on november 24 1971 a man who would become known as d.b cooper hijacks a plane
and then jumps out taking with him a ransom of two hundred thousand dollars
well he either got away or else he sure made a big hole in the ground up there
his identity is never uncovered nor is his body it's impossible or is it
i've said many times before that i really want to get to the bottom of this and i believe that i can
can investigator eric euless finally close the only unsolved skyjacking in u.s history d.b
cooper was very clever in terms of how he pulled this thing off he and his team will re-examine
the plane's alleged flight path the pilot said that they were not looking far enough west search
alternate landing sites for fresh clues this could be promising and profile possible suspect tonight
new answers in one of history's greatest mysteries who is d.b cooper and how did he escape
db cooper investigator eric euless is on his way to washington state but his research and
investigation started 12 years earlier in arizona i've always had a fascination with aviation which
is what i believe ultimately drew me into the case here was a man who developed a cult-like
following over the years despite the fact that nobody really knew anything about the guy at all
he became a legend overnight i think db was like the coolest guy in america he did the ultimate
crime eventually i found the case was being hijacked by conspiracy theories and so forth
and i just ended up getting sucked in to this db cooper vortex and ultimately i decided that i was
going to undertake an investigation of my own into the case over the years more than 1 000 suspects
have been scrutinized when this case happened in the 1970s the era of dna was not upon us
and agents really didn't look out to preserve this evidence in the way that we do now in
order to identify where the fbi and others went sideways with this case i knew that i
was going to have to personally read all 20 000 pages of redacted fbi files regarding the case
thanks to a freedom of information act lawsuit filed in 2016 every few months the fbi releases
files from the case in chronological order this constant drip of new information and new sources
is key to eric's theory about what really happened on northwest flight 305.
the night of the skyjacking we know a man boarded northwest orient flight in portland destined for
seattle he bought the ticket with 20 bill at the airport there was no id required and he gave the
name dan cooper to the ticket agent he would end up taking a seat in the very back row of the jet
18e to be exact the flight attendants recall d.b cooper being a guy who was in his mid 40s dressed
as a business person wearing a black suit wearing loafers with a skinny black tie and a raincoat
and he would later put on a pair of dark sunglasses as the jet was about to take off by
his side he had a black attach shake case as the plane starts taxing toward the runway d.b cooper
hands one of the flight attendants florence shaftner a note which says that he has a bomb
36 passengers got off the jetliner in seattle last night left aboard four crew members and
the hijacker dressed in a business suit demanding two hundred thousand dollars with the full ransom
collected from seattle banks and four parachutes aboard the plane headed for reno what many people
don't know is that reno was not the intended destination cooper actually requested that the
plane fly to mexico but the problem is is that he wanted the jet to fly with the landing gear
down he wanted the jet to fly with the flaps down he wanted the jet to fly at a very slow
speed and not fly over 10 000 feet in altitude so there was simply no way that they could fly
non-stop to mexico city they would need to refuel somewhere and they decided reno
according to eric cooper's request to be flown to mexico was a ruse seven minutes after the plane
left seattle the flight crew received an alert the rear air stairs were activated the boeing 727 was
unique in that it had air stairs that would deploy from the back bottom of the fuselage
in fact it's these air stairs that the passengers actually boarded the jet with roughly 27 minutes
after the air stairs deployment alert the crew experienced a cabin pressure disturbance at
approximately 8 12 pm the pilots experienced what they described as a pressure bump on the plane
what felt like a popping in the ears this pressure bump was created when db cooper
jumped off the back air stairs and the air stairs snapped back up into the bottom of the fuselage
that bump holds the key to everything estimating where and when that bump took place is key
it determined the area in which fbi air force and local law enforcement members
looked for cooper in a coordinated ground search that lasted for months
the fbi never found anything in their original search area
and my research indicates that the reason they came up empty-handed is because they
were actually searching in the wrong place why were they searching in the wrong place
because the flight path was off understanding that pressure bump and identifying the correct search
area will allow us to ask the basic fundamental questions the identity of db cooper has haunted
investigators for nearly five decades who is the mysterious hijacker and will we ever
unlock his identity tune in next time for another installment of history's greatest mysteries you