In 1971, an airline passenger going by Dan Cooper showed a stewardess that he had a bomb and demanded $200,000, four parachutes, and a private flight. His demands were met, and during the second flight with only Cooper and the flight crew, he jumped out of the plane somewhere between Seattle, Washington, and Portland, Oregon. He was never seen again. For 50 years, it was the only unsolved skyjacking in America.
Strangely, only five months later, Richard Floyd McCoy II pulled off an almost-identical skyjacking in Utah, in which he absconded with $500,000. McCoy was arrested soon after and convicted of the crime. He escaped from prison and was shot by FBI agents. McCoy has always been a suspect in the D. B. Cooper case, but was thought to have been too young to be the same person. Until now. Pilot and YouTuber Dan Gryder has been researching the case for decades, and in 2022 found a parachute on McCoy's property that could be the uniquely-modified parachute Cooper used when he bailed out of the plane.
Gryder was alerted to the existence of the parachute by McCoy's children, Richard II and Chanté. They were small children when the skyjackings occurred, and always suspected their father was the mysterious D. B. Cooper, but kept quiet until the death of their mother in 2020. The parachute is now in the custody of the FBI, which officially closed the investigation in 2016. It may soon be officially reopened. Read about the family's claims and the new evidence in a two part series at Cowboy State Daily, part one and part two. -Thanks, WTM!
(Images credit: FBI/public domain)
Not only that, but the premise is that McCoy, an experienced parachutist, jumped at night, location and landing conditions unknown, altitude unknown, dressed exceptionally poorly for the conditions, without any further gear, using a borrowed basic parachute and a reserve chute clearly marked as inoperable. There's a reason that countless experienced jumpers have said that Cooper had no idea what he was doing. No one else agrees that the main chute provided to Cooper was a specially-modified sport chute so easy to identify - the reports say exactly the opposite.
Just one more in the pantheon of amateur "sleuths" trying to capitalize on their BS.
Commenting on Neatorama will earn you NeatoPoints!