D. B. Cooper: The Man Who Leapt Into the Storm and Disappeared Forever
On the evening before Thanksgiving in 1971, a quiet, well-dressed man in a dark suit and tie stepped aboard an airplane in Portland, Oregon, bound for Seattle. He gave his name as Dan Cooper. He was polite, unremarkable, the sort of passenger no one would remember. By the end of that night he would become the central figure in the only unsolved air piracy case in the history of the United States, and one of the most enduring mysteries of the modern age. For after taking control of the aircraft, collecting a fortune in ransom, and ordering the plane back into the sky, this calm and courteous stranger opened the rear door in the middle of a storm, stepped out into the freezing darkness thousands of feet above the forests of the Pacific Northwest, and vanished. He was never found. No confirmed trace of him, alive or dead, has ever been recovered. More than half a century later, no one knows who he was or what became of him. A Quiet Man With a Briefcase The man who called himself Dan Co...