DB Cooper: They've Found Something

I dont think guy died on the jump. Think about it, hunters and hikers and everybody else woulda found the body if it was just lyiing there out in the open. I would give it a month max before some wandering hiker found the body.

I dont understand why the FBI is so sure the guy died. He did have a parachute after all. Yeah there was a raging storm at the time, but as long as his parachute worked and he didtn get electrocuted by lightning I see no reason to suggest that he was doomed to die from the jump.
 
the story is interesting but i cannot figure out why it is still so prominent with $200k missing almost 40 years ago and no one injured.
 
Brandon- the guy jumped into a 150+ mph slipstream maybe 2000 feet from the top of the mountains.

If the chute actually opened it may not have been in time. Its entirely possible the chute never opened due to the slipstream having collapsed the canopy. Or the speed was so great that the chute split….

The guy jumped into heavily wooded & mountainous terrain that is rarely traveled.

If he died on impact, the bears and critters would have eaten the body and moved the rest of the pieces all over the place within weeks, the chute would have been dirtied pretty quickly and not stood out.

Folks could have walked right past and not even noticed.
 
It's just sucha facinating mystery. Normal guy walks on an airplane, hijacks it, jumps out, disappears forever.
 
Yeah I agree with Smurfette. Totally fascinating. I guess that's why it's still relevent. Cool story.
 
Especially if he jumped with the parachute that wasn't real. They mistakenly gave him a reserve chute used for classroom instruction. He reportedly used the good one to wrap up the money, then jumped wearing the bad one.
 
He could have jumped into an area, died, and no one came within a half mile of his body for years.
 
Oh, one other thing about Mt. St. Helens. See Castle Rock on I-5 just north of Longview? When I was a kid, the destruction from the flooding and flows from the volcano was still very evident in 1987 and 1988 even right along I-5. The damage done to this area was immense. If Cooper's body landed just 2-3 miles northeast of Longview, it was toast after the explosion.
 
I think it is highly unlikely that Cooper survived the jump. Truly fascinating story though. Ironically, I saw a reenactment of the whole story on cable TV several weeks ago.

There is evidence to indicate that Cooper may have tried to jump with a dummy (training) chute, which had been sewn shut. Also, the weather conditions at the time were extremely unfavorable. Over 200+ MPH winds with a driving rainstorm. It would have been about like jumping into a tornado. Given the poor visibility, it also would have been difficult to maintain situational awareness over the mountainous terrain prevalent in the apparent drop zone. (Note this area is very close to Mt. St. Helens.) Makes it darn near impossible to know exactly how much time you have available in freefall before you have to deploy the chute in order to safely land.

Interesting to note that a kid found nearly $6000 worth of the ransom money on the banks of the Columbia River near Vancouver, WA several years later. Nobody really knows how it got there, and none of the rest of the money has ever turned up. I suspect it probably just landed there on the way down, although some people think it may have landed in the Washougal River and drifted downstream into the Columbia. Anyway, it seems reasonable that if Cooper survived the jump, at leat some of the rest of the money would have eventually been either spent or laundered.

Have to agree with a lot of the other posts regarding Cooper's whereabouts. Pretty rough terrain. Assuming he did not survive the jump, it is not unreasonable that the remains were never found. If wild animals didn't get hold of them, then perhaps whatever was left became buried under a thick layer of ash when St. Helens blew up several years later.

Really intriguing story to ponder, though. Nobody really seems to know much about Cooper. We don't even know if it was his real name, or simply an alias. He seems to have had a fair amount of aeronautical knowledge, yet was apparently very inexperienced at skydiving safely.
 
Dude, Adam West admitted to being D.B. Cooper several years ago during the trial of Jimmy James.
 
Hmmm.. raises some interesting questions..
what kind of terrain is it where the parachute was found.. was that area searched back during the 18 day operation..
how far is this location to the money that the boy found back in 1980..

i'm intrigued...
 
I heard a lawyer on Coast to Coast AM whose hobby is tracking down DB Cooper. I suspect with the amount of time and energy he's invested in the hunt he is biased to believe he survived but nevertheless he makes a good case for his survival. He says the evidence is he put the navy emergency issue parachute on his back and put the training civilian parachute that was sewn up on his chest to carry the money or use as an emergency shelter. He also gave directions to the pilot to take the plane to 5,000 feet and a certain speed and heading so he obviously knew something about aeronautics. He also had a wrist altimeter meaning he was going to do a HALO jump and free fall for a while to avoid showing up on radar. If he was going to open the parachute as soon as he jumped he would not have needed the altimeter.

All the speculation stills leave out the problem of him getting back to civilization. Even if he landed alive, he could have broken his legs or arms on trees or boulders coming down that fast in such a rainstorm. Then he's got to survive in the wilderness with no food or water, and his clothes are soaking wet. Then he's got to find his way back to civilization on foot. It's entirely possible he just died in the wilderness and was never found.
 
The thinkof interest t me is that the parachute was buried. Which implies survival to me. I sort of doubt there are very many parachutes buried in your average woods. The burrying to me means concealment. Probably in about 20 years somebody will run across the guy. We all find out he survived the jump but couldn't survive the forest....
 
He'd be roughly 80 years old by now. Wouldn't the statue of limitations have run out? He only took 200,000 dollars. You'd think he would write a book and make millions.
 
In that article, it says that the 6,000 bucks they found was also buried.

I'm starting to believe he survived the jump and got clean away with it.

Read the link if you haven't. His "brother" makes a good case.
 
yep he got away all right.

Other than the 6k found near the creek, not a SINGLE bill has returned to civilization. Banks may be crazy, but there is no way the ransom bills ever just happened to reenter the market without being discovered.

He may have lived, but he didnt walk out of the woods with the cash in his hands.....
 
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