Mysterious Man -Dan B Cooper

In 1971 a plane was hijacked after taking off from Portland Airport.

The hijacker demanded a $200,000 ransom and it was given to him when the the plane landed at Seattle Airport.

In the air again, somewhere between Seattle and Reno, the hijacker disappeared completely.

The hijacker became known as “D. B. Cooper” even though he’d never used that name. He was never captured, identified, or heard from again.

It is the only unsolved skyjacking in American historyThere are only two types of bombs: exploded bombs and unexploded bombs.

Exploded bombs are not really even bombs anymore. An exploded bomb has become a bombing. It has left its bomb state and become a moment, then an event, then a

series of events.

A bomb is simply a container filled with explosives and other various materials,

but it is different than simply a container which is filled with those materials. A crate of

dynamite is not a bomb, it is a crate filled with dynamite. Dynamite can be set on fire

without causing it to explode.

A crate filled with dynamite, fitted with blasting caps, and connected to a length

of cannon fuse or detonating cord, is a bomb.

A bomb is made of its potentiality.

The force of an explosion is measured in terms of its kinetic and potential

energies. The energy release of one stick of dynamite is calculated at 2 x 106 J. This same

formula is used to measure all forms of energy release.

The energy release of a moderately sized asteroid colliding with the planet Earth

is calculated at 3 x 1020 J. The J represents the energy of one Joule. Named for James P.

Joule, who measured the mechanical equivalent of heat, 4.18 Joules is equivalent to one

calorie burned in the human body. The body will burn one calorie simply by sitting in an

airplane seat for an hour and existing. D. B. Cooper existed for about 6 hours.

And in 1971 dynamite sticks were packaged in paraffin-sealed paper that was

brown, like pale leather.

  THE PERFECT SUSPECT

The man who would be DB would have had to have an intimate working knowledge of the Boeing 727-100. It was the only commercial passenger aircraft in wide use in 1971 which had a built-in aftstair. In order to accommodate the stairway, Boeing engineers had configured the three jet engines higher up than they would have ordinarily.

A result of that arrangement — DB would have known — was a relatively calm and cool spot of slipstream below and behind the tail of the aircraft. A sweet spot where a person leaping from the aftstair while in-flight would not be incinerated by the jet wash, as would have happened otherwise.

It was for exactly this reason that the Central Intelligence Agency had, for years,

been using the 727 for low-level airdrops into Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Few other jet aircraft of its size and cargo capacity were capable of flying below radar at 10,000 feet and at a speed of only 200 miles per hour.

In 1971 it was not widely known that the aftstair could be deployed while the plane was in-flight. Most of the aircraft crews themselves did not know this; the fact had

never been incorporated into any commercial airline training, as there was no foreseeable

the situation in which the crew would need to deploy the stairway while in-flight.

A cargo specialist working for Air America - the CIA’s private, clandestine airline in Asia - would have known that the stairway was controlled by a master switch that could not be overridden from the cockpit. A Green Beret waiting to jump into a wide

dark night over Laotian jungle might have noticed that the stairway could be deployed in-

flight with just the flip of a single switch. A hollow-eyed member of the Phoenix