The day before thanksgiving, 1971, a middle-aged man hijacked a Northwest Airlines flight en route for Seattle, Washington. The man identified himself as Dan Cooper and after extorting $200,000, he parachuted from the aircraft, never to be seen again. In this video I explore the subsequent manhunt, the skyjacker's fate, and a handful of potential suspects.
5 feet and 9 inches is approximately 175 centimeters, not 180 centimeters.
This book was written by Ralph Himmelsbach, the lead FBI agent assigned to the case. NORJACK (short for Northwest hijacking) was the official FBI codename for the D. B. Cooper investigation. Himmelsbach does not believe the hijacker survived the fall.
This is probably the most authoritative and comprehensive book about D. B. Cooper.
In 2007, a group of citizen scientists, collectively known as Citizen Sleuths, were granted special access to the evidence and files in the FBI archive. You can read all about their findings on their website.
In 2007 the FBI released more than 16,000 documents from their NORJACK investigation. The documents have been divided into 46 individual PDF files which can be downloaded from this page. The majority of the information included in the video were taken directly from eyewitness interviews, internal memos, and other material which can be found within these files. If you want to do some research of your own, this is where you should start. I recommend that you download the files and scan them with OCR software so that you can search through them using a PDF reader.
This page contains a few unredacted FBI documents. The interviews with the flight crew are especially significant.
In 2016, the FBI formally announced the suspension of the NORJACK investigation in order to prioritize other cases.
While Brian Ingram is the one credited with finding the ransom money at Tina Bar, this article claims that it was actually Ingram's 5-year-old niece who found it.
In this interview, Ralph Himmelsbach talks about how the FBI considered but ultimately opted against sabotaging the chutes as they did not want to endanger any potential hostages.
Information about Air America, the airline covertly operated by the CIA during the Vietnam War.
This website contains a lot of information and files about the case. The website has been taken offline but can still be accessed via the Wayback Machine.
A forum dedicated to the discussion of D. B. Cooper.
This website has compiled a number of D. B. Cooper-related files and documents from a variety of sources.
A skydiving forum called Dropzone has served as a hub for online discussions about D. B. Cooper for well over a decade. One thread in particular has become somewhat famous for its length and has attracted investigators, authors, and many others related to the case.
The longest discussion thread about D. B. Cooper has amassed over 60,000 comments since it was first started in early 2008.
Between 2007 and 2008, the lead FBI investigator, Larry Carr, was active on the forum under the username Ckret. His comments contain a lot of insightful information and are definitely worth reading through if you have the time.
Jo Weber is the widow of Duane Weber who claimed he was the infamous hijacker on his deathbed. Jo has been active on the Dropzone forum since 2006 and posts under the username skyjack71.
In the wake of the hijacking, several newspapers received letters from people claiming to be D. B. Cooper. None of these letters contained information that had not previously been released to the public so they could have been sent by anyone. But in 2016, a team of private investigators claimed that certain codes and sentences within these letters could be deciphered to implicate Rackstraw. I did not bring any of this up in the video because the methods used to "decipher" these codes are highly questionable. You can read more about it in this article.
A website dedicated to proving that Rackstraw was D. B. Cooper.
This article is focused on Christiansen and was written by the same author as reference #2.
One reason why people believe Christiansen may have been D. B. Cooper is that he supposedly bought a house with cash soon after the hijacking. The documents on this website tell a different story. Christiansen did not pay off the mortgage on his house until 1990 and he earned his money by selling land. The documents were obtained from public records.
A summary of the findings of a private investigation into Christiansen.
A website dedicated to proving that Christiansen was D. B. Cooper.
The widow of Duane Weber, Jo Weber, has been trying to convince people that her late husband was actually D. B. Cooper on various online forums since the mid-2000s. This is one example of her profile on a forum called Sitcoms Online. See reference #49c for another example.
The photograph of Smith mentioned in reference #73 can be found on this page. It is the sixth photograph counted from the top of the page.
A website dedicated to proving that Smith was D. B. Cooper.