He Jumped Out of a Plane With 200,000 Dollars... and Vanished

A man in a business suit bought a one-way ticket with cash, ordered a bourbon and soda, and hijacked a Boeing 727. Then he jumped out the back into a rainy night with two hundred thousand dollars. More than fifty years later, the FBI still does not know who he was.

This is the case file on the hijacking of Northwest Orient Flight 305 on November 24, 1971, the man who gave the name Dan Cooper, and the investigation the FBI code-named NORJAK. Everything in this episode comes from the FBI's own public records: its history pages, its case articles, its press release closing the active investigation in 2016, and the typed reports in the FBI Vault.

In this episode: the ticket counter in Portland, the note handed to a flight attendant, the demands for four parachutes and two hundred thousand dollars in twenty-dollar bills, the trade in Seattle, the jump somewhere between Seattle and Reno, why the FBI says the name D.B. Cooper was a mistake created by the press, what the two flight attendants agreed on in their descriptions, the parachutes, the black clip-on tie and the DNA the FBI took from it, why the FBI ruled out Richard McCoy, Duane Weber and Kenneth Christiansen, the eight-year-old boy who found a rotting bundle of the ransom money on the Columbia River in 1980, the French comic book clue, Tom Kaye's experiments on the river, what agent Larry Carr believes happened, and the day in July 2016 when the FBI closed the active investigation after forty-five years.

The case is officially unsolved. Did he survive the jump, or did the night and the woods win? Tell us what you think in the comments.

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CHAPTERS
0:00 The man who vanished
0:23 November 24, 1971
0:42 Dan Cooper boards Flight 305
1:06 The note and the demands
1:51 Seattle and the jump
2:32 Norjak, the FBI opens a case
3:29 What the FBI knows
3:57 The parachutes
5:17 The suspects
6:28 The money on the river
7:16 Larry Carr takes over
9:06 The FBI closes the file
9:48 Still unsolved
10:10 Your verdict

SOURCES (U.S. government works and public information)
FBI history, The D.B. Cooper hijacking: fbi.gov/history/cases-and-criminals/db-cooper-hijacking
FBI, A Byte Out of History (2006): archives.fbi.gov/archives/news/stories/2006/november/dbcooper_112406
FBI, D.B. Cooper Redux (2007): archives.fbi.gov/archives/news/stories/2007/december/dbcooper_123107
FBI, In Search of D.B. Cooper (2009): archives.fbi.gov/archives/news/stories/2009/march/in-search-of-d.b.-cooper
FBI Seattle, update on the investigation (July 2016): fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/seattle/news/press-releases/update-on-investigation-of-1971-hijacking-by-d.b.-cooper
FBI artifact, the plane ticket: fbi.gov/history/artifacts/d-b-cooper-plane-ticket
FBI Vault, D.B. Cooper (Dan Cooper) case files: vault.fbi.gov
FBI privacy policy, on use of its public information: fbi.gov/privacy-policy

ABOUT THE VISUALS
Real photos and documents come from the FBI (the sketches, the ticket, the black tie, the parachute and bag, the recovered money, and typed report pages from the FBI Vault). There is no known photo or video of the hijacking itself. The scenes of the plane, the night, the search and the river are AI illustrations made for storytelling; they are not photos of the real people or places. Newspaper clippings in the Vault were not used. Quotes and numbers come from the FBI sources above. Where the FBI calls something a theory, we say so. This channel is not affiliated with or endorsed by the FBI.

Narration: ElevenLabs. Music: Suno. Evidence Drawer tells real cases from official records and reporting. Where sources disagree, we say so.

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Related: D.B. Cooper, Dan Cooper, Flight 305, NORJAK, Northwest Orient hijacking 1971, FBI cold case, Brian Ingram, Larry Carr, unsolved mysteries, true crime.

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