On November 24, 1971, a man named D.B. Cooper or Dan Cooper hijacked a plane and extorted $2,00,000 before skydiving off the plane. The case of D.B. Cooper went down to be one of the largest unsolved mysteries in the history of the world.
During the busy night of thanksgiving (November 24) in the airport of Portland (city in Oregon, United States), D.B. Cooper booked a 40-minute flight to Seattle, Washington. After the take-off, he gave a note the air hostess in which he claimed to have a bomb in his briefcase and demanded $2,00,000 with 4 parachutes. After the air hostess alerted the staff and the airport, they decided to keep it quiet with the passengers to avoid panic and began getting the money and the parachutes.
After the money and parachutes were ready, the flight had landed in Seattle to let all the passengers exit and only the flight staff and Cooper remained. Cooper had demanded that they set a course to Reno, and keep the jet at minimum height at a slow speed. A few minutes later, he jumped out of the plane with the ransom money.
One of the reasons why D.B. Cooper managed to do this was because of the security level of airports back then, no thorough security check or bag checks, this is also the reason why there used to be so many hijacking incidents in the seventies and eighties.
Till now, Cooper is yet to be found. No one knows what happened after, if he had a safe landing or if he even survived the jump. Either way, no one has been able to identify who D.B. Cooper really is. It has been fifty years since the hijack, Cooper would be in his eighties or nineties by now and yet no one has found him, making him one of the only people, if not the only person, to get away with a hijacking such an exorbitant amount of money.
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