D.B. Cooper (1971): Seattle ransom and release · 400

A Portland reporter mixed the ticket name with a local man named D.B. Cooper; wire services kept the error. The FBI composites — especially the 1972 and 1973 sketches — became the American face of an unidentified hijacker. Agents interviewed thousands of people. Richard Floyd McCoy Jr., who hijacked a different airliner in 1972, was a much-cited lookalike; the Bureau did not treat him as Cooper.

Special Agent Ralph Himmelsbach, who stayed with NORJAK for years, later wrote that the jumper faced night, rain, timber and a thin chance of walking out with the money. That is an investigator’s memoir, not a finding that Cooper died. The 2016 suspension cited the age of the case and the death or fading of witnesses, not a recovered body.

Ingram’s 10 February 1980 find on Tena Bar is the only physical recovery of ransom money that the FBI authenticated by serial number. The packets lay a few inches down in sand, upstream of the reconstructed jump zone if one assumes a simple downstream wash. Hydrologists and amateur theorists have argued over whether the bills floated, were buried, or were placed.