Free Loch Ness Monsters and Raining Frogs The Worlds Most Puzzling Mysteries Solved by Albert Jack Page B

Cooper, in order to find out if, on the off chance, this otherwise meticulous and thorough hijacker had been stupid enough to buy a ticket in his own name. He wasn't, although a genuine Dan Cooper in Portland did undergo an uncomfortable few hours of questioning before being released without charge.

    The FBI circulated a wanted poster throughout the States, with an artist's impression of Cooper based upon eyewitness accounts, but it could have been a picture of just about any average American on the street, and as many as ten thousand false sightings were reported. As it was, the FBI interviewed more than fourteen hundred people, but to no avail. The story held the popular imagination for a long time, the news papers ridiculing the unsuccessful FBI investigation in the process. Eventually the hijacker, named as “John Doe, a.k.a. Dan B. Cooper,” was charged, in his absence, with air piracy at a federal court in 1976.

    The American public, on the other hand, was in the process of elevating D. B. Cooper to the status of a legend as the mystery around him continued to grow. Bars in the area of Ariel and Lake Merwin set up D. B. Cooper shrines, which remain to this day, and hold D. B. Cooper “days,” with local parachute clubs even reenacting the jump on the day before Thanksgiving every year.

    That is what we all like most about this sort of history. Nobody was hurt, it involved extra ordinary courage, and nothing has been found since. Not even Cooper's hat, coat, or briefcase. And that is why we all want Cooper to still be alive, and not to have been lying at the bottom of Lake Merwin all these years. We like the idea of Cooper jumping out of a passenger jet with the loot, landing and then dusting himself off, picking up his briefcase, putting on his hat, pausing only to straighten its brim, and being back in the office by nine.

    But the FBI does not share our warmth toward the mystery man. Agent Ralph Himmelsbach spent eight years at the head of the investigation and was unable to hide his bitterness, calling Cooper a “dirty rotten crook,” a “rodent,” and nothing more than a “sleazy, rotten criminal who threatened the lives of more than forty people for money,” oh—and “a bastard.”

    Himmelsbach once snapped at a journalist who inquired about Cooper's growing status as a hero. “That's not heroic,” he shouted. “It is selfish, dangerous, and antisocial. I have no admiration for him at all. He is not admirable. He is just stupid and greedy.” Himmelsbach retired from the FBI in 1980, his work incomplete, to run his own charm school in the Deep South. In his subsequent book,
Norjak: The Investigation of D. B. Cooper
, Himmelsbach tried to promote what is known as the “splatter” theory, meaning Cooper had been killed as he hit the ground. This is dismissed by most, as the body, highlighted by its bright red and yellow parachute, would have turned up sooner or later. When pressed by reporters about why the body had not been found despite a legion of police, the Army Reserve, volunteers, and Boy Scouts all searching, Himmelsbach surprised everybody, including, I imagine, the FBI, when he insisted they had all been looking in the wrong area all the time, despite the Feds’ re enacting the jump in an effort to pinpoint Cooper's drop zone.

    In 1980, an eight-year-old boy was playing by the river and discovered a bag of cash totaling $5,800, all in twenty-dollar bills. His father, aware of the D. B. Cooper mystery, immediately took the cash to the police, who checked the serial numbers and confirmed this was part of the missing money. Hopes of a conclusion faltered on discovering the cash was found nearly forty miles upstream of where the police now believed Cooper to have landed. This was compounded by the geologists who claimed, having studied the notes and assessed their rate of deterioration, that the money must have been placed in the water in about 1974, three years after the hijacking.