D.B. Cooper and the 7 Men Who Tried to Copy Him

On November 24, 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper boarded a Northwest Orient Airlines flight in Portland, Oregon. He was neatly dressed, ordered a bourbon and soda, and waited until the plane was in the air to hand a flight attendant a note saying he had a bomb. His demands were straightforward: $200,000 in $20 bills, four parachutes, and a fuel truck waiting in Seattle.

The airline complied. The FBI photographed every bill. The passengers were released. And somewhere over the dark, heavily wooded Pacific Northwest — in cold weather, in a business suit, wearing dress shoes — Dan Cooper lowered the rear staircase and jumped into the night. He was never identified. His body was never found. Only a small bundle of deteriorated bills ever surfaced, washing up on a riverbank in 1980. The rest of the $200,000 — worth roughly $1.7 million today — has never been recovered.

His name was misreported by the press, and the mistake stuck. The world came to know him as D.B. Cooper, and his hijacking became one of the most famous unsolved crimes in American history.

To many people watching from the outside, it looked like he had pulled it off. And that appearance — regardless of whether he actually survived — was enough to inspire a wave of copycats.

In the months and years that followed, a string of men boarded planes with fake bombs, demanded money and parachutes, and attempted to replicate what D.B. Cooper had done. Some surrendered before the plane ever left the ground. Some were surrounded by FBI agents the moment they landed. One Vietnam veteran with actual parachute training jumped successfully from a plane over Colorado — and looked up to find two U.S. Air Force fighter jets circling overhead, having watched him land.

This episode covers the original D.B. Cooper hijacking and the copycats who followed — and why nearly every one of them ended up demonstrating just how unlikely his disappearance really was.