➡ A suspect named Barb Dayton, who was the first person in Washington state to undergo gender reassignment surgery, is believed by some to be the infamous hijacker DB Cooper. She allegedly confessed to friends years after the hijacking. Additionally, the Paranoid American podcast, launched in 2012, explores various mysteries and conspiracies, including the DB Cooper case. The host, Darren Schaefer, who runs the Cooper Vortex podcast, grew up near the proposed drop zone and has a deep interest in the case.
➡ A man named Cooper hijacked a plane, demanding to be flown to Mexico City with his ransom money. He instructed the pilots on how to fly the plane, including keeping the cabin depressurized and the landing gear down. After refueling in Reno, Cooper was no longer on the plane, leading to the theory that he jumped out mid-flight. Despite some money being found years later, there’s no concrete evidence to confirm whether Cooper survived the jump or not.
➡ The text is a conversation about various conspiracy theories, including the idea that 9/11 was an inside job, the existence of celebrity clones, and the potential for AI to contact supernatural entities. The speakers also discuss the mystery of DB Cooper, a man who hijacked a plane and disappeared, with various theories about his identity and fate. They mention a podcast called “The Cooper Vortex” where listeners can learn more about this case. The conversation ends with a promotion for “paranoid propaganda packs” from ParanoidAmerican.com.
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➡ The mystery of DB Cooper’s money, found on the Columbia River’s shore, remains unsolved. Despite theories suggesting he drifted east from the plane’s flight path, the money was found 15 miles west, raising more questions. The only evidence left behind was a deteriorated stack of $20 bills and a clip-on tie. However, the FBI lost potential DNA evidence, including cigarette butts and a hair slide, leaving the case unresolved.
➡ The text discusses a mysterious man who boarded a plane in 1971, sat at the back, and went unnoticed by other passengers. The man, who was around 40 years old, was suspected to be a military veteran due to his comfort with parachuting out of the plane. The text also explores the possibility of the man carrying a real bomb, with the author leaning towards it being real. The discussion also covers the investigation of the case, the man’s possible motivations, and similar cases where hijackers were caught due to their own mistakes.
➡ A man demanded $300,000, three cheeseburgers, a rental car, and a head start, but was caught before he could escape. The discussion then shifts to DB Cooper, a famous hijacker, and the possibility that another man, McCoy, could have been him. However, the FBI ruled out McCoy due to physical descriptions not matching. The conversation also explores why Cooper requested the plane’s landing gear and stairs to be down, suggesting it was to slow the plane for a safe jump. The mystery of what happened to Cooper after he jumped remains, with no clear story before or after the event. The text also mentions that none of the money’s serial numbers, except for deteriorated ones, have been found, which is statistically unlikely. Lastly, it’s mentioned that there have been hundreds of confessions claiming to be DB Cooper, but none have been confirmed.
➡ The article discusses the unsolved case of DB Cooper, who hijacked a plane in 1971 and disappeared after parachuting with a ransom. Many people have confessed to being DB Cooper, but none have been proven. The only evidence left was a tie with unusual metals, which has led to various theories about his identity. Despite the lack of concrete evidence, the case continues to intrigue people, with new analyses and theories emerging regularly.
➡ The U.S. government, airlines, and airports had a long debate over who should be responsible for airport security. During this time, a hijacking occurred, leading to discussions about airline security. A suspect named Ted Braden, who had military and possible CIA connections, matches the description of the hijacker, known as DB Cooper. However, there’s little record of Braden’s existence, adding to the mystery of the case.
➡ The text discusses various theories about the identity of DB Cooper, a notorious hijacker. Some believe he could be linked to the CIA or other intelligence agencies, while others suggest he might be connected to the JFK assassination. The text also mentions the calm and collected demeanor of Cooper during the hijacking, which is unusual for such situations. Lastly, it explores the overlap between those interested in the DB Cooper case and other unsolved mysteries like the Zodiac Killer.
➡ The text discusses the mystery of DB Cooper, a man who hijacked a plane and disappeared after parachuting from it. The author explores various theories and motivations behind the crime, noting that Cooper didn’t harm anyone but himself, if he was injured during the landing. The text also mentions the impact of the event on Tina Mucklow, a flight attendant on the hijacked plane, and the speculation around the name ‘Dan Cooper’, which was used by the hijacker and is also the name of a comic book character who performs similar feats. The author also discusses various portrayals of DB Cooper in popular culture, including movies and TV shows.
➡ The text discusses the mystery of DB Cooper, a man who hijacked a plane and disappeared, leaving behind many unanswered questions and theories. The author suggests that the case might be solved if someone close to Cooper comes forward with information, or if the community continues to investigate. The text also explores various conspiracy theories, asking the author to rate their credibility. The author expresses skepticism about some theories, like the moon landing, but believes in others, like the existence of aliens.

Probably my favorite DB Cooper suspect. If I could choose who DB Cooper was, not who do I think is most likely DB Cooper? If I just got to pick, there’s a suspect named Barb Dayton who was born Robert Dayton and was the first person in Washington state to get gender reassignment surgery in 1969. So two years prior to the hijacking, she’s working at the Seattle public library as a librarian. She’s sort of unhappy and unfulfilled. She wants to prove to herself that she’s still this badass, that Robert Dayton was a merchant marine and just a rowdy, rough and tumble guy.

And so she devises this plan to hijack the plane, does it, pulls it off, lands in Aurora, Oregon, I believe, stores the money in a culvert. Because it was never about the money. It was just about proving to herself what a badass she still is, and then returns to her normal life. Meets Ron and Pat Foreman. Probably that would have been eight years later. They become fast friends, hang out for a while, and she confesses to them that she was dB Cooper. Has that one been dramatized on tv movies? No, but it needs to be. And is there a more Portland story than DB Cooper was a trans woman? Good evening, listeners, brave navigators of the enigmatic and the concealed.

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So strap yourselves in, broaden your horizons, and steel yourselves for a voyage into the enigmatic heart of the paranoid american podcast, where each story, every image, every revelation brings us one step closer to the elusive truth. We’re going to do some straight up conspiracy talk today, so you’re probably in the perfect place. I’ve been having a lot of variety. We’ve been talking about all kinds of different topics, but we’re going back to the roots today, and I’m going to learn a little something. You’re going to learn a little something. Let’s see what we can find out about DB Cooper from Darren Schaefer here.

