D. B. Cooper

Summary

On the night before Thanksgiving in 1971, a man in a business suit hijacked a Boeing 727 with a briefcase he said held a bomb, collected two hundred thousand dollars and four parachutes, released the passengers, ordered the aircraft back into the air, lowered the rear stairs in flight, and stepped off into the dark over Washington State.

Nobody has ever established who he was. It remains the only unsolved air piracy case in the FBI's history.

And in December 2025, without explanation, the FBI quietly handed back the most promising piece of physical evidence anyone has produced in fifty years.

What is documented

The hijacking. On 24 November 1971, a man who had bought a ticket under the name Dan Cooper boarded Northwest Orient Flight 305 from Portland to Seattle. He passed a note to a flight attendant, Florence Schaffner, claiming to have a bomb, and opened a briefcase containing what appeared to be red cylinders and wires.

He demanded two hundred thousand dollars in twenty-dollar bills and four parachutes. At Seattle-Tacoma, the money and the parachutes were brought aboard and all thirty-six passengers were released.

The jump. The aircraft took off again at 7:37 pm with three crew in the cockpit and one flight attendant, Tina Mucklow, in the cabin. Cooper directed them to fly toward Mexico City at low altitude and low speed, with the landing gear down and the flaps extended, which required a fuel stop at Reno.

He sent Mucklow forward to the cockpit. At some point after that he lowered the aft airstair. At around 8:13 pm the crew felt a change in cabin pressure. When the aircraft landed at Reno, he was gone.

What he left. A black clip-on tie from JCPenney, and a mother-of-pearl tie clip.

The tie, which is the best physical evidence there is. Forensic examination in the 2000s found more than a hundred thousand microscopic particles on it, including unalloyed titanium, bismuth, and strontium sulfide. Unalloyed titanium was, in 1971, used in a small number of specialised industries: aerospace, chemical processing, certain kinds of manufacturing. The particles indicate that Cooper worked in or around such an environment.

There is also a partial DNA profile from the tie. It is badly degraded. Reporting on the current investigation indicates it carries roughly seven of the twenty-three markers required for a confirmatory identification.

The money. In February 1980, an eight-year-old boy named Brian Ingram found decaying twenty-dollar bills on Tena Bar, a sandbar on the Columbia River. The serial numbers matched the ransom. The find totalled roughly five thousand eight hundred dollars.

That is all that has ever been recovered. The remaining one hundred and ninety-four thousand dollars has never surfaced. Not one further bill from the ransom, out of ten thousand of them, has entered circulation anywhere in fifty-five years.

The Tena Bar location is a problem for every reconstruction of the case. It is not where the money should be if Cooper jumped where the FBI thinks he jumped, and how it got there has never been settled.

The FBI closed it. In July 2016, after forty-five years, the Bureau suspended active investigation, saying its resources were better used elsewhere. It stated that it would still accept specific physical evidence relating to the money or the parachutes.

The McCoy claim. Richard Floyd McCoy II was a Vietnam veteran, a Green Beret helicopter pilot and an experienced skydiver. In April 1972, five months after Cooper, he hijacked a United Airlines 727 in an almost identical manner, demanded half a million dollars and parachutes, and jumped from the aft stairs. He was arrested within days, convicted, escaped from prison in 1974, and was shot dead by the FBI later that year.

The parachute. In July 2022, Dan Gryder, a retired pilot who has pursued the case for twenty years and documents it on YouTube, found a parachute rig in an outbuilding on the McCoy family property at Cove City, North Carolina. McCoy's children, Chanté and Richard III, believe their father was Cooper. They had waited until their mother died before coming forward, because they suspected she had been complicit.

In September 2023 Gryder and Richard McCoy III delivered the parachute, a harness, and a skydiving logbook to FBI agents in Richmond, Virginia. A month later, agents searched the family property.

The Bureau collected DNA from McCoy's son and daughter.

And then, nothing. In December 2025, after roughly two years of forensic testing, the FBI returned the parachute to Richard McCoy III.

It offered no conclusion. It has not said the parachute is connected to the hijacking, and it has not said it is not. The agent involved told him that the Bureau had made considerable effort to extract data from the items but was not able to offer any specific conclusion. Asked for comment, the FBI has continued to refer enquiries to its 2016 statement.

Leading explanations

He died in the jump. The long-standing FBI view, and the position of Ralph Himmelsbach, the agent who worked the case for years. Cooper jumped at night, in the rain, at around ten thousand feet, in a business suit and loafers, into forested and mountainous terrain, wearing a parachute he had not packed, carrying twenty-one pounds of cash. The survival odds are poor.

The strongest evidence for this is the money. Ten thousand marked bills, and in fifty-five years not one of them has been spent.

He survived and never spent it. Also consistent with the money evidence, and it requires a specific kind of person: someone who did it for the act rather than the cash, and who then had the discipline to sit on a fortune for the rest of his life. It is not impossible. People are strange.

The Tena Bar money. Whatever happened, five thousand eight hundred dollars of the ransom ended up buried in a sandbar on the Columbia. Every explanation has to account for that, and none does so comfortably.

Richard McCoy II. The circumstantial case is genuinely strong: the near-identical method five months later, the skills, the timing, and now a parachute and a logbook from his family's property, produced by his own children. Against it: the FBI's own case historian has previously ruled McCoy out; McCoy did not obviously match the physical descriptions given by the crew; and the Bureau tested the parachute for two years and returned it saying nothing.

The registry notes that Dan Gryder, who found the parachute and has stated publicly that it will definitively prove McCoy was Cooper, is an advocate for the theory and has a channel that benefits from the story. That does not make him wrong. It does mean his confidence is not a finding.

Current status

Unsolved. No identification. No body. No aircraft debris. No parachute recovered from the jump zone. Ninety-seven per cent of the ransom has never been seen.

The registry keeps this record as the archive's clearest example of a case that is perpetually about to be solved. It has been about to be solved for fifty-five years. The most recent development, which was reported worldwide as a breakthrough, ended in December 2025 with the FBI handing the evidence back and declining to say anything at all.

Last reviewed: July 2026. Records are provisional. Where the evidence changes, the entry changes. Found an error? Tell us.