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Hi, listeners. Before we dive into today's episode of Hidden History, I want to take a brief moment to tell you about another show from Rewind Studios that I know you'll love. It's called Government that Doesn't Suck, hosted by professors Lindsay Cormack and Greg Jackson from History that Doesn't Suck. Ever wonder how the weather forecast on your phone is so accurate? Or how your mail still gets across the country for less than a dollar? Or who actually built the highway you drove on this morning? Each episode tells the surprising story of an American institution that you'll never look at the same way again. Listen to and follow Government that Doesn't Suck every other Monday on Apple podcasts and Spotify, or watch video episodes on YouTube. This is Rewind. Rewind. It's the night before Thanksgiving, 1971. A man in a dark business suit settles into the last row of a passenger jet, orders a bourbon, and lights a cigarette. He looks like every tired businessman heading home for the holiday, and he's about to become the most famous criminal America never caught. Somewhere over the freezing forest of Washington State, this man will lower a staircase in the belly of a moving airplane, step out into the dark with $200,000 strapped to his body and. And vanish. 50 years later, we still don't know his real name. We don't know if he lived or died. We don't even know where most of the money went. So who was the man known as D.B. cooper? Did he survive that impossible jump? And is it possible that he somehow pulled off the perfect crime and is still out there? I'm Dr. Huni Bhat, and this is Hidden History, a Rewind original powered by Pave Studios. On this show, we're exploring some of the most mysterious events from history that have yet to be fully explained, and examining all the different theories, from science to the supernatural and everything in between, from vanished civilizations and doomsday prophecies to paranormal experiences and unexplained phenomena. I'm looking at it all, and I want you to join me. Before we begin, I'd love it if you could rate, review, and follow Hidden History. Your support allows our community to grow and for other people to discover the show. Today's episode is all about D.B. cooper, the man who hijacked a Boeing 727 in 1971, collected a small fortune in ransom, and then parachuted out the back of the plane into a stormy night sky. He was never seen again. So what happened to him? Was he a criminal mastermind, a desperate amateur, or something else entirely and why, after all this time, can't any of us stop thinking about him? To understand how a man could hijack a commercial airliner and get away with it, you first have to understand the world he did it in. Today, getting on a plane means taking off your shoes, emptying your pockets and shuffling through a body scanner while a machine X rays your toothpaste. But back in 1971, none of that existed for domestic flights in America. There was no security screening at all. No metal detectors, no bag checks, no ID required. You could walk up to a counter, pay cash, give any name you liked and stroll right onto the plane. And people were taking advantage of it. Between 1968 and 1972, there were hundreds of hijackings around the world. So many that the era earned a grim little nickname. The golden age of Hijacking. It coincided with a massive recession and airlines also didn't want to annoy their customers with increased security measures. So the sky stayed wide open. Which brings us to the afternoon of November 24, 1971. The day before Thanksgiving. At Portland International Airport in Oregon, a man steps up to the Northwest Oregon Airlines counter and buys a one way ticket to Seattle. It's a short flight, just about 30 minutes. He pays in cash and on the ticket he writes the name Dan Cooper. Witnesses would later describe him as a white man in his mid-40s, somewhere around 510 to 6ft tall, with an olive complexion, dark hair combed straight back and brown eyes. He wore a business suit, a white shirt, a thin black clip on tie and a raincoat. And he carried a black briefcase and a paper bag. Completely unremarkable, just your average businessman taking a short commuting flight home. He boards a plane, a Boeing 727, and takes seat 18E in the very last row. He orders a drink, a bourbon and seven up. Then he waits. On board that day were 36 passengers and a crew of six. Two of them are about to become central to the story. A 23 year old flight attendant named Florence Schaffner and another flight attendant named Tina Mucklow. At 2:50 in the afternoon, right on schedule, Flight 305 pushes back from the gate and climbs into the gray Oregon sky. Just another short hop up the coast. Except for the quiet man in the back row, the one with the briefcase balanced on his lap, who'd made a point of confirming that the plane was a Boeing 727. Shortly after takeoff, Cooper hands Florence Schaffner a note. Now