Modern Mysteries

Has DB Cooper finally been identified ?

By T.K. Randall
January 9, 2018 ·  45 comments

A letter written by Cooper could hold the key to identifying him. Image Credit: PD / US Government The infamous hijacking occurred in 1971 when a mysterious man, who at the time went by the name Dan Cooper, boarded Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 to travel from Portland to Seattle.

During the trip, Cooper called over one of the flight attendants and asked them to write out a note declaring that he had a bomb in his briefcase and that the plane was being hijacked.

When the aircraft stopped at Tacoma International Airport, he allowed the passengers to leave in exchange for four parachutes and the sum of $200,000 in cash.

After the plane had taken off again, Cooper strapped the bag of money to himself, put on one of the parachutes and jumped out somewhere between Seattle and Reno. No trace of him was ever found.Now though, a team of around 40 former FBI agents, forensic scientists and private investigators believe that they may have finally discovered Cooper's real identity.

Their investigations uncovered five typed letters that Cooper had allegedly written and sent out to various newspapers following the hijacking. The letters had been held in the FBI archives for many years and were only made available following a Freedom of Information Act request.

At the bottom of one of the letters Cooper had written a mysterious sequence of numbers that experts now believe to be a reference to three covert military units which operated during the Vietnam War.

As it turns out, one of the original suspects in the DB Cooper case was a Vietnam veteran who happened to have ties to all three of those units.

Efforts are now underway to conclusively tie him to the case and solve the mystery once and for all.

Source: IFL Science | Comments (45)

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