In 1971, a man in a business suit and a beige raincoat bought a one-way ticket to Seattle, ordered a bourbon and soda, and handed a flight attendant a note. It said he had a bomb. By the time the plane landed in Reno, he was gone — along with $200,000 in cash and, apparently, any trace of his existence. No body. No parachute. No fingerprints. Nothing. The FBI investigated for decades and officially closed the case in 2016 — never solving it. It remains the only unsolved plane hijacking in US history. This is Just The Gist of DB Cooper: the 1971 Northwest Orient hijacking, the $200,000 ransom, the parachute jump, and the mystery that has never been solved.

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DB Cooper and Tina Mucklow: The Untold Story (Rolling Stone, 2019)

DB Cooper Case Files (FBI Vault)

DB Cooper Confessions and Evidence (Popular Mechanics, 2025)

DB Cooper: New FBI Files and Suspects (ABC News, July 2025)

The Disappearance of DB Cooper (YouTube, 2024)

D.B. Cooper Wikipedia

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