cooper on The Sealed Docket

We packed the D.B. Cooper case into a short case file on YouTube: "He Jumped With $200,000 and Vanished." If you like disappearing-man mysteries, read our deep dive on what happened to Judge Crater, then browse the full Sealed Docket case index and every episode. New case files from Domonique Luchin drop on the @TheSealedDocket YouTube channel every week.

Related Case Studies from The Sealed Docket

• Leopold and Loeb: The True Story of the "Perfect Crime" That Shocked 1924 Chicago
• What Happened to Judge Crater? The True Story of the 1930 Disappearance
• John Dillinger: The True Story of Public Enemy No. 1 and the Biograph Theater

Sources

• FBI History: D.B. Cooper Hijacking
• FBI Records: The Vault, D.B. Cooper files
• Wikipedia: D. B. Cooper
• Wikipedia: D. B. Cooper copycat hijackings
• Wikipedia: Cooper vane
• Ralph P. Himmelsbach and Thomas K. Worcester, Norjak: The Investigation of D.B. Cooper (1986)

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