Darren, welcome to the program, and, yeah, thanks for coming. And plugs up front, tell people where they can find you. Well, thanks for having me on, Thomas. I appreciate it. You can find me the Cooper Vortex podcast anywhere you listen to podcasts, and then you can find me at Cooper Con in November. November 15 through the 17th, the Seattle Museum of Flight. Cooper Con. I didn’t even know about that. You know what? I’m starting to try and get more into conspiracy and paranormal conventions just because it. I can stand out better than going to comic book conventions, which is where I usually go.

So I’m. I love to hear about them. Yeah. I mean, and it seems that everyone’s there for much more of, like, a very specific reason. So let me just start all this with a little bit about you in a way framed within the context of DB Cooper. But why do you care? Like, why do you care about DB Cooper? Why do I care? I ask myself that question all the time, but really, it boils down to just a set of circumstances where I fell into the vortex, as they call it. I didn’t create the name the Cooper vortex.

It was coined by somebody else. But it’s once you fall into the vortex, you can’t escape, is why it’s called the Cooper vortex. But I grew up in Woodland, Washington, just outside of DB Cooper’s proposed drop zone, so it was just a local story. I remember seeing the unsolved mysteries episode when I was a little kid with my sister and just thinking, like, Portland, that’s. That’s right by us. That’s over there. Like, I know where that is. And then, you know, hearing them talk about the drop zone in Woodland, it’s like, that’s. That’s right here. Is this the local story? And then there was a bar close by to me, the aerial tavern that did this.

DB Cooper days. It was. I believe it was the. The Friday after Thanksgiving was when they did it. And it was just something I had a passing interest in. But all these things fell together at the same time. I got this book, Skyjack by Jeffrey Gray, which led me to another book and another book. And then I got on the forums, and then at the exact same time, I started this weird job where I worked completely alone. So I would work 40 to 60 hours a week listening to podcasts. And so I searched for DB Cooper because I was super interested in it.

And all of the shows were exactly the same. It would be two or three hosts. They would basically read the Wikipedia page, and then they would discuss a few different suspects, and then they would close the case or solve the case at the end of a 25 to 40 minutes episode. And it just was so unsatisfying for me because I was so much deeper into it already by then, I wanted to hear long form interviews with the people that were writing these books and the people that were arguing about DB Cooper online every day. And so I just decided, well, you know what? I’ll just create the show that I want to listen to.

And so I told myself I was going to email five people and ask them if they would be on my show that doesn’t exist yet. And I told myself, if two out of those five say yes, then I will create a DB Cooper podcast. And fortunately, or unfortunately, all five of them said yes. So I was like, now I got to create a podcast. And I thought it was going to be a brief experiment, something that I did for maybe six months, to say that I did it. And once you get sucked in, you can’t escape.

I’m still doing it six years later. All right, well, for just in case there’s someone listening, they have no idea who DB Cooper is or why anyone cared. Some guy that jumped out of a plane with a briefcase full of money or something that says, maybe as far as somebody knows. Can you. Can you give, like, the cliff notes version of what DB Cooper is and what the events that transpired are? Absolutely. November 24, 1971. The day before Thanksgiving, a middle aged man in a suit, wearing an overcoat or a trench coat walks into the Portland International Airport.

He buys a one way ticket to Seattle. The price for that ticket, including tax, is $20. He pays with a $20 bill, the only identification you needed in 1971. The gate agent asked his name. That’s it. And he responded, his name was Cooper, Dan Cooper. He pays the $20 in cash. He’s one of the last to board the plane. Take off is about 250, I believe, one of the last to board the plane. And as the plane is taking off, he hands a stewardess a note. He’s seated in the back of the plane. She assumes it’s just another businessman trying to hit on her, so she just puts the note in her purse without looking at it.

And he realizes this gets her attention and says, miss, you might want to have a look at that note. I have a bomb. He is now hijacking the airplane. He wants $200,000 and two sets of parachutes, two fronts and two backs or two mains and reserves ready before the plane lands in Seattle. The airline agrees to his demands. They land in Seattle. He gets his $200,000 on the plane. Then he lets the passengers off. It’s important to note that none of the passengers knew the plane was being hijacked. He was in complete control of the situation, so they didn’t realize anything was wrong.

The pilot told them that there was a mechanical issue, and they had to circle the airport a couple of times before landing. But they had no idea they were being hijacked until they got out of the plane and the FBI was there. So at this point, it gets a little weird. Cooper wants to be flown to Mexico City with his money. But more important than where he wants to fly, he tells the pilots how to fly the plane. He wants the cabin to remain depressurized, the landing gear down, the flap set to 15 degrees, and he wants the airplane to take off with the aft stairs down.

So, as Boeing 27. Oh, sorry. As a Boeing 727 with aft stairs. So, back in the day, if you flew into a smaller airport and they didn’t have one of those stair trucks or a ramp truck, you could just lower the aft stairs on this plane and deboard from the plane itself. So he wanted to take off with that down. Now, the pilots were not sure if the plane could even fly with that aft staircase Downdez forget about taking off with it down. So they call in air traffic control. Air traffic control has no idea they’re looking at a manual or something like that.

And so they have to reach out to Boeing in this instance. Hey, can this plane even fly with the aft stairs down? And Boeing tells them, yes, it can. We’ve done that. We’ve tested it. It can fly with those stairs down. So in this configuration, the pilots don’t have enough fuel to get to Mexico City. So they discuss a couple refueling stops. They mention a couple other cities. They agree to a refueling stop in Reno. The plane takes off from Seattle, about 750 for Reno. The plane lands in Reno a little before 10:00, I believe, and DB Cooper is not on board.

So is there a dramatic moment in which somebody sees him jump off the plane, or is it literally just the plane took off and landed and he was no longer on it. He had one stewardess stay behind. So when he let all the passengers off the plane, he asked one stewardess to stay behind to be the go between, between him and the, the pilots in the cockpit. And so he got everything ready. He sends her into the cockpit, and then they, the pilots wouldn’t take off with the stairs down. There was some argument over that. And DB Cooper interestingly says, because the pilot said it’s too dangerous to take off with the stairs down.