Schaffner is a young flight attendant and Passengers slip her their phone numbers all the time. So she does what she always does. She drops a note into her purse without reading it. But then Cooper leans toward her and says quietly, miss, you'd better look at that note. I have a bomb. End quote. Florence didn't need to be told twice. In neat, all capital letters, written in felt tip pen, the note tells that he has a bomb in his briefcase and he wants her to sit beside him. She does, and when she asks to see the bomb, he opens the briefcase just enough for her to glimpse what's inside. A tangle of wires, a large cylindrical battery, and two rows of red sticks that. That look exactly like dynamite. Then he tells her what he wants. $200,000 in $20 bills and four parachutes. Here's the first sign that DB Cooper is not your average criminal. Because why four parachutes? That's more than one person needs. By demanding that many two main chutes and two reserves, he makes it seem like he might force a hostage to jump along with him. And that means they can't risk slipping him sabotage, broken equipment, because they might be sentencing an innocent person to death. Keeping all this in mind, Florence carries the demands to the cockpit. Captain William Scott keeps her up front and sends the other flight attendant, Tina Mucklow, to sit with Cooper and act as the go between for the next few hours. Tina is the person closest to DB Cooperation, and the picture she paints of him is genuinely unsettling because he's so calm, he's polite, he's almost pleasant. Not how you'd expect a hijacker to be. The plane circle Seattle for about two hours, while the FBI and Seattle police scramble to put together the money and the parachutes. Meanwhile, the passengers are simply told there's a minor mechanical difficulty and Cooper isn't doing anything to make them think otherwise. He offers Tina a cigarette, and at one point he looks out the window at the lights below and says, looks like Tacoma down there. Which might just seem like a casual observation, but it's also our first hint at his identity. Because when he's told the parachutes are coming from Accord Air Force Base, Cooper mentions that it's only about a 20 minute drive from the Seattle airport. Something most people wouldn't know. So chances are he's familiar with the area, but still he's keeping things close to the chest. As they circle, Tina asks him why he picked their airline. Cooper laughs and says, quote, it's not because I have a grudge against her airline. It's just because I have a grudge but he doesn't elaborate beyond that. Finally, at 5:46pm Kung Fu. The plane lands at the Seattle Tacoma Airport. The money arrives from Seattle First National Bank. $10,020 bills weighing about 19 pounds packed into a bag. And crucially, the FBI has photographed every single one of them. They've recorded all 10,000 serial numbers on microfilm. Most of them begin with the letter L. Cooper stays true to his word. In exchange for the money and the chutes, he releases the other passengers, plus Florence Schaffner and a third flight attendant, Alice Hancock. Then he gives the crew their new, very specific orders. Cooper wants to fly to Mexico City. He tells the captain to keep the plane low, no higher than 10,000ft. And he wants it as slow as it can fly without falling out of the air. The flaps are set to 15 degrees with the landing gear down and the cabin unpressurized. Cooper also wants the rear stairs at the back of the plane left down. And this is why he specifically chose a flight with a Boeing 727. The 727 was one of the only passenger jets in the world you could realistically parachute out of. It had a staircase built into the tail underneath the body of the plane and three engines mounted high enough that someone falling out wouldn't get sucked into them. Here's the craziest part. That rear staircase could be lowered while the plane was flying. And the switch to do it was in the back of the cabin where it couldn't be overridden by the pilots up front. This was not common knowledge. Regular flight crews didn't even know it was possible. And yet DB Cooper did. Which gives us another hint at his identity. Later on, the FBI came to suspect he might have known about this design quirk because of a very specific, very classified fact. During the Vietnam War, the CIA used Boeing 727s to drop agents and supplies out the back mid flight into enemy territory. And it's possible DB Cooper had access to that knowledge. Whoever he was, he hadn't wandered onto Flight 305 on a whim. He'd been planning this for a while and things are going exactly the way he wanted. At around 7:40pm, the plane takes off again, this time with only five people aboard. DB Cooper, Tina Mucklow, the pilots and the flight engineer. But there's still some elements outside Cooper's control. He has no idea that two F106 fighter jets and a trainer plane are shadowing the 727 from a distance, weaving back and forth to stay behind