10 Legendary Manhunts
6. Dan 'D.B.' Cooper
It's hard not to romanticise these entries, many of them are seen as folk antiheroes; but it's best not to see crime through rose-tinted glasses. Dan Cooper, though, deserves props for how ingenious his plot was.
On November 24 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper bought a one-way ticket to Seattle from the Portland International Airport. During the flight the man informed a flight attendant that he had a bomb.
He demanded that once the plane landed in Seattle he was to be given $200,000 (about $1,200,000 today), several parachutes and a refuel for the plane. He then ordered the plane to take off. At some point during the second flight, Cooper would parachute out of the plane.
The FBI, the Army and local police all took place in one of the largest manhunts in history, but due to the large search area and large number of potential locations Cooper could land no substantial evidence was ever uncovered (although some of his ransom money was found by a kid years later).
The investigation was officially suspended in January 2016, with authorities no closer to knowing who the man actually was or what became of him. His crime remains the only unsolved act of air piracy in history.