Was DB Cooper a modern day Robin Hood or a hardened criminal? This film had the best ratings ever in the long-running Undercover History series on Nat Geo.
Produced & Directed by Philip J Day
Edge West Productions
for National Geographic
The Skyjacker That Got Away
On the eve of Thanksgiving, 1971 a man calling himself Dan Cooper leapt out of the back of a commercial jet with a parachute, $200,000 in ransom money and was never seen again dead or alive. It remains the only unsolved hijacking in U.S. history and has frustrated the FBI for nearly forty years. Who was the daring skyjacker and did he survive the jump?
Then, in 1980, after nearly a decade of silence, a young boy finds $5800 of the original ransom money buried in a sandbar of the Columbia River, nearly thirty miles from the calculated drop zone. Did Dan Cooper bury the money? Or did the three bundles of cash suggest that Cooper had perished that night?
Now for the first time in FBI history a team of citizen sleuths is using modern forensic science to unravel the mystery of D.B. Cooper.
Using state-of-the-art forensic technology, can the small amount of Cooper’s ransom money, found in 1980, provide the lead they have been missing? Can the tie, left on the plane, and presumed to be Cooper’s, reveal more secrets about where the hijacker came from? Or will one of the many suspects put forward compare with the DNA traces on file and prove to be DB Cooper.