It started in Portland, Oregon, when a man walked up to the flight counter of Northwest Orient Airlines. He was wearing a dark raincoat, dark suit with skinny black tie, and carrying an attaché case. He gave his name—Dan Cooper—and asked for a one-way ticket to Seattle, Flight 30.
When I was 13-14, I dearly loved true crime. I still do, but nothing like I did back then. And boy, did I love it — for a good year or two, true crime was the only type of literature I had any interest in reading. Perhaps it had something to do with the recklessness of it all; I was an overgrown, gangly kid with extremely thick square glasses who never dreamt of breaking any sort of rule. Reading the real-life adventures of wily thieves and cunning cops who stalked each other in a battle of wits was a sort of metaphysical catharsis—especially if nobody got hurt. I never cared much for violence, so I tended to skew towards grand theft or embezzlement or fraud (you know, the good stuff). There was this one case in particular, the unsolved mystery of D.B. Cooper, that captured me hook, line, and sinker for months.
He sat in the last row of the plane, 18-C, lit a cigarette, and ordered a bourbon and soda. The plane took off and he passed the stewardess a note, printed in felt pen, all capital letters. “I have a bomb in my briefcase. I want you to sit beside me,” it read. She did as he requested, then asked to see the bomb. She saw a tangle of wires, a battery, and six red sticks. He dictated some instructions: “I want $200,000 by 5:00 p.m. In cash. Put in a knapsack. I want two back parachutes and two front parachutes. When we land, I want a fuel truck ready to refuel. No funny stuff or I’ll do the job.”
I found myself every piece of D.B. Cooper literature or media that I could find and devoured it greedily. I read the Wikipedia entry for it over and over, eyes darting across well-trodden texts for the secret to this man’s identity, or better yet, his whereabouts. Not that I necessarily wanted them to be found—the idea of the discovery was almost more interesting than the discovery itself would be. I borrowed the only book I could find about him from the library and read it carefully over the course of two months, scanning carefully the names, ages, and lives of the suspects that I would forget all about as soon as the book was done.
The plane landed on the Sea-Tac tarmac, greased up by the squalls of the rainstorm. Airline staff carried his ransom—$200,000 in $20 bills and parachutes—onto the plane as it refueled. As it took off for a second time, he specified more instructions: keep the plane under 10,000 feet, with wing flaps at fifteen degrees, which would put the plane’s speed under 200 knots. He strapped the loads of cash to himself and slipped on two chutes—one in front, one in back—and moved deeper into the vessel, toward the aft stairs and the sealed exit door of the plane.
I told everyone around me about D.B. Cooper. Most listened patiently, but failed to really understand just how exciting it was — it really seemed like I was the only person I knew who cared about this unsolved, decades-old robbery that had no affect on my everyday life in the slightest. It was okay. I cared even if nobody else did, and as long as they listened to me, that was enough.
The cloud ceiling that night was 5,000 feet, and some of the most rugged terrain in the country was beneath it: forests of pine and hemlock and spruce, canyons with cougars and bears and lakes and white-water rapids, all spilling out into the Pacific. He jumped.
I often was compelled by various church authorities to help out with events, and being a kid who liked pleasing church authorities, I often did. On one such event, I was relieved from my decorating and welcoming duties to sit at a table with an older gentleman whom I did not know well, who was there for the event and also, fortunately, did not know D.B. Cooper from Joseph. He asked me what book I was reading and I happily obliged, eagerly spilling out every interesting detail that I could think of—the FBI agents were two hours late to the Sea-Tac airport because they were setting up snipers, but he never left the plane and so they never got to him; the bundle of ransom money weighed twenty-one pounds. The stewardess who he spoke to was named Florence Schaffner, and she described him as ‘gentlemanly’ and ‘polite.’ He was wearing dark sunglasses. They say that he left behind eight pieces of key evidence, and that when they took a closer look they found—
The gentleman looked at me, not unkindly, and inquired:
“Now why would you read a book like that? That sounds like a waste of time.”
The Feds scoured the forests the next day, and for days after in a dense fog, praying for a parachute tear, a $20 bill, a body. One team of treasure hunters chartered a submarine and descended hundreds of feet into a lake. In Washington, D.C., at the headquarters of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, agents coordinated a profiling campaign. The name ‘D.B. Cooper,’ they soon found, was a fake.
I have since wondered quite a bit what it means to not ‘waste time.’ Is it a search for truth? For enlightenment? For meaning? What is meaning, anyways? Is it only some sort of an abstract concept that lives in a metaphysical world far beyond ours, that can only be achieved by letting go of the material world? I can’t imagine it so. If we reject the physical world, we reject all things that come of it: all the laughter, joy, and small delights of living in a world with real, physical things. How valuable could meaning be if it cuts away the little joys? If there’s no room for useless, worldly interest, for exploration, for stupid random facts, what is there room for? I find it hard to believe that meaning like that, stripped bare with no room for change, could be anything worth pursuing. I mean, what is humanity if it doesn’t have those transient, little, beautiful moments—two strangers grinning at each other in a parking lot, a family laughing quietly at a novelty duck-shaped mug, a thirteen year old girl who can’t stop talking about a fifty-year-old unsolved robbery?
D. B. Cooper is a media epithet used to refer to an unidentified man who hijacked a Boeing 727 aircraft in United States airspace on the afternoon of November 24, 1971. The flight was operated by Northwest Orient Airlines and was between Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington. The hijacker extorted $200,000 in ransom (equivalent to $1,278,000 in 2020), asked to be flown to Reno, Nevada, then parachuted to an uncertain fate over southwestern Washington midway through the second flight. The man purchased his airline ticket using the alias Dan Cooper but, because of a news miscommunication, became known in popular lore as D. B. Cooper. The FBI officially suspended active investigation of the case in July 2016 ().
The Student Movement is the official student newspaper of 日韩AV. Opinions expressed in the Student Movement are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors, 日韩AV or the Seventh-day Adventist church.