And it’s interesting that Cooper says, I disagree with your assertion, but I’ll just lower the stairs in the air. So it’s like he had this knowledge. He knew more than the pilots about the plane, except for once he sends the stewardess to the cockpit to, the last thing she saw was he was putting his parachute on. So he sends her back to the cockpit, and then he doesn’t know how to lower the stairs, even though he knows they can be lowered in flight, that they could take off with him down somehow he doesn’t know how to lower him.

So she had to show him how to lower the stairs. Then she goes back into the cockpit. So no one actually saw him jump out of the plane. The only idea we have of where he might have jumped out of the plane is in between about 811 and 814, depending on the account or the transcript you’re reading. There was a pressure bump in the cabin of the plane that, and even, like, some motion that required some correction for the pilot. And so they theorized that was that could have been when Cooper jumped. You have the aft stairs sort of floating and he’s standing on them.

They lower, he jumps, they rebound, and you have this pressure bump in the plane. And so they’re not sure if that’s what it was, but to do this, they took the exact same plane, flew it out over the Pacific Ocean. I’m not talking like the same model, the exact same aircraft, and then they flew it out over the Pacific Ocean and pushed a 200 sled, a 200 pound sled out the back to see if it recreated that pressure bump that they felt, and they believed that it did. So we have this idea. Cooper most likely jumped between 811 and 814, which would put him Ariel Amboy Yakult battleground, sort of northern Vancouver, Washington.

Okay, so if we do like the Occam’s razor version of this, which I’m not a fan of, by the way, but I won’t. I won’t go on a danger. But the Occam’s razor version of this is something that he had this all planned out, knew how the plane at least operated and how you would be able to jump out of a plane in midair with the least amount of barriers in the way. And therefore, he also knew when to jump out and where he was going to land, and he essentially got away. That’s one version. Or, you know, he jumped out and something went wrong and he went splat.

And no one’s ever found any remnants. Are both of those somewhat like mainstream narratives of this? Well, there’s equal evidence for both those because there’s no evidence for either of those, which is what’s so frustrating about this case. What I will say, though, is there are five or six copycats of DB Cooper with varying degrees of skill. One gentleman knew nothing about parachutes and asked for an instruction manual on how to use a parachute. He successfully used that parachute and made it to the ground. You have another gentleman, Martin McNally, who the pilots are like, this guy.

He doesn’t know the difference between 200 miles an hour and 400 miles an hour. So let’s just kill him with speed. So McNally jumps out of the plane at like 330 miles an hour or something like that and is completely knocked unconscious. When he jumps out of the plane by the force of the wind, it regains his consciousness and uses the parachute and makes it to the ground. Martin McNot. Martin McNally. Martin Andrade wrote this great book, finding DB Cooper. And the best part of that book, in my opinion, is he compares world war two ejections and their survival rate.

So you have this subset, this group of men who have to bail from the plane. The plane could be spiraling out of control. Best case scenario, it’s a mechanical failure and they have to ditch. But more than likely, it’s the plane’s out of control, the wing was shot off. We got to get out of this thing. And he found it’s something like 97% survival rate for those guys, which is incredible. There’s some more data that shows something like, it could be even 2% of those people were dead before they hit the ground anyway. So is that a closer to 99% survival rate? So parachutes work, period.

The only way that I could see Cooper not surviving this jump, first of all, if he pulls his parachute and lands in a tree, or it’s a real rough landing and he’s badly hurt, we find him the next morning, he’s found as soon as the sun comes up. No doubt about that. But the only way in my mind, if he doesn’t survive the jump is if he does not pull the ripcord at all, which it just doesn’t seem plausible to me because there’s been no remnants whatsoever. Right? Like, no money. Found the bag, clothes, parachute, anything at all, just he.

The last time anyone sees him is when that stewardess helps them with the stairs. And that’s pretty much it. I wish I could say nothing was found, but unfortunately, there was some money that was found. So Cooper gets his ransom. It’s $200,000. He gets it in $20 bills. The serial numbers were all logged, weirdly. See, first bank in Seattle had $250,000 set aside for such an emergency, like some hostage situation, some ransom, a bank robbery. We have this money set aside, and we have all of the serial numbers logged per policy, or coincidentally, for that branch.

And at that moment in time. See, and that’s another thing we’ve looked at, because it doesn’t seem to be policy. And is it a coincidence that the number he asked for was within that $250,000 limit? But anyway, they grabbed the 250, the $200,000 form. It’s not marked, but the serial numbers are logged, so it’s good legal us currency. There’s nothing wrong with it. All we have is a list of $10,000. A list of 10,000 serial numbers for these $20 bills. Well, in February of 1989, years after the skyjacking, a little boy is playing on the shore of the Columbia river.

They’re gonna start a little campfire. He brushes some sand aside with his arm and comes across this little pile of garbage. His dad picks it up, and it’s actually a brick of $20 bills that’s badly deteriorated. And just like you or I would, we went home, or he went home and tried to clean this up. Because it’s money. I’m not going to tell anyone about it. But then he starts talking to some other people, hey, I found this money. It’s too deteriorated to even really be spent or anything. And someone else is like, hey, I bet that’s dB Cooper’s money.

And so he turns it into the FBI, and it is dB Cooper’s money. Now, here’s the problem with this? Why nobody in the DB Cooper world wants to talk about this, why nobody cares about it? Or I guess a lot of people care about it, but there’s zero answer. So based on where we know the airplane was and the wind direction and wind speed, when Cooper jumps out of that plane, he is going to drift east of that flight path. And so we’re looking at this flight path. He should drift a little bit east of that.

The money is found on the shore of the Columbia River, 15 miles west of where the airplane would have been. So it doesn’t answer any questions. It only adds more and more questions. We have no idea how the money got there. I think the consensus in the DB Cooper community is that if we could talk to DB COOPER right now, he would have no idea how the money got there. Based on what? Like, is there, is there no other sort of options where a brick of the money also flew away and since it had a different weight, maybe it blew in a different direction as him or that he hit the ground and he trekked 15 miles in one direction and hit it there to throw off this.

