D.B. Cooper Parachuted Away and Vanished

On November 24, 1971, the day before Thanksgiving, a man traveling under the name Dan Cooper boarded a Northwest Orient Airlines Boeing 727 at Portland International Airport, bound for Seattle. Soon after takeoff he showed a flight attendant a briefcase he claimed held a bomb, then passed a note to the cockpit demanding $200,000 in twenty-dollar bills and four parachutes.

After the plane landed in Seattle, Cooper traded the passengers for the cash and chutes, then ordered the crew to fly low and slow toward Mexico. Somewhere over southwest Washington, he lowered the jet’s rear aft stairwell and stepped into the night.

He parachuted out of the plane with the ransom money and vanished, never seen or heard from again.

The FBI’s decades-long investigation, codenamed NORJAK, considered hundreds of suspects but never identified him. It remains the only unsolved act of air piracy in U.S. commercial aviation history.