it. And out of sight. But for now, they're only watching. Once they're in the air, Cooper tells Tina to head to the cockpit, pull the curtain closed behind her and not come back. As she walks away, she glances behind her one last time. Tina sees Cooper standing in the aisle, tying the bag of money around his waist with a length of parachute cord. Before she goes, she begs him, please, please take the bomb with you. That is the last time anyone sees D.B. cooper. A little after 8pm A warning light flashes in the cockpit. The rear airstair has been deployed. The crew calls back to him on the intercom asking if he needs help. He answers once. No. Then at about 8:13, the tail of the plane suddenly lurches upward and the pilots have to fight to bring it level again. Their ears pop from a sudden change in cabin pressure. They call back to Cooper again and this time there's no answer. There's only the curtain and the open sterile behind it and the freezing black air rushing in. At 11:02 that night, the plane lands in Reno, Nevada with the staircase still hanging open. Captain Scott walks to the back of the cabin. It's empty. All that's left is a black clip on tie lying on a seat, eight cigarette butts in an ashtray and an open door to the dark. Once Flight 305 landed in Reno, the race was on to find Dan Cooper. The FBI gave the case a name, Norjack, short for Northwest Hijacking. With a story this big, it didn't take the press long to catch onto it. And right away they made a mistake that left a huge impact on this case. One of the first reports to file his story got Cooper's name mixed up. He'd written his name down as Dan Cooper, but the reporter wrote it down as DB Cooper. From there, the wires picked it up and the name stuck. Now, in the grand scheme of things, it probably doesn't really matter since Dan Cooper wasn't his real name anyway and it didn't affect the investigation. But it's one of those quirks that stands out. And even today we still know him as DB Cooper, whatever his name was. Cooper's antics kicked off one of the largest manhunts the FBI had ever run. Within five years, they looked at more than 800 suspects. Over the life of the case, more than a thousand. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover personally approved using an SR71 Blackbird, the fastest spy plane on earth, to photograph the flight path. Agents even reflew the exact same airplane and shoved a 200 pound sled out the Back stairs to recreate that telltale lurch of the tail and figure out the precise moment Cooper jumped. And they combed the ground, too. We're talking hundreds of soldiers with helicopters, boats, and even a submarine sent down to the depths of the Merwin Reservoir in Southern Washington. And they found nothing. No parachute fabric, ripped clothes, loose bills. No sign of Cooper at all. Even where he jumped was a moving target. Early estimates pointed near the town of Ariel, Washington. But a pilot who'd been flying a few minutes behind Flight 305 that night told the FBI their wind data was wrong. When they recalculated, the likely drop zone shifted east toward the Washougal River. The lead FBI agent on the case, Ralph Himmelsbach, later admitted that if he were going looking for Cooper, that's where he'd start. So what do they actually have in terms of physical evidence? The answer is not much. On the plane, Cooper left behind his clip on tie. And the tie clip. Two of the four parachutes, eight Raleigh cigarette butts, hair samples on his headrest, and 66 fingerprints. With current technology, it might be a good place to start, if most of that wasn't lost along the way. Over the years, the hair got misplaced somewhere in the custody of various field offices, and the cigarette butts were destroyed. The fingerprints haven't led anywhere either. The only genetic material that survives is a partial messy DNA profile pulled from the tie back in 2001. And the FBI itself has admitted they can't even be certain that DNA belonged to Cooper. He could have borrowed the tie. A salesman could have handled it. There's just no way to know. But that doesn't mean the investigation was a total bust. In 1978, a deer hunter walking in the woods along the flight path found an instruction card for lowering the 727's rear stairs. It was the first physical proof that the search area was at least roughly right, although it didn't yield any more information than that. And then, in 1980, came the big one. That year, an eight year old boy named Brian Ingram was on a family camping trip along the Columbia river at a sandy spot called Tina Bar. He was raking the sand to build a campfire when he uncovered bundles of disintegrating $20 bills still held together with rotting rubber bands. The FBI checked the serial numbers. This was D.B. cooper's money, about 5,800 of it. To this day, it's the only part of the ransom ever found and the only physical trace of DB Cooper ever discovered outside that airplane. You'd Think it could be the clue