The Man Nobody Could Find

On November 24, 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper bought a one-way ticket from Portland to Seattle for $18.52 in cash. No ID required. He boarded the plane wearing a dark suit, a black clip-on tie, and a mother-of-pearl tie clip. He ordered a bourbon and soda. He paid his tab.

Then he hijacked the aircraft.

Cooper was calm about it. He passed a note to the flight attendant, opened his briefcase to show what he said was a bomb, and made his demands: four parachutes and $200,000 in twenty-dollar bills. He'd done the math — twenties were the ideal denomination, heavy enough to be credible, small enough to spend. He specified non-sequential serial numbers. When the plane landed in Seattle, he exchanged thirty-six passengers for the money, kept the crew, and ordered a course for Mexico City. Somewhere over the forests of southwest Washington, a little after eight p.m., he tied the money to his waist, lowered the aft airstair, and stepped off the back of a moving 727 into a freezing rainstorm.

The FBI searched for forty-five years. They compiled sixty-six volumes of case files. They sent a Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird — the fastest aircraft ever built, designed to outrun Soviet missiles at Mach 3 — to retrace his flight path.

It was defeated by clouds.

Cooper was never identified. But every Boeing 727 that flew after 1972 carried a small spring-loaded device on its tail, installed to prevent anyone from ever doing what he did.

It's called a Cooper vane.