Dan Cooper: Dead or Alive?

By Mike O'Keefe

Looking out the rear hatch of the airplane, Dan can see nothing. The sound of howling wind and whipping rain are drowned out by the plane’s engines. Pitch-blackness stares back at him from opening as he makes his final decision.

To jump or not to jump is the question racing through this man’s mind. Dan has the money, and he has the parachute. Everything he asked for he got. With one final sigh, he pushes himself out of the door and into the night.

Whether he got what he wanted, and whether it would still be possible today, is still under question.

“We’ve run down thousands of leads and considered all sorts of scenarios,” the FBI website says. “Yet the case remains unsolved.”

D.B. Cooper was the alias given to a man who disappeared under some strange, to say the least, circumstances after he hijacked a plane in 1971.

Cooper boarded a Boeing 727 in the evening of November 24, 1971 with a destination of his own in his head. After handing the flight attendant a note informing her that he had a bomb in his briefcase and that his name was Dan Cooper, he told her to ask the captain to land the plane.

After landing the plane, receiving over $200,000 in cash, four parachutes and fuel for the plane, he ordered the plane back into the night sky.

Without saying a word to anyone on the plane, somewhere over the Oregon wilderness is where he made his jump, cash and parachutes in hand.

And although he successfully got off the plane, the weather conditions as well as his landing zone asks whether or not he survived the landing.

The FBI claims that it is highly probable Cooper died on the jump, but scant clues have lead to a cult following of cooper.

The FBI website contains composite sketches of the man, who bears a surprisingly generic look.

A black and white suit with sunglasses and neatly combed hair was the unanimous description given by all the witnesses.

And not a short while ago, a young boy found some bills along a riverside downstream from where Cooper bailed.

And to top it all of, flight manifests were not required at the time, thus leaving no trace of the true identity of the man who named himself Dan Cooper.

The FBI also says that Cooper was probably not an expert skydiver, nor did he have any help on the ground. There were a few crucial things and keys that revealed Cooper as a novice skydiver, such as his willingness to jump in such extreme conditions.

He also had no idea where he was when he jumped. He told the pilots to fly in a certain direction and then bailed out a few minutes later. There was no way he could have known where he was.

Over the years a few people have come forward with deathbed confessions and clues, all of which have led back to a dead end.

“Diving into the wilderness without a plan, without the right equipment, in such terrible conditions, he probably never got his chute open.” Says Special Agent Larry Carr, the FBI investigator who recently re-opened the case.