that cracked everything wide open. Instead, he did the opposite. Because the moment investigators look closely at how that money got to that riverbank, the. The whole story stopped making sense. It should have been easy to explain. The money washed down a river and got buried in the sand. Easy. It's that the science isn't that simple. When researchers examined the bills, they found microscopic algae called diatoms clinging to them. And the species present were ones that only bloom in spring. But Cooper jumped in November. That suggests the money didn't enter the water until months after the hijacking. Another theory came from a geologist who studied the sand layers and concluded the bills probably arrived at that spot years later, sometime after 1974. This has been disputed, though, and no one has ever explained why one bundle was missing exactly 10 bills. Or how three packets stayed perfectly stacked together while tumbling down a river. After that, answers were hard to come by. And in 2016, after 45 years, the FBI finally suspended the case, making it the only unsolved skyjacking in American history. So what really happened to D.B. cooper? It comes down to three questions. Did he survive? Who was he? And just maybe, did he actually win? Let's get into the theories. Let's start with the most basic question of all. The one the FBI wrestled with from day one. Is it even possible that DB Cooper survived? Because on paper, this was close to a suicide jump. Think about the conditions. It was a dark, moonless, rainy night. The temperature up there was around 15 degrees Fahrenheit. And with the plane in motion, the wind tearing past that open staircase was screaming by at well over 150 miles an hour. Cooper jumped into all of that at 10,000ft, wearing only a business suit, a thin raincoat and slip on loafers. And his parachute couldn't even be steered. The main one he used was a military style emergency chute. The kind that just opens and flows straight down wherever the wind decides to take it. Not only that, but one of the reserve chutes he'd been handed was a dud. It was a training model that was sewn shut and couldn't actually open. A truly experienced skydiver would have spotted that in an instant. Which does poke a hole in the DB Cooper was a criminal mastermind theory. Especially considering that he leapt out of a plane in freezing dark rain, unable to steer his parachute into miles of rugged, forested wilderness. The agent who ran the investigation in his later years, Larry Carr, doesn't think Cooper ever even got his shoe open. Another agent was convinced he came down in the Columbia river and drowned. So it's fair to say the odds were stacked against him. But that doesn't make his death a given. The skydiving expert who actually packed Cooper's parachutes said you wouldn't need to be a pro to survive that jump. He figured a few practice jobs would be enough. And then there's the most stubborn piece of evidence of all. In the months after Cooper's disappearance, five different people try to copy his crime. And every single one of them survived, Including a man who jumped into the Honduran jungle at night and another who jumped into the Colorado snow wearing barely more than a shirt, slacks, and cowboy boots. So did Cooper die? Maybe. Probably even. But probably is the most anyone can honestly say. Now, here's where the science gets really interesting. Because even if it can't tell us whether Cooper lived, it might be able to tell us who he was. Remember that cheap clip on tie he left behind on the seat? The DNA from it wasn't helpful, but decades later, a team of citizen scientists went over that tie particle by particle with a borrowed electron microscope. And what they found was extraordinary. The tie was covered in microscopic metal particles, specifically pure, unalloyed titanium, along with rare elements like antimony, bismuth, cerium and strontium sulfide. In 1971, pure titanium was rare and highly specialized. You ran into it in exactly two kinds of places. Aircraft manufacturing plants or chemical plants that use it to handle corrosive material. And the rare earth elements, along with the titanium point pointed to places like Boeing's supersonic jet program or the factories around Portland that made the glass tubes inside old televisions. In other words, the ties suggest that D.B. cooper might not have been a daredevil or drifter at all. If the tie was really his, he might have been an engineer, a guy in a hard hat, an aerospace or metals plant. And I have to say, that fits everything else we know about him. The planning, the technical knowledge, maybe even the lack of practical experience with the actual jump. So the science tells us a little more about Cooper, but it can't tell us whether he lived. And the one piece of physical evidence we do have only deepens the puzzle. So I mentioned the FBI has looked over a thousand possible suspects. None of them have been 100% confirmed as DB Cooper. But there