A man stands at the back of a Boeing 727, soaring across the Atlantic Ocean. He holds a briefcase full of $200,000 (that'd be about to $1,160,000 today) in ransom money, extorted from Northwest Orient airlines. He also has the four parachutes he requested, one strapped to his back. The plane has been emptied of its passengers during a stopover in Seattle. He takes a deep breath, clutches the briefcase, and hurls himself out of the plane at 30,000 feet. Yes, you're right, that would be a pretty good opening to a movie. Except it already happened in real life, and the story is so much stranger than that. On November 24, 1971 an unidentified man - referred to as DB Cooper in the press, a corruption of the Dan Cooper alias he bought his plane tickets under - hijacked an aircraft on a flight from Portland to Seattle. He demanded thousands of dollars in ransom, lest he trigger the bomb he claimed to have in his luggage and bring the whole plane down. Along with the money, he requested four parachutes (two primary and two reserve) and a fuel truck standing by in Seattle to refuel the aircraft upon landing. He got everything he asked for. The plane landed in Seattle, he let the passengers go, and the craft was refuelled after he was delivered his money and parachutes. Then they took back off. The crew remember him as rather charming and polite, calm throughout the ordeal, and even offered to pay for the bourbons he'd been knocking back during both flights. Then, without warning, he dived out of the plane and into the night. And no trace was ever found of him. That's despite the FBI making him a top priority, employing all their best agents and most sophisticated technology into tracking him down. They never even got as far as figuring out his real name, who he was, or what his motivations were. Modern experts doubt he would've survived his risky skydive, but no body was ever recovered. Marked dollars of the sort his ransom takings were made up of have since been found, but lead to nothing. The case remains the only unsolved air piracy in American aviation history. And DB Cooper is probably off on some tropical island somewhere, earning twenty percent, safe in the knowledge that he managed to disappear and never be found
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
