New clues on the DB Cooper case, the hijacker with a parachute who disappeared 40 years ago in the US skies

Dan Cooper, if that was really his name, hijacked a Boeing 727 flying from Portland to Seattle in November 1971 and demanded a $ 200,000 ransom. Then he jumped with a parachute and since then nothing has been known about him and his treasure, so much so that the FBI closed the case for good five years ago. Now Eric Ulis, a historian passionate about crime and determined to solve the only unsolved incident of aerial piracy in American aviation history, has resumed research along the banks of the Columbia River following a new lead: the feds have been searching for decades in the wrong place, miscalculating where the hijacker would jump. A thesis that could lead the authorities to reopen the affair. So Ulis, whose adventure can be followed live on his Facebook page, began to scour an area of ​​about 5 square kilometers in search of Cooper’s treasure, starting from where in 1980 heavily deteriorated $ 6,000 banknotes were found and belonging to the ransom. The story of Db Cooper (a fictional name probably inspired by a comic book character from the 1950s) has taken the sleep of generations of federal agents and has inspired more than one movie. Elegant, six feet tall and around 40, he took his seat on the Northwest Orient Airlines flight immediately after take-off, lit a cigarette and ordered bourbon with soda. Then she handed the stewardess a note in which she had written that she had a bomb in her black suitcase and that she was demanding a ransom from the airline that would now amount to over a million dollars. The hijacker also requested four parachutes and a tank truck to refuel the plane once it landed in Seattle. Crew and travelers remember him as a gentleman, calm and polite. When the Boeing landed on an isolated runway at Seattle-Tacoma airport, it paid the bill for what it had consumed and, after receiving the bag with ten thousand twenty-dollar bills, dropped everyone off. Only the pilots remained on board and ordered to go to Mexico City, at low altitude and at the lowest possible speed, enough to avoid the aircraft stalling. At one point, while still flying over Washington state, the pilots from the spies noticed that the tailgate had been opened and the ladder down. Landed two hours later in Reno, Nevada, there was no trace of Dan Cooper on the plane. His only traces found on board were the tie, the tie clip and eight cigarette butts. In the years since, many people have claimed to be DB Cooper, while the FBI has pinpointed its suspicions on over 800 people, but to no avail. Few believe that the hijacker survived: impossible for anyone, the FBI swears, to parachute on a rainy night and with a wind of 300 kilometers per hour in the face wearing a tranch and moccasins. But many still believe that somewhere down there a treasure is buried.