A mystery that has puzzled Americans for 50 years. A daring pirate jumps for ransom from a plane after it was hijacked and disappears forever

On November 24, 1971, a very ordinary passenger boarded Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 from Portland to Seattle, and it was only hours, until he parachuted with a ransom of 200 thousand dollars, and he has not been found since.

Fifty years after his leap into the unknown, hijacker Dan Cooper, whose pseudonym was later transformed into "DB Cooper" by the media, remains a mystery baffling Americans, as his case is the only unsolved plane hijacking case in the United States.

The technique Cooper used that afternoon on Thanksgiving Eve was relatively simple: after the Boeing 727 took off, he called a flight attendant, and when she approached he handed her a handwritten note that the young woman at first thought contained his phone number in an attempt to flirt with her, so she put it in her bag without reading it.

He only said to her, "Miss, you better take a look at the paper. I have a bomb."

The bomb was hidden in the bag placed next to him, and he was able to get it into the plane, as the security inspection procedures at that time were not as stringent as they are today.

After notifying the authorities, Cooper continued to hold the hostages for hours in the northwestern United States.

Chase -

and soon Cooper demanded a ransom of $200,000 - today's equivalent of $1.3 million - four parachutes, and a tank on the runway at Seattle Airport.

The airline complied with his requests, and when the plane landed, the hijacker exchanged the thirty-six passengers for cash and parachutes.

The plane took off again for Mexico at Cooper's request.

On the way, the hijacker asked the pilots to operate the aircraft's tailgate opening mechanism.

In this type of Boeing, passengers would actually enter the plane through a walkway at the tail.

D.B. Cooper put his parachute on his back, jumped out of the plane with his cash, and disappeared into the darkness of the night.

The authorities soon launched a hunt, and awarded a reward to anyone who provided information on the whereabouts of the hijacker.

But investigators have found no trace of him after weeks of hunting in the dense forests of the northwestern United States.

This case grabbed the headlines of the American media, which began to wonder: Who could be behind this daring and deceitful pirate?

Where could it have landed?

Did he survive that jump?

And if so, where is he hiding now?

- "James Bond"

Businessman Eric Ulis (55 years) explained the phenomenon of continuing fascination with the Cooper operation 50 years after it happened by saying that the hijacker behaved "in a similar way to James Bond."

Ulis has been following the DB Cooper case for nearly 14 years and trying to track him down. His research was the subject of a documentary on the American "History Channel" channel.

He is also the organizer of Copper Con, the annual meeting near Seattle for those passionate about the cause.

As for Mary Jane Fryer, who was a special agent for the FBI when the operation took place and who investigated it during the first decade of the twenty-first century, she believed that Cooper had become a "popular hero" in the United States after his non-violent robbery. high altitude

Fryer even describes the current movement on the case as a "cult" that goes back to the failure to find the famous hijacker.

Over the years, there were sometimes bizarre theories about the case, and dozens of people, some on their deathbeds, claimed to be DB Cooper.

FBI investigators looked into the files of the most prominent of these, including the amateur pilot and transgender woman Barbara Dayton, who confessed where she had hidden the money and then retracted her statement, and the former Korean War fighter Lynn Doyle Cooper, whose niece had been convinced for years that he was the perpetrator. and Sheridan Patterson, who was interviewed by Mary Jane Fryer in the 2000s before DNA tests prevented her from moving forward.

In 2016, the FBI officially announced that the investigation was finally closed because there were no new leads of interest.

Eric Ulis considered that the US Federal Police did a "very good job" in general, but "made some serious mistakes."

He explained that one of these errors was that the flight path assumed by the FBI was not the correct one and that DB Cooper landed several kilometers from the search area.

But the aura of mystery surrounding this issue continues to inspire American society, as evidenced by the presence of the D.B. Cooper name on coffee cups, mugs, socks, and others.

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