The hijacking of Northwest 305 (D. B. Cooper)

The flight was tracked by air traffic control and military radar, and the FBI drew a flight-path map from that data. The radar record itself has not been preserved, but the FBI's transcripts give two DME position fixes and name the towns the aircraft passed; the air traffic controller interviewed by the Citizen Sleuths team said the aircraft never left Victor 23 while on his screen⁠[11]. From the 8:13 pm pressure bump the FBI placed the jump near Ariel, Washington, over the Lake Merwin area south of Mount St. Helens, and searched there on the ground and from the air in 1971 and 1972 without result. A later re-reading of wind data by a Continental pilot led agent Ralph Himmelsbach to favour the Washougal River watershed to the south-east⁠[2]⁠[12].

Two things later surfaced. In 1978 a deer hunter found a 727 airstair instruction placard about 13 miles east of Castle Rock, roughly 20 miles north of the Ariel zone, consistent with the stair having been lowered over that stretch⁠[2]⁠[11]. On 10 February 1980 eight-year-old Brian Ingram, digging a fire pit on Tena Bar on the Washington bank of the Columbia north-west of Vancouver, found three bundles of twenties, 290 bills in packets of 100, 100 and 90, still in their rubber bands, whose serial numbers matched the ransom. The FBI excavated the beach and found only fragments. The bills were decayed at the edges and some were blackened; Portland State geologist Leonard Palmer examined the site and argued the money lay above a sand layer dumped by dredging in 1974, which would put its arrival after that date⁠[2]⁠[7].

The tie is the most-studied object. In 2001 the FBI obtained a partial DNA profile from it, which it has said cannot be tied to the hijacker. From 2009 the Citizen Sleuths team led by Tom Kaye, working with FBI access granted by agent Larry Carr in 2007, lifted particles from the tie and examined them by scanning electron microscopy with energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy. They found unalloyed titanium, 400-series stainless steel smeared into a titanium particle, spiral aluminium machining chips, bismuth and other metals, and a majority of particles matching book-match residue⁠[13]⁠[14]. A 2016 to 2017 automated scan by McCrone Associates of more than 100,000 particles on 20 stubs added pure cerium, cerium-lanthanum, yttrium, strontium sulfide and other rare-earth and phosphor compounds, with the raw element tables published as spreadsheets⁠[15]. Kaye and Mark Meltzer later showed that diatoms adhering to the Tena Bar bills were a spring-blooming species, which argues the money entered the river months after a November jump⁠[16].

The FBI's own record is the Vault release: the NORJAK investigative files from 1971 to 1992, posted in numbered parts. A March 2025 batch of 472 pages covered the elimination of hundreds of named suspects, and an October 2025 batch, Part 110 of 668 pages, included Special Agent Charles Farrell's 336-page report of 16 February 1972 recording 325 suspects under investigation and 220 eliminated by 4 February 1972⁠[4]⁠[5]⁠[6]. The complete text has been extracted into a public dataset of 44,000 passages⁠[17].

Who he was. The FBI named no one. The suspect discussed longest is Richard Floyd McCoy Jr., a Vietnam veteran and skydiver who on 7 April 1972 hijacked United 855 with a demand for 500,000 dollars and four parachutes, jumped over Utah, and was arrested two days later; he escaped from Lewisburg penitentiary in August 1974 and was killed by FBI agents in Virginia Beach on 9 November 1974⁠[10]. A former FBI agent and a parole officer argued in a 1991 book that he was Cooper. The Bureau ruled him out in August 1974, partly on an exchange student's statement that she ate Thanksgiving dinner at the McCoy home in Provo; his widow later said the couple were in Las Vegas that weekend, and his daughter disputes the alibi⁠[1]⁠[8]⁠[18]. McCoy's children, Chanté McCoy and Richard McCoy III, say they believe their father was Cooper and kept silent until their mother died in 2020; they showed a modified military bail-out rig and a skydiving logbook from the family property in Cove City, North Carolina, to Dan Gryder, whose videos made the claim public in 2024. The FBI took the rig, searched the property, tested the pack and canopy for DNA and soil, and returned the rig in December 2025. An agent told McCoy III that the Bureau could offer no specific conclusion, that it was neither crediting nor discrediting the material, and that the DNA sample it was working from was degraded, with about seven of the 23 markers needed for a match. The Seattle field office refers reporters to its 2016 statement⁠[8]⁠[9]⁠[19]. Other named candidates include Robert Rackstraw, Kenneth Christiansen, Sheridan Peterson, Walter Reca, Duane Weber, Lynn Doyle Cooper, William J. Smith and Vince Petersen; each rests on a resemblance, a deathbed remark or a family story, and none has a fingerprint, DNA or documentary match⁠[2]. The Citizen Sleuths reading is occupational rather than personal: the titanium and machining particles point to someone who worked in or around a metal fabrication or titanium plant, and the match residue to a heavy smoker⁠[14].

Where he landed and whether he lived. The FBI's own view, stated by Carr in 2007 and on its case page, is that an inexperienced jumper in a business suit, at night, in rain and a 170-knot slipstream, with a dummy reserve, probably did not survive⁠[1]⁠[2]. Against that: no body, parachute or money bag has ever been found, no missing-person report matched, and none of the 9,710 unrecovered bills has surfaced in circulation in 55 years⁠[14]. The landing zone follows from the flight path: if the FBI map is right, he came down near Ariel; if the aircraft was further east than the map shows, the Washougal basin is possible⁠[11]⁠[12].

How the money reached Tena Bar. Three readings compete. The "Washougal washdown" has the bundles washed down the Washougal into the Columbia and deposited on the bar; it requires the money to survive years in water and to pass the 1974 dredging if Palmer's stratigraphy is right. Kaye's team tested rubber bands and bundles in river water and sand and found bands failing within months and bundles not travelling far intact, and could find no part of the Washougal basin within 20 miles of the Ariel zone⁠[12]⁠[20]. The dredging reading has the money moved with the dredge spoil in 1974; the team's survey of the beach argued the find lay outside the spoil area⁠[7]. The diatom result constrains all of them: the bills were in the river in spring or summer, not in the weeks after the jump, and then buried⁠[16]. The remaining reading is that a person placed or lost the money there; Kaye says this is the one his data do not exclude⁠[14].

Identity would be settled by a match: a fingerprint from the aircraft or a DNA profile from the tie, the cigarette butts or the parachutes against a named person or his relatives. The FBI's 2001 profile is partial; the tie clip's spindle has not been swabbed, and a federal court held in December 2023 that FOIA does not compel the Bureau to hand over the tie for private testing⁠[21]. The McCoy rig would be settled by showing it is or is not one of the four 1971 chutes, which have known makers, serial numbers and a rigger's history; the FBI has published nothing from its testing⁠[8]. Exhumation of McCoy for DNA, which his son has offered, would answer whether any profile from the evidence is his⁠[9].

The landing zone would move with a recovery: a chute, a harness, the attache case or a skeleton in the Lake Merwin or Washougal drainages, or a re-analysis of surviving radar or weather records. The money question would move with a stratigraphic record of the Tena Bar find that no one made in 1980, or with any of the remaining 9,710 bills appearing anywhere with a provenance. Publication of the FBI's complete Vault file, now past Part 110, is the one thing that is steadily happening⁠[4]⁠[6].