Who was D.B. Cooper?
In 2016, the FBI announced that it was finally closing its file on the mysterious 1971 plane hijacking case in which a man identified only as “D.B. Cooper” demanded $200,000 in cash (and some parachutes), jumped out of the plane over the Pacific Northwest, and disappeared without a trace. This means Cooper’s identity may never be discovered. But who could he have been?
A military paratrooper
For a man to jump out of a plane at 10,000 feet — into high winds, at night, wearing regular clothes — FBI investigators at first turned their attention to men who had done that kind of thing before. As skydiving wasn’t yet a recreational thrill sport, they figured someone in the military. This notion was ultimately rejected because the jumper did make some rookie mistakes — like not noticing that his reserve chute had been sewn shut before he jumped, for example.
Robert Rackstraw
In July 2016, the History Channel aired a special called D.B. Cooper: Case Closed?, which followed retired FBI agents who opened a new investigation into Cooper’s identity. The consensus: a 72-year-old California man named Robert Rackstraw. He served in the Vietnam War as an army helicopter pilot (and trained as a paratrooper). Rackstraw has never before been associated with the hijacking and had never turned up in 45 years of FBI research. Rackstraw denies that he’s Cooper — and in the special, a flight attendant from the fateful flight claims he doesn’t look anything like the hijacker.
Kenneth Christiansen
In 2007, reporter Geoffrey Gray published Skyjack: The Hunt for D.B. Cooper. He’d actually been given access to the FBI’s files on Cooper, and his investigation centered on Kenneth Christiansen. Gray had been contacted by a private detective, hired by a man named Lyle Christiansen who was convinced that his deceased brother Kenneth was Cooper. Kenneth Christiansen was a flight purser for Northwest Orient Airlines — the carrier for Cooper’s fateful flight. He’d also bought a house a few weeks after the hijacking. And on his deathbed, Lyle says that Kenneth told him, “There is something you should know, but I cannot tell you!” Lyle thinks he knows what Kenneth was going to say.