I don’t know. I’m not a DB Cooper, so I wouldn’t. And that’s what we’re doing also. It’s. There are people that are proposing theories where he followed this railroad track all the way and it gets you kind of close to where that is. And then maybe he had a boat stored there. But then you’re making all these insane leaps in logic and everything. It’s. It’s the only piece of evidence that has shown up after the skyjacking and it hasn’t answered any questions. It’s only added more people are trying to come up with ways that it could have floated down there or maybe he landed in the Columbia river and then a dredge brought some of that up.

But the more you sort of propose these theories, the less and less they make sense when you sort of lay them out. So is this deteriorated brick of twenties the last trace of Cooper, or has there been anything else since then? It’s the only trace. So when he passes those notes to the stewardess, he asked for his notes back. One of my favorite things about this case is she sits next to him on the plane and he’s got a, you know, a bomb in his briefcase and she lights his cigarettes for him. I just love that detail that he’s hijacking the plane and she’s going to light his cigarette for him and she uses the last cigarette of one of his two matchbooks.

And he asked for the matchbook back. And this is 1971, so isn’t this pre sort of DNA or. Yeah, and I’ve got a great story about that for you, too. So he leaves behind two things on the plane, really. He leaves behind his clip on tie. He took his briefcase and his money with him, took his notes. The other thing he left on the plane is he smoked seven cigarettes, and they were in the ashtray. And so they collected those cigarette butts for evidence. And the dB Cooper FBI files are out, and you can read them.

And I have read the file about the cigarette butts, and it specifically says, hey, here’s these seven cigarette butts. Test them for fingerprints, and if you can’t come up with anything, throw them in the garbage. That’s. That also seems to be a weird pattern with, like, really high profile cases, even sometimes modern day, where it’s like, hey, give it a quick glance, and if you don’t see anything, just go ahead and incinerate that thing. Go ahead and ship it out to China or whatever. Yeah, because, I mean, I guess the idea is you don’t want a pile of cigarette butts hanging out in your storage bin or whatever.

And they didn’t have their poor side of DNA. The other thing they had is they believe they found a hair on the seat that he was sitting on that they believed belonged to him. So we have a hair slide. But guess what? That’s lost. Accidentally lost or accidentally lost. So in the FBI files, what they were doing. And this is so stupid. So stupid. You have a hair slide, right, Thomas, of this crazy criminal. And mine would be a beard haired slide. And I found a hair, and I’m like, hey, Thomas, I want to compare my hair that I found to your slide.

You would say, okay, send me the hair. That’s not what the FBI did. The FBI was like, okay, we’ll mail you the slide. So it got mailed out a couple of times. And I want to say Ryan Burns, who worked on this, he said, I want to say it was like, Jackson, Mississippi was the last place they mailed it, and they’re not sure if it ever got mailed back or what happened to it from there. The other thing is, we’ve learned that it’s most likely that the glue they used to affix that piece of hair to that slide in 71 by now has ruined any chance at DNA if we did find that hair slide.

So cigarette butts gone, hair slide lost. And even if found, perhaps not even valid, because the glue deteriorated the DNA. So, what about the stack of $20 bills? Was that just analyzed for the serial numbers? And then what do they incinerate that to? Well, that’s an interesting story. So, the the family that found that money ended up fighting the FBI because they wanted it back. And there’s a court case over that. I want to say the FBI got to keep a handful of bills, but had to return the rest to that family. And they sold several bills and several chunks of bills at auction sites.

It’ll be the most expensive fraction of a $20 bill you’ll ever see. Oh, they weren’t even selling the full twenties. There are no full twenties. If you look up DB Cooper, Tina bar money, you’ll see pictures of that money, and it’s completely deteriorated. I mean, the most intact bill I’ve seen is maybe 50% of the original bill. So I’ve seen some sketches of DB Cooper, but it’s, like, comically, just, like, a dude with dark glasses covering his whole face and, like, a buzz cut, which, I mean, do we have an age, weight, sort of like race? Any any social class? Do we have any of those built up around the types of clothes he was wearing or the way that he spoke or any of that? Well, we we don’t have much, actually.

So he’s one of the last to board the plane. He sits on the back of the plane right after he passes that stewardess of the note. He puts sunglasses on. And then Tina Mucklow, a beautiful young stewardess, is the one who ended up sitting next to him. And hilariously, on the other side of the aisle was a young college guy named Bill Mitchell. And at a certain point, he was like, what the hell is this geeky old guy getting all of her attention for? Like, I don’t get it. Why is she talking to him? And that’s the only person who really noticed him.

And he described him as a geeky old guy. Cooper was wearing, like, a dark brown, maybe with a light pinstripe suit and then a black overcoat or trench coat. One of the things I think is most interesting about Cooper is if I told you, hey, this this guy hijacked this plane and a brilliant plan and then jumped out of it into the middle of the night. You would say, I’m guessing that’s, like, a 25 year old guy, but Cooper’s not. The stewardesses put Cooper’s age at mid to late forties, and then a couple of passengers saw him, but real brief glances.

So we have age descriptions as young as 35 and as old as 55, but he’s super average looking. He’s described as medium to average build, maybe, like, 510 to six foot. He had dark brown hair. He’s described as having olive or swarthy skin. No accent, no distinguishable marks or tattoos. You know, when you talk about the sketches, it’s so interesting because there are different sketches. There isn’t one DB Cooper sketch. There’s probably about four or five different sketches, but there’s really two main ones. We refer to them in the DB Cooper community as the Bing Crosby sketch, which is the one you’ll see that’s usually in black and white.

And he’s got a really thin face. And then we have the Cary Grant sketch, which it’s. He’s got a wider cheekbones and darker olive skin. That one’s usually seen in color. Both sketches are available with sunglasses. But that second sketch only came out, like, 1415 months after the first one because one of the stewardesses, one, was unhappy with the first sketch. And the FBI is like, okay, we’re one year into this, and it’s not going anywhere, so we might as well revitalize the sketch and see if that does anything for us. But looking back on it, when you have all these armchair sleuths with two sketches, you can now match your suspect to the sketch that works best for you.

It’s interesting, too, that you say that he was the last one on the plane and sat in the back, because that means, technically, every other person on that plane, every single person, could have gotten a good look at him. But I guess he just went unnoticed from all the other passengers. He boarded via the aft stairs in the back of the plane. Okay. Okay. Interesting. So, I don’t know the exact timelines here, but if he’s 40 and it’s 1971, then clearly he’s not a Vietnam vet. Could he have been, like, a korean war vet? I’m just trying to think World War two or Korea, because that’s another thing we discuss in this case all the time.

