DB Cooper historian is conducting an excavation along the Columbia River in WA in hopes of uncovering new evidence

This undated artist’s sketch shows the Skyjacker known as DB Cooper from the memories of the passengers and crew of a Northwest Airlines jet that he hijacked between Portland and Seattle on Thanksgiving evening in 1971.

AP

On the night of November 24, 1971, a man known to the world as DB Cooper disappeared when he jumped out of the tail of a Boeing 727 in mid-flight after hitting the aircraft’s passengers and part of its crew for $ 200,000 had ransomed.

He was never caught.

Now, nearly 50 years later, a de facto expert on Cooper and his infamous skyjacking is conducting an excavation on the banks of the Columbia River in Vancouver, Washington, where a boy found Cooper’s $ 5,800 ransom while in 1980 he raked the sand to make a campfire.

That expert is Eric Ulis, an Arizona-based writer and documentary filmmaker whose study of Cooper was featured on the History and Discovery channels. In an interview on Monday, 55-year-old Ulis said he had known the case since the late 1970s but didn’t begin an independent investigation until the late 2000s.

“I called it a ‘guilty pleasure’. It was just one of those things that I was intrigued by,” he said.

Ulis and a team of three others started the dig on Friday. They search an area of ​​about 300 square meters between a dirt road and the place where the money was found. Ulis, who obtained permission to dig from the landowners, said the area had never been searched by authorities.

The team of four spent the weekend breaking through a 2-foot layer of earth and large rocks that the landowners had placed on the beach to prevent erosion. Ulis expects the excavation to be completed sometime in September.

A photo from the excavation this weekend.

Courtesy Eric Ulis

The Cooper case is one of the most well-known unsolved crimes in the U.S. The FBI field office in Seattle said the 45-year investigation was one of the longest and most comprehensive in the agency’s history.

That night in 1971, a man described as in his 40s, wearing dark sunglasses and an olive complexion, boarded a flight from Portland, Oregon to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. He bought his $ 20 ticket under the name “Dan Cooper”, but an early wire service report incorrectly identified him as “DB Cooper” and the name stuck.

Sitting in the back of the plane, he handed a flight attendant a slip of paper after it took off. “Miss, I have a bomb and I want you to sit next to me,” they said.

The man asked for $ 200,000 in cash plus four parachutes. He received her at Sea-Tac, where he released the 36 passengers and two of the flight attendants. The plane took off again at his instruction and slowly flew to Reno, Nevada, at a low altitude of 10,000 feet. Somewhere, apparently over southwest Washington, Cooper lowered the rear steps of the plane and jumped.

The $ 5,800 split into three bundles and identified as Coopers by serial numbers is the only evidence found in the years following the incident.

Ulis hopes to find one or both of Cooper’s parachutes – he left the plane with only two – and the briefcase that supposedly carried the bomb. He believes Cooper survived the jump and buried the cash and other items on the riverside, using nearby trees as landmarks when he came back to get the money back.

Based on this theory, Ulis selected the excavation site with two older trees that he says stood on the bank in 1971. If you were to draw lines between the trees, they would converge in an “X” over the place where the $ 5,800 US dollar was found in 1980.

“In my opinion, it’s just a little too random,” he said. “I didn’t just pull this place out of nowhere.”

A photo from the excavation this weekend.

Courtesy Eric Ulis

As for the money itself, Ulis believes Cooper got the majority back before 1980.

He says Cooper probably took several wads of banknotes from the unwieldy, open-top bank pocket where the ransom came in before jumping, and then buried them loosely next to the sack. Ulis believes Cooper returned shortly after June 12, 1972 when the Columbia River was flooded.

He says the high-profile flood likely spurred Cooper to action, fearing that the items he buried might be discovered. Ulis said Cooper could easily have missed the $ 5,800 in loose wads while pulling the rest of the money out of a wet hole.

“He got the bank bag out of the watery grave, got probably as many of these packages as he could, thought maybe he had them all, but three of them just went unnoticed and were just left behind,” he said.

Over the years the FBI and amateur detectives have explored myriad theories about Cooper’s identity and fate, from reports of inexplicable wealth to alleged discoveries of his parachute to possible matches with the compound sketch of the suspect’s authority.

But after nearly five decades, the most popular theory is that Cooper died in his escape, and his body and belongings were simply lost to the elements.

“Maybe Cooper didn’t survive jumping off the plane,” the FBI wrote in a profile of Cooper and his crime on its website. “After all, the parachute he was using was not maneuverable, his clothes and shoes were unsuitable for a rough landing, and he had jumped into a wooded area at night – a dangerous proposition for a seasoned professional, which suggests Cooper isn’t was. ” . ”

The FBI announced in July 2016 that it was no longer actively investigating the case.

“The mystery surrounding the hijacking of a Northwest Orient Airlines flight in November 1971 by an as yet unknown person generated considerable international attention and a decade-long manhunt,” the FBI said at the time. “Although the FBI appreciated the vast amount of information received from the public, none to date has resulted in a definitive identification of the kidnapper.”

That said, if the case is ever to be resolved, it’s up to independent detectives like Ulis. He claims the secret will be revealed and says the time is the best to help the allied investigators with it.

“Time is a double-edged sword. In one way people move on and memories fade and something that works against us, ”he said. “But in other ways you have advances in science and technology and learn other things over time, and that actually helps us. I think time will generally benefit us and help us solve the case.”