OPINION: Mystery and myth of D.B. Cooper perseveres

This editorial was published in The Columbian of Vancouver, Wash.

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It seems far-fetched, yet it grabs our attention. Such is the human fascination with mystery and myth.

Media reports this week revealed that the FBI has reopened an investigation into notorious hijacker D.B. Cooper. A backpack found in an outbuilding on a North Carolina property has led to renewed interest in a case that was officially suspended in 2016.

You know the story, of course. It is a legendary piece of local lore.

In 1971, on the night before Thanksgiving, somebody who purchased a ticket under the name Dan Cooper hijacked a Boeing 727 between Portland and Seattle. The passenger handed a note to a stewardess saying he had a bomb while demanding $200,000 and four parachutes. Upon receiving his bounty, the man released the other passengers and demanded that the plane be flown to Mexico City.

Even the name is part of the myth. Initial media reports incorrectly said the man called himself D.B. Cooper, and the name stuck as the legend grew.

Cut to the chase: Cooper eventually lowered the rear stairs and jumped from the plane, probably over southwest Washington. And with that, he jumped into our collective imagination.

In truth, Cooper likely was killed by his parachute jump into a heavily forested area. In truth, he was simply a criminal who endangered a plane full of passengers. In 1980, an 8-year-old boy found $6,000 in rotting $20 bills along the Columbia River shore near Vancouver — money that was confirmed to have come from Cooper’s bounty — but still the story endures.

It is human nature, after all, to be fascinated by cads and rogues, particularly when they have an air of mystery about them. And Cooper has captivated amateur and professional sleuths for generations while becoming a cult anti-hero.

British author Diana Wynne Jones once said: “If you take myth and folklore, and these things that speak in symbols, they can be interpreted in so many ways that although the actual image is clear enough, the interpretation is infinitely blurred, a sort of enormous rainbow of every possible color you could imagine.”

Or, as a headline over a 2021 editorial in The Columbian summarized: “Humans need folklore; we’ve got D.B. Cooper.”

That explains the intrigue behind the latest chapter of the legend. Reports say the investigation into Cooper again is focusing on Richard Floyd McCoy II, who long was a prime suspect but could not be definitively linked to what remains the only unsolved airline hijacking. McCoy was arrested for a similar hijacking five months after Cooper’s crime, and he was killed in a 1974 shootout with FBI agents.

In 2020, McCoy’s children reached out to a YouTube sleuth who has investigated the case for 20 years. The children had waited until the death of their mother before coming forward, and the investigator uncovered the backpack and a skydiving logbook.

All of which has returned the tale of D.B. Cooper to the public consciousness. All of which leads to questions about whether, deep down, we desire the case to be solved. As French poet Jean Cocteau once wrote: “I’ve always preferred mythology to history. History is truth that becomes an illusion. Mythology is an illusion that becomes reality.”

The mythology of D.B. Cooper has survived for more than five decades, allowing those who follow the story to invent whichever outcome they prefer. The truth, if it is ever definitively uncovered, might not be as interesting.

TNS