It’s like, was Cooper a veteran? Well, odds are yes. Yeah, that seems like almost an obvious assumption. If you look at men between the ages of 35 and 55 in 1970, what percentage of them had military service? It would be well over 50%. And then what percentage of those men smoked and damn near 100% in 1971? So how many would have been comfortable jumping out of an airplane as if they had maybe done it before, regardless of the craft itself that they were on? Yeah, exactly. And there would have been hundreds of dudes that had thousands of dudes that had paratrooper experience from wars, and there would have been a ton of air crew pilots and things that would have, at the very least, had classroom training on using a parachute or have been the brother or friend of one and, like, had heard the stories and known.

So I guess, I guess I’m, that’s the assumption that I’m already going with being fair newcomer into this. I understand some of the lore and some of, like, the tv shows and episodes based on it, but that’s kind of always been my impression, especially if we’ve got an older gentleman that seems like they’re comfortable jumping out of an airplane. It just fee, it reeks of military and military adjacent. I mean, how many people in the sixties were jumping out of airplanes for fun? It seems like that might be a more modern sort of adrenaline junkie thing that started in, like, the eighties or nineties.

I don’t know. I don’t know anything about skydiving. You’re definitely accurate about that. So the sort of the sport of skydiving sort of developed post World War two, where these guys had these experience in free fall and parachuting and loved it and then came back, we’re like, how can I do that again? And it was a real small community that developed. And so by 1971, the United States Parachute Association, I don’t think, had that many members, probably hundreds. And so what the FBI did is like, all right, give us that list. And then they essentially went through that entire list one by one.

Can we eliminate this person? Can we eliminate this person? And with the files, now, it’s crazy to read their investigation because they really had nothing to go on from the start. And then you read one of my favorite files, like, five years later, six years later, 1976, they’re going to have a meeting in San Francisco. And it’s like, hey, we’re going to have all these agents meet in San Francisco on this Cooper case. And we want you to all bring fresh ideas because this isn’t, hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s like, that’s five or six years later. I assume that all the other questions that I’ve got now are going to have you be speculating, because it sounds like we’ve gone over a lot of the core facts of the things that are just objective.

So everything else I’m going to assume to be speculative. So one of those questions, did he really have a bomb, or was that a bluff? See, and I’ve changed my mind about this. So if you would have asked me six years ago, was his bomb real? I would have said, absolutely not. There’s no need for it to be real. No one’s going to question you. If I’m on a plane and I say, I have a bomb in this box, is anyone going to be like, prove it? No, you don’t. You just have to take the guy’s word for it.

But as I’ve gone deeper into this, my thought on that has sort of changed. So just for context, he opens the briefcase one time, and the stewardess gets a look at it, and she described eight red sticks with some wires and a big, like, lantern style battery. And then he had his hand in there and was like, see, all I have to do is connect this wire to this and this whole thing explodes. It’s basically your cartoon briefcase bomb is what she described. And I’ve thought for the longest time that it was fake because there just isn’t.

There’s no need for it to be real. But I would say now I lean on the side, I’m 51% sure that it was real, because there is that small chance where they’re on. On the tarmac, on the Runway in Seattle, and the FBI is just like, no, we’re not doing this. And then what does he do? Just sit there and wait it out? Wait for a gunfight? Go to jail? Or does he. All right, I lost. I’m gonna detonate this bomb. Because being arrested with a fake bomb. Boy, is that embarrassing. So embarrassing. Yeah. So that was the plan B was just erase the plane out of the sky and jump out of there anyways, right? Sans any kind of money.

Well. Or would that have been like a self detonation thing, too? Would have, like, DB Cooper have gone out with it? I don’t. I don’t foresee himself blowing himself up in the air. I think the only time he would have used that bomb, if it was real, was after the hijacking. They land in Seattle, the passengers get off the plane, and then they’re just going to refuse to let that plane take off. And so then he’s just kind of stuck sitting in there. There’s no. There’s nowhere to go unless that plane takes off. Of course, northwest Orient Airlines has.

I looked it up once. I want to say in 71, it was still, like $15 million to build that plane or something like that. So it’s a lot easier to pay $200,000 than lose your very expensive aircraft, assuming no one else is on there. So that answers the question of why not just land and let them stew in there because ultimately they didn’t want to lose the plane versus this 200 grand, which was relative. Like, what’s the conversion rate between 1970s and 2024 for 200 grand? Like 1.3 million today. So, I mean, not bad, but also, it seems like he lowballed it a little bit, which is coincidental, I guess, with the exact amount that a local bank would have had on hand for such an occasion.

Yeah. Richard McCoy, one of the copycats, he. He hijacks a plane, like six months later. I want to say it’s April. He asks and gets for $500,000. Did any of the copycats get away? McCoy got away. The only reason he was caught was he ran his mouth about it because the police knock on his door three or four days after the skyjacking. The McCoy story is absolutely amazing. I wish everyone knew that. So he does this hijacking. He’s a member of the National Guard. He gets home, he plans this so well, his execution, not so great, but the planning was amazing.

He lands just like two or 3 miles from his house. His wife picks him up. He got a milkshake on the way home. And when the police knock on his door a few days later, there was like $499,995 in there because he bought a milkshake. But when he gets home from the hijacking, the National Guard calls him. His phone rings and they’re like, hey, McCoy, we need you to suit up. We got a hijacker to look for. And so he’s like, okay, hangs up the phone, goes down to the national Guard, gets in a helicopter, and he’s flying a helicopter, looking for himself.

So who’s he running his mouth to? One of his, like he was going to school for criminal justice, hilariously. And I think he told one of his friends he was also writing a paper, or had written a paper on us hijackings, us airline hijackings, and everyone else aside from this guy, what, got caught immediately or in air or in progress. A couple of the hijackers got away for a real limited time. I think it’s Paul Sini. Don’t quote me on this. I might have my copycats mixed up, but my favorite one is he. I think it’s Paul Sini wants, you know, a trillion dollars or whatever it is.