have been some promising leads. And we have to start with a man whose name is back in the headlines right now. His name was Richard Floyd McCoy, Jr. And his story is almost too on the nose. McCoy was a Vietnam veteran, a helicopter pilot. And a demolitions expert. He was also a devout Mormon and a Sunday school teacher in Utah. And on April 7, 1972, less than five months after the Cooper hijacking, McCoy hijacked a Boeing 727 running D.B. cooper's playbook, brandishing a handgun and what he claimed was a grenade, but was later proven to be a paperweight. McCoy passed note demanding $500,000 in cash and four parachutes. After he got it and the plane took back off, he lowered the rear airstair and parachuted out over Utah. But unlike D.B. cooper, McCoy got caught. The FBI had him within 72 hours. They matched his fingerprints and his handwriting and got a tip from a motorist who spotted a hitchhiker walking along a rural road in a jumpsuit, carrying a duffel bag in a detail you genuinely couldn't make up. McCoy was serving in the National Guard at the time, and before he was identified, was actually flying one of the helicopters in the search for for himself. But he was eventually caught and sentenced to 45 years in prison. His story wasn't over just yet, though. McCoy escaped from a federal penitentiary by ramming a stolen garbage truck through the gate. But a few months later, his luck ran out when he was killed in a shootout with the FBI in Virginia beach in November of 1974. So, case closed, right? D.B. cooper. Was Richard McCoy looking for another score? Well, not so fast. The FBI actually ruled McCoy out for a couple of solid reasons. First, the descriptions didn't match. McCoy was only 28 years old in 1971, and every eyewitness described Cooper as a man in his mid-40s. And McCoy had an alibi for Thanksgiving. Although, according to FBI files that have since come to light, The Bureau took McCoy seriously enough as a suspect that it reportedly altered a photo of him to see if it could be made to match the Cooper sketch. And here's why. McCoy is suddenly everywhere again. For decades, his children stayed silent. They suspected their father was D.B. cooper, but they kept quiet, partly to protect their mom, Karen, who was implicated in the Utah hijacking. However, after Karen died in 2021, McCoy's two children came forward, and they revealed that hidden away in an outbuilding on the family's property in North Carolina, there was a parachute, a modified one. They handed it over to an aviation expert and YouTuber named Dan Grider, who became convinced it was the rig used in the Cooper jump. Called it, quote, one in a billion. And then things got even stranger. The FBI searched the property, then took the parachute along with a skydiving logbook into evidence. They held onto it for roughly two years. And then in December 2025, they quietly handed the parachute back with no explanation. They wouldn't say whether it was connected to Cooper, but they also wouldn't say it wasn't. Meanwhile, they reportedly been testing the McCormick coy's family DNA against the sample found on the tie. So maybe it won't prove useless after all. However, there's another side to the story. Dan Grider is a polarizing figure in the aviation community. And some experts point out that the FBI sketch of Cooper doesn't cleanly match Richard McCoy's face. And there's still the open question of whether Cooper even survived that jump. So the McCoy parachute is the most most tantalizing lead in 50 years, but as of this recording, it's still unconfirmed. Rishi McCoy isn't the only candidate, though. Let's run through some of the others. There's Robert Rackstraw, an explosives expert and a paratrooper who served in Vietnam, earning dozens of air medals along the way. He also got kicked out of the military. One of his friends said that Rackstraw was extremely charismatic and possessed. Was described as a, quote, criminal mind. And in 1978, seven years after D.B. cooper disappeared, Rackstraw was convicted of forging checks and stealing a plane. Now, like Richard McCoy, Robert Rackstraw was dismissed as a major suspect because he was too young. But a miniseries documentary in 2016 took another look at him. And again, the story isn't so simple. Along with Rackstraw's background and appearance, there's a coded letter D.B. cooper supposedly wrote that translates to, quote, and please tell the lackey cops, DB Cooper is not my real name. I am First Lieutenant Robert Rackstraw. D.B. cooper is not my real name. End quote. Rackstraw always denied the allegations until his death in 2019. And the history Channel, which aired the documentary, stopped short of actually concluding he was DB Cooper. There's also Kenneth Christensen, and this one's eerie because he actually worked for Northwest Orient, the airline Cooper hijacked. And he was a former paratrooper. Christensen's name was first brought up in 2007, when his brother Lyle came forward with a story he'd been