CRIME: $200,000 and a Parachute: D.B. Cooper

August 14, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

On the afternoon before Thanksgiving in 1971, a man in a dark business suit walked up to the Northwest Orient counter at Portland International Airport, paid cash for a one-way ticket to Seattle, and signed the name "Dan Cooper" in careful block letters. He was middle-aged, olive-skinned, and perfectly forgettable except that he wouldn't take off his sunglasses. He boarded a Boeing 727, ordered a bourbon and soda, lit a cigarette, and a few minutes after takeoff handed a folded note to a flight attendant. She assumed it was a phone number. He told her to read it. It said he had a bomb in his briefcase. Over the next six hours, he extracted $200,000 and four parachutes from the FBI, then stepped off the back of the plane into a freezing storm somewhere over the Pacific Northwest. More than fifty years later, no one knows his real name, whether he lived or died, or how he pulled off the only unsolved skyjacking in American history.

The World That Made Him Invisible

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What you'll learn

1 CRIME: $200,000 and a Parachute: D.B. Cooper
2 Main Outline
3 (00:51) **Setting the Scene: November 24, 1971** - A man in a dark suit buys a one-way ticket to Seattle at Portland International Airport, signs "Dan Cooper," and boards a Boeing 727
4 (03:46) **Why This Crime Captivated America** - Cooper committed a crime so technically precise that half the country saw him as a folk hero before the FBI had a suspect
5 (05:55) **The World Cooper Exploited** - In 1971, flying had no TSA, metal detectors, or ID checks — and hijackings were epidemic
6 (07:01) **The Key Detail at the Ticket Counter** - Cooper asked the ticket agent if the plane was a Boeing 727 — a question that later proves crucial
7 (08:14) **The Hijacking Unfolds Mid-Flight** - Florence Schaffner initially tucks away Cooper's note, thinking it's a phone number, until he insists she read it

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

In November 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper boarded a commercial flight in Portland, Oregon, told a flight attendant he had a bomb, and demanded $200,000 and four parachutes. After releasing the passengers in Seattle, he ordered the crew back into the air, then lowered the plane's rear stairs and leapt into the freezing night somewhere over the Pacific Northwest. He was never seen again. The hijacking exposed just how little security existed in the early days of commercial aviation, when passengers boarded without screening and a man in a suit could carry a bomb onto a plane unquestioned. Despite one of the longest investigations in FBI history, no one ever identified him or recovered his body, and only a small portion of the ransom money was ever found. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson revisits the only unsolved skyjacking in American history, the security gaps that made it possible, and the enduring question of who D.B. Cooper really was and whether he survived the jump.

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