And then the stewardess, who is a genius and a true badass, she slips a handful of Valium in his drink. So he’s making all these demands, he’s being violent and then putting a few back, and then all of a sudden, he’s not so lucid anymore. And his demands go from, like, $300,000 to, seriously, this is not a joke. I want three cheeseburgers, a rental car, and a 32nd head start. He was negotiating himself down. He was so messed up that when they were like, okay, fine. We got cheeseburgers and a rental car for you. He could barely make it down the stairs, and by the time he did, they just tackled him.

That’s pretty badass. So, who do you think had the best chance of getting away with it, aside from DB Cooper? Out of all the copycats, the one dude that ran his mouth, do you think he could have quiet about it? I think he probably could have gotten away with it, yeah, I’m not sure. McCoy might have. McCoy’s interesting. There are some people that believe that McCoy was DB Cooper and he was just doing the second skyjacking. I don’t believe that. The descriptions don’t match. You can read the FBI files. The FBI is confident. They ruled him out.

They placed him somewhere else. It just doesn’t match up the physical description. McCoy is way, way younger, 20 years younger than McCoy is believed to be. So you have this 22 year old steward sitting next to him. I can’t. I can imagine her being off by a few years, but she wouldn’t confuse someone a few years older than her for someone that could be her father. What was the reason for wanting the landing gear to be down and the stairs to be down? These are very specific requests. Right. And, I mean, I can’t really think of, was it, like, drag that.

Would that require the plane to not go over a certain limit, which would, you know, knock you out from, like, lack of. Like, what’s the actual reason that he would say, put the landing gear down? I believe that the flight configuration that he requested. He requested that specific configuration because he knew that was the best configuration for that aircraft to jump from it. But then the question is, how did Cooper know you could jump from that plane when the pilots didn’t have. Well, what. What makes flying with the landing gear down, uh, more, you know, capable of jumping out of the plane in midair that.

Well, I think the landing gear down specifically speaks to the fact that he didn’t want them to go fast. I think the landing gear down was to keep the speed around 200 miles an hour. Okay. And probably likewise with the staircase then, too. Well, he has to jump from that staircase. I didn’t know that. I thought you could just pop. Pop a door. If it’s depressurized, you just pop a door open and jump out the door? No. Well, you don’t want to jump out of the side of that plane, but the aft stairs are perfect for jumping from.

Okay, so what if we start with the moment that the stewardess takes her eyes off of DB Cooper the last time anyone sees him? Can you just take me through your current today’s thinking of, like, what you think happened, where he jumped, where he landed, where he went after that. I don’t know, Thomas. That’s why it’s so frustrating. Cooper only exists for 5 hours. He. She shows up at 250 and he’s gone at 08:00. There is. I don’t have any story before that, and I don’t have any story after that. I mean, we could get into specific suspects, but, you know, I ask this question on my show to people, would you rather know who DB Cooper was? But you don’t get to know the story of what happened that night, or I’ll tell you the entire story.

But you don’t. But you never get to know who it was because it’s likely possible that we do find out who it was. But we’ll never know the story. We’ll never know the motive. We’ll never know the planning involved. We’ll never know what happened when his boots hit the ground. And that’s so frustrating to me because more than anything else, I want to know what happened when your boots hit the ground. Where were you? Where did you go? Did you have an accomplice? Do you have any idea the ages of the other people on the plane? I’m just trying to piece together if this is, again, 71, this is 50 odd years ago, right? So if you were 20 years old or even 35, then you might be around your deathbed at this point and ready to say, okay, maybe I knew one other thing about DB.

Like, there’s one scenario. Another scenario is someone finds a diary or something. Is there any other scenario here? Like, for example, is there any expectation that any of the money in those serial numbers would ever pop up again somewhere, or have they already been cycled through the system? Have any of the serial numbers been found? Aside from the deteriorated ones, none of the other serial numbers were ever found. I had this gentleman, Arthur Friedberg, on my show, and he is like the guy with current US currency, if you know currency. You’ve heard of the Friedberg system, which his family created.

And he’s been before Congress and testified for the Senate banking committee and everything. He’s the man. And I asked him, like, what are the odds that you have $10,020 bills go into circulation and we don’t, none of those serial numbers ever pop up in a flag transaction. And he was like, statistically that’s impossible. So it really put a reign on my parade of me imagining Cooper on a beach somewhere reading these DB Cooper books. Because it’s like, well, if this guy is going to tell me the money was never spent, I can’t question him. I don’t know enough about money.

But one other thing I wish that was. Does that mean, like he also didn’t go to South America and spend it there? Yes, because the way it was explained to me, like, even if you spend money abroad, it eventually cycles back. Because if you’re spending it somewhere else and they don’t have a use for it, so it’s got to, our currency comes back to us. Do you know if it, if one of those serial numbers popped today, is it still being flagged or. I’m sure it is, but boy, would that be interesting. I’d be so excited to read that news story.

One DB Cooper 20 shows up, but by now that’s like three generations of $20 bill ago. So when was the last time you went to an ATM and got a $20 bill before 1999? Was that when it was changed? 98, 99, something like that? Well, what I mean, again, speculation, but what the hell would be the point of going through all this? If he was this smart and had it that planned out? He had to have assumed that they were going to give him some sort of traced bills, right? Or at least a portion of them.

Who knows? It is possible. I mean, I really hate to be the guy that’s like that expert doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but that expert doesn’t know what he’s talking about. There’s just, I just can’t believe that it never got spent. Even, let’s say Cooper dies in the jump or he lost the money and that’s why some money showed up somewhere else. If you and I are going for a hike in the woods and we find a stack of money, we’re spending it. We’re not going to hold on to it. We’re not going to be like, oh, I found this money I’m going to put in my closet.

No, if somebody else found the money and didn’t report it, they would spend it and then it would show up somewhere eventually. I’m not saying all of it, but you would have a group of serial numbers or a serial number that would show up in a flagged transaction. But to your point about maybe, you know, someone’s on their deathbed. One of the most interesting things about the DB Cooper case is that we have a confession, and we don’t just have one confession, we have hundreds, hundreds of confessions. There are taped confessions that you personally can listen to the, I think it’s called the real story of DB Cooper.