sitting on for years. Kenneth had died in 1994, but before he passed away, Lyle said his brother had pulled him close and said, quote, there is something you should know, but I can't tell you. Lyle's pretty sure that Kenneth was trying to tell him he was D.B. cooper. He'd worked at the airline for decades. Started as a mechanic, then as a flight attendant. He knew the airline's routes, and he'd flown on 727s, so he knew about the aft staircase. His physical description was pretty close to the composite sketches of Cooper. Christensen had an olive complexion, was in the right age range and had a similar build. He also lived in Bonney Lake, Washington, near flight through FIA's flight path. And in the years after Cooper's disappearance, he'd bought a house in cash, with no explanation for where the money had come from. But like the others, he still falls a bit short. Ultimately, the FBI concluded that Kenneth Christensen just didn't resemble the sketches enough in height or appearance. And then there's a whole gallery of others. A guy named Walter Reca, who supposedly confessed on tape to a friend, a leather worker named L.D. cooper, whose own niece pointed the finger at him, although his DNA didn't match the tie. A Boeing technical writer and avid skydiver named Sheridan Peterson. There was even a female recreational pilot named Barbara Dayton, who reportedly claimed to be Cooper. So far, every single one of these suspects has been ruled out by the eyewitness descriptions, by an alibi or by DNA. Although it bears mentioning again that the Thai DNA might not even be Cooper's in the first place. So the DNA doesn't match. Rule outs are shakier than they sound. So we've got a thousand suspects, a handful of really compelling ones, and not one name that has ever truly stuck.
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Evening. Buyer's remorse. Buy a new car. I'll be moving in. Let's get started.
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C
Sorry, I think there's been a mistake. I bought it from Carvana.
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B
You what?
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C
Yeah. Great price. I even have seven days to love it or return it.
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B
So there's no.
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C
No buyer's remorse. More like buyers rejoice.
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B
I guess I'll let myself out. Congratulations. I mean it.
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C
Buyers rejoice. Buy your car today. On Carvana. Limitations and exclusions may apply.
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See our seven day return policy@carvana.com. here's where we get to the theory that I think a lot of people want to believe. Forget the science for a second. Forget the suspects. What if the most important thing about DB Cooperation isn't how he did it, but the simple, astonishing possibility that he won? A lot of people have rooted for that possibility. Then and now. They don't see a criminal. They see a folk hero. The tiny town of Arrow, Washington, near his suspected landing zone through an annual DB Cooper Day party. For decades, he's been the subject of documentaries on Netflix and hbo. He's a running obsession on Reddit. He even turned up as a punchline on Breaking Bad. D.B. cooper became a kind of American Robin Hood, except he didn't even need to give the money to the poor. He just needed to get away. And the idea that someone could beat the entire system and disappear. I can see the appeal of it. Now I have to put my skeptic's hat back on. As romantic as the he got away clean story is, is the version the evidence supports the least. Because if Cooper beat the system and went on to live a rich, comfortable life, then why was the money never spent? Why did a chunk of it rot away on a riverbank outside that one bundle found at Tina Barr? Not a single One of those 10,000 marked bills has ever turned up. The story we love the most is the one the facts back up the least. But there's no denying that it is a good story. Here's what I keep coming Back to. With D.B. cooper. We don't actually know if he was a hero, a desperate man at the end of his rope, or something else entirely. And I think that blank space that not knowing is the entire reason we can't let him go. A mystery with no answer becomes a kind of mirror. We pour into Dan Cooper, empty outline, whatever we most want to believe. And what most of us want to believe is intoxicating. That a calm, clever, completely unremarkable person could outwit every powerful institution stacked against them, stepped right off the edge of the map and simply disappear. And think about how strange that is. We are rooting for a man who threatened a plane full of innocent people with a bomb. We probably shouldn't be on his side at all, but he represents something we can't help but want. The fantasy of vanishing, of