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On the evening of November 24, 1971, a smartly dressed middle-aged man jumped out of a Northwest Orient Airlines jet flying over Washington state with $200,000 in cash. D.B. Cooper boarded a flight out of Portland, Oregon, and shortly after takeoff, handed a flight attendant a polite bomb-threat note requesting the money and four parachutes. The plane landed at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, where Cooper's demands were met and the other passengers were evacuated. The plane took off again, bound for Mexico, and Cooper parachuted out along the way. He was never found, and the case remains the world's only unsolved skyjacking. The name "D.B. Cooper"
is actually a misidentification. The gentleman who stepped off the airplane at 10,000 feet bought a ticket under the name "Dan Cooper." He was mistakenly referred to as "D.B. Cooper" by an officer at a press conference, and the name stuck. Cooper leapt out of the Boeing 727 (the only commercial airplane with a staircase in the rear) directly into American folklore. He inspired songs, books, and a 1981 film starring Robert Duvall. A massive manhunt in the woods north of Portland came up empty, although five years later a boy discovered a bag containing roughly $6,000 of Cooper's money along the banks of the Columbia River. The
Mount Saint Helens eruption in 1980 covered most of Cooper's potential landing zone in ash. Whatever happened to Cooper? He would have been exceedingly lucky to survive the jump -- the plane was traveling at 200 miles per hour in freezing rain. He would have landed in the wilderness at night, at the onset of winter, with no survival gear. But this article from U.S. News suggests that he may have wound up as an antique salesman in Florida. The case remains open.
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