It’s on Amazon prime. But many, many people have confessed to this crime, many deathbed confessions. You have Dwayne Weber, who told his wife on his deathbed, I am Dan Cooper. And then she goes to the library because she doesn’t know who Dan Cooper was. His pre Internet, like 95, 96, I think, he died and finds a book on DB Cooper, Max Gunther’s DB Cooper, what really happened? And she claims she saw her dead husband’s handwriting in the margins of that book, which is a great story. I don’t really believe that Dwayne Webber was DB Cooper, but it’s interesting.

But you have a sort of a deathbed confession with Kenny Christensen. Walter Reca confessed. Wolfgang Gossett, who is another really interesting suspect. He confessed to his sons on their 21st birthday and confessed independently to two lawyers, two different states. I interviewed Larry Carr, who was one of the lead case agents on the DB Cooper case, who really sort of pushed to get help from the public and the media in like 2000, 820 ten. And he told me that during his tenure on the case, multiple people went into FBI offices to confess to being DB Cooper. Now, I understand me.

And you were at the bar, Thomas. And I’m like, hey, man, let me tell you the story. You know that db cooper thing? That was me. I’m so cool. I get that. I don’t get the part where you go into an FBI office to confess for a crime you obviously did not commit. Takes all kinds. So it sounds. I can understand some of the frustration in this, but what is the current state of trying to expand on this now? Is it just everybody in the DB Cooper arena is just basically waiting for some unknown big explosion to come? Or has everyone sort of settled into.

Okay, we’ve got all the info that we’re ever going to get, and now we just have to assemble pieces, I guess. What is the goal here? Because, again, it’s so far removed. DNA, non existent money, serial numbers haven’t been tracked, and there’s almost no anticipation that they just, like, pop up somewhere being spent. So where do you go from here? Is it just like a complete plateau forever? It seems that way sometimes. I mean, you have so many people looking at this independently from so many different angles. Also, all the forensic work that’s really been done on this case has been done by independent researchers with the permission of the FBI.

So DB Cooper leaves his tie on the plane. That’s basically the only piece of evidence we have. Now. If you look back at pictures, you can see FBI agents handling it with their bare hands. There’s a documentary or like a HBO History channel thing from the mid two thousands also, where they just, like, bring it out. People are just handling it. So it hasn’t exactly been the best chain of custody. But in, like, 2010, Tom Kay, who has his own microscope, basically took a look at this with an electron microscope that he has and discovered some really, really weird stuff on the tie.

Insane amounts of unusual metals and alloys, specifically titanium, which wasn’t very widely used in 1971. And so that sort of pushed us on this. How can we explain these thai particle elements? And some people who already had a suspect are like, well, how can I explain why my suspect would have had this where other people are like, well, it’s got to be some sort of a metallurgist. Let’s look there. Or it’s got to be in one of these weird research and development electronics labs. Let’s look there. And it pointed us a few different directions, but didn’t really give us any answers or any end to the journey.

But we crowdfunded some money, and we’re going to have McCrone labs take another look at some of those tie stubs that we pulled from the tie. So we’re going to get another analysis of that and we’ll see what directions that’ll take us. What’s the absolutely most outlandish dB Cooper theories that you’ve heard? Like, are there any, like he’s an alien, he jumped into another dimension? Well, yeah. Did you see Loki? Is that an actual theory, or was that just something put into Loki? It was just something put into Loki. There are many wild theories. Are you familiar with E.

Howard Hunt of the Watergate scandal? I believe so. Go ahead and refresh me, though. So E. Howard Hunt is one of Nixon’s plumbers. E. Howard Hunt wrote a ton of different wacky spy novels. I think he always wanted to be James Bond, and his career got him pretty dang close. But there is a book, dB Cooper identified and exposed, or dB Cooper exposed and identified, that proposes E. Howard Hunt as dB Cooper. And it’s a fun theory. It makes a lot of sense. I not sure see Howard Hunt, but it is hilarious that during that Watergate trial.

He is pictured with sunglasses on in the courtroom. So this is another cool thing, but probably my favorite DB Cooper suspect. If I could choose who DB Cooper was, not who do I think is most likely DB Cooper? If I just got to pick, there’s a suspect named Barb Dayton who was born Robert Dayton and was the first person in Washington state to get gender reassignment surgery in 1969. So two years prior to the hijacking, she’s working at the Seattle public Library as a librarian. She’s sort of unhappy and unfulfilled. She wants to prove to herself that she’s still this badass, that Robert Dayton was a merchant marine and just a rowdy, rough and tumble guy.

And so she devises this plan to hijack the plane, does it, pulls it off, lands in Aurora, Oregon, I believe, stores the money in a culvert. Because it was never about the money. It was just about proving to herself what a badass she still is, and then returns to her normal life, meets Ron and Pat Foreman. Probably that would have been eight years later. They become fast friends, hang out for a while, and she confesses to them that she was DB Cooper. Has that one been dramatized on tv, movies? No, but it needs to be. And is there a more Portland story than DB Cooper was a trans woman like this? This also explains the whole reason why the money wouldn’t have been spent if it was just like an ego thing that in a weird way, it explains so many of the anomalies.

Yeah. And Ron Foreman told me, he’s like, they never found DB Cooper because they were looking for a man. What’s your impression of the FBI, 1970s? Is it just Keystone cops, or was this just an oddball case that didn’t get the right kind of resources or. I think there are a few things going here. There’s a lot of critique of the FBI, especially nowadays. But having talked to a bunch of agents that worked a case, they wanted to solve this. They wanted to be the one who would perp walk Cooper. They wanted to be the one who said, I solved this.

I solved the DB Cooper case. And even more so as the years went on, there was a lot of resources put it in this case. I think the FBI did a good job. I think they did what they could. I think it was a very novel crime. So there is sort of a botched hijacking a few weeks prior, and then you have a couple of, like, fly me to Cuba type things. But Cooper is really the first one to, like, be like, hey, give me a bunch of dough and I’m going to jump out of this airplane.

So they didn’t believe that he was going to jump in the first place. So they were behind, behind Cooper immediately. So they didn’t think he was going to jump. In Reno, they searched the plane with dogs. One thing I hate is people that are new to the case, they immediately come to one of two conclusions. So you watch a doc about DB Cooper or listen to this, and you’re going to have one of two ideas. The first is Cooper never existed and the flight crew made him up and the flight crew was in on it. The second idea you’re going to have is Cooper never jumped out of the plane.