beating the odds, of pulling off the impossible thing and never having to answer for it. The mystery of D.B. cooper doesn't endure in spite of the missing answer. It endures because of it. And maybe that's why, on some level, a quiet part of us doesn't actually want him to be found. Okay, so after all that, what do I actually think? I'll be honest with you. I love the folk hero version. The idea that he made it, that he's been some twinkly idol man sitting on the secret of the century. That's the version I'd want to be true. And that McCoy parachute genuinely gives me chills. It's the best lead anyone's had in this case. But the evidence points somewhere a little less romantic. So here's where I land. I think D.B. cooper was a real methodical, technically skilled man, and that those microscopic flecks of titanium on his tie tell us far more about him than any deathbed confession ever has. He wasn't a ghost. He wasn't some reckless thrill seeker. He was a planner who knew exactly which features of one very specific airplane could be exploited, and who built an entire crime around that knowledge. As for whether he survived, I lean toward no. Or at least not in the way the legend says. The conditions that night were potentially lethal. The money was never spent. To me, that all points towards a man who either died in that wilderness or who survived the landing only to lose the fortune. That was the whole point of the jump. But those five copycats prove that surviving was possible. So this is really a coin flip. And the McCoy DNA results could still rewrite this whole thing tomorrow. So do I think we've heard the last word on DB Cooper? Not even close. So now's the time when I'd ask, what if DB Cooper tried this exact stunt today? Here's my favorite irony in this entire story. He couldn't. And the reason he couldn't is because of him. After those copycat hijackings, the FAA required airlines to install a small device on the back of every 727. It's a simple spring loaded paddle that uses the rushing air during flight to physically lock that rear staircase shut. It only releases once the plane has slowed down on the ground. They named it the Cooper Vane. And even if that didn't exist, there's no way he'd make it onto the plane and in the first place. Today, he'd have to walk through TSA security, show ID and get scanned. So, no bomb in a briefcase, whether it was real or not. But for the sake of argument, let's say he did make it off the plane with a bag full of money and lived to tell the tale. With modern surveillance technology, there's just no way he'd be able to blend back into society without getting caught. And then there's us, the Internet. If this happened today, the manhunt would be all over Reddit and TikTok. Armchair detectives would be pulling up the live flight tracker data and geolocating his probable drop zone before the plane even landed in Reno. That police sketch would be a meme within the hour. There'd be a subreddit with 50,000 members by morning. Heck, there already is one for DB Cooper, and it currently has over two and a half thousand weekly visitors. This case actually reminds me a lot of the Louvre museum heist in October 2025, when thieves disguised as construction workers stole eight pieces of the French crown jewels. It went viral, not just because of the items that were stolen, but because of how simple the execution was. The thieves just rolled up with a truck mounted ladder, climbed into the gallery during daylight hours, then ran out with the jewels and disappeared for a few weeks at least. As of this recording, the French authorities are confident that they've caught most of the perpetrators, although most of the items they stole are unaccounted for. A parachute out of a plane? A ladder into an art museum. It's so brazen, you'd think they never really get away with it. And it's arguable that they didn't, at least in terms of being able to profit from the their heist. To be clear, I do not condone breaking the law in any way. But there's a reason crimes like this grip our imaginations. They remind us that if you're bold enough, anything can happen. It doesn't always pay off, and it shouldn't. But when we think of that moment of dropping into the sky, never to be seen again, the possibilities seem endless. A small part of us thinks what would happen if they got away with it? Thanks so much for joining me for this episode of hidden history. I'm Dr. Harni Bott. Join me next time as we explore another unbelievable story from the past. What did you think of the DB Cooper mystery? Do you believe he walked out of those woods and lived a long, quiet life? Or do you think the forest swallowed him that night? Let me know in the comments and I might talk about it in a few future episode. And be sure to subscribe on YouTube or rate review and follow if you're listening on audio so we can keep building this community together. See you next week. Hareemi Hive for another episode of Hidden History.