Active: November 2b, 1971

The identity of a man referred to as “D. B. Cooper” has never been discovered. No one knows who he was or what became of him. But on November 24, 1971, he stepped out of a plane and into history as the only hijacker in the United States to escape capture.

The passenger in seat 15D

On the day before Thanksgiving in 1971, a man who identified himself as Dan Cooper (a journalist erred in reporting his name as “D. B.,” and it was never cleared up) was one of thirty-six passengers who boarded Northwest Airlines flight 305. The plane, a Boeing 727, was headed from Portland, Oregon, to Seattle, Washington—a flight that would normally take less than one hour. Shortly after takeoff, when the plane had climbed to thirty thousand feet, the passenger in seat 15D gave one of...