D.B. Cooper

On the afternoon of November 24, 1971, a man using the name Dan Cooper purchased a one-way ticket on Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 from Portland to Seattle. Described as a middle-aged man in a business suit, he handed a note to a flight attendant stating he had a bomb and demanded $200,000 in cash and four parachutes.

After the plane landed in Seattle, Cooper released the 36 passengers in exchange for the money and parachutes. He then ordered the crew to fly toward Mexico City at low altitude with the rear stairs lowered. Somewhere over the forested wilderness of southwestern Washington state, Cooper parachuted into a rainstorm with the ransom money strapped to his body.

A massive search of the area found no trace of Cooper. In 1980, an eight-year-old boy found $5,800 of the ransom money in deteriorating bundles along the Columbia River at Tena Bar, Washington. No other money has surfaced.

The FBI investigated more than a thousand suspects over the decades. The case became the only unsolved American hijacking and captured public imagination as a folk legend. In July 2016, the FBI announced it was no longer actively investigating the case, though it would continue to accept credible leads. Cooper's true identity and fate remain unknown.