He hid on the plane. Okay, the hit on the plane thing is totally ridiculous. If you’ve ever been on an airplane, there’s about a bunch of extra space they’re not using. They’re using every inch of that aircraft. Also, they searched the plane with dogs. There’s zero evidence anyone on the flight crew is in on it. I’ve talked to a bunch of people that worked for airlines in the sixties and seventies, and they all loved their jobs. So now you’re talking about whacking up $200,000 between seven people who may or may not have even known they were going to work together that day.

It just, that doesn’t make any sense. So both of those are ridiculous. So if you had that idea in your head while you’re listening to this, it was not a good idea. Well, my ideas after listening to all this is that he was either an FBI agent or a CIA agent, and they were just using this as, what are the weak links? How far can we push this? Because like you mentioned, the original version of this, like the original security protocol, I guess, was, hey, what’s your name? Oh, Dan Cooper. All right, get on board. So were there any changes as a direct result of the DB Cooper case in terms of airline security? Yes, theres one specifically.

So after this and all these skyjackings, they invented this part they refer to as the Cooper vane, which will lock the stairs on a 727 while it’s in flight so they can’t be lowered. So it’s literally just this little flap that once the plane takes off, the wind pushes it to its side and it locks a latch in there so the aft stairs can’t be deployed. The Cooper Vanessa. But what was already being argued at the time in 71 was there’s this argument going on between the United States government, the airlines and the airports over who is responsible for security.

So the airlines didn’t want to do it, the airports didn’t want to do it, and the government didn’t want to do it. But they all said, you guys have to do this, not us. So there was a long debate over who was going to be in charge of security at the airport. Interestingly, president of the FAA, or he might have just been president of United at the time. Najib Hallaby was meeting up with Nixon the day of the hijacking to discuss airline security. See, now, now I’m cooking, because that’s where my mind usually goes, is that if no one spends the money and no one got hurt, it went off basically without a hitch, and the guy disappears, especially with the money not being spent.

It just seems like the perfect catalyst to be used as something else. If the end result wasn’t to have some kind of financial gain or financial capital, then it seems political capital makes the next most amount of sense, and that can be spent without any serial numbers getting traced. Yeah. An interesting thing about Najib Hallaby also is if you look at his Wikipedia page, there’s a picture of him. And the picture of Najib Hallaby looks exactly like the DB Cooper sketch. Exactly like it. So I understand that. I guess you don’t really have a specific idea on how any of this lines up.

At any point, were you convinced of one of the commonly known suspects, or have you always just been, like, wavering around between all of them? I’m a gullible fool. So I’m going to read your book about your suspect. And the second I put that down, I’m going to be like, damn, Thomas solved this thing. He did it. Yeah, he did it. And then I’m going to get on the forum and then talk to a couple other my DB Cooper friends and then be like, dang it. I really wanted that to be it. But there are some really, really interesting suspects.

One of them that’s been around for a while is a dude named Ted Braden, who is in this crazy special forces group in Vietnam called Mac v SOG. And then he goes AWOL and then is arrested working as a mercenary in the Congo. Now, if you or I did that, if we’re lucky, we’re going to military prison. Most likely we’re going to receive a death sentence for doing that. He goes to a military president. I want to say he’s a four dicks. And then I’ve spoken to one of the guards that was there. I actually think he might have been running that part at the time.

But he said he walked by Ted Braden’s cell and Ted Braden was in his cell watching tv in full uniform with a buckle and signed shoes, smoking a wood tipped cigar. And he was like, darren, everything I said was not allowed. None of that was allowed. And I knew right away, like this guy, there’s something going on with him above my pay grade. And the day came for his trial and he was released because there wasn’t enough staff for the trial, was the reason given. And he was like, I looked at that and was like, that is obvious.

Bullshit. Obvious. But they just let him go. And real, real shady character. There’s an article you can read about Ted Braden where he’s asking for work as a mercenary from Ramparts magazine. TED Braden, ramparts in the article, pull up, I’m sure Drew Beeson has it plastered all over the Internet, but he is truly a badass. Matches the description. And he had direct ties to the CIA, like one of his good buddies was Jack Singlob. So it’s just so interesting. And, you know, I’ve got some connections that can look up some records now with DB Cooper. And you look up Ted Braden and there is no record of anything.

There’s barely a record of him being alive. And there should be all these military records and everything. What was that? His age lines up great. Age lines up great. He is a little bit on the short side is the only real critique of him. But hilariously, Drew Beeson shoes in the seventies, that was a huge thing in the seventies. He would look good in him, too. But my friend Drew Beeson found this arrest record he got pulled over for DUI in his seventies. No license plate, no license, no insurance, no registration. And refused to identify himself in his seventies.

Like, what’s going on there? And he’s been a DB Cooper suspect, a serious one, for well over a decade. See, that’s the one I’m going to settle into until there’s something that pushes me out of that area. But it just seems to make the most sense for the most number of reasons, not the least of which either understanding the level of incompetence in the teams that would be in charge of tracking you down or being on one of those teams just like the copycat. Because if. And I mean, I guess we’ll just also speculating wildly. And you’ve probably already heard all of this before from different angles, but like, if the copycat was like, oh, like I’m an ex military guy, I saw this other guy that either I knew or I heard about how this went down.

It’s like I can do the exact same thing because I am basically the same person, and I can repeat that. So I don’t know. It makes it seem that whatever the original DB Cooper is would have known not just the configuration of the plane, not just how to jump out of a plane, not just that the money would be available, but also, like, what would have gone into looking into him. And that seems like an even more niche area of knowledge. Like, I guess if you had military experience, you would know some of that. Maybe if you knew some people in banking, you could make friends with civilians.

But the second you’re talking about, okay, well, what’s the state going to do? Like, how are they going to investigate me? That feels like a level of knowledge that’s way outside the scope of any kind of civilian. Yeah, it’s interesting because of that knowledge. So we figured out there’s basically two or three avenues where you would have known that you could jump from a 727 in 1971. So in Vietnam, they were doing some shady stuff with 727s where they were thinking, hey, we can use this plane, and it will be. It will look like a commercial airliner because it is a commercial airliner, but we can use it to drop supplies and troops covertly.

So they were testing that in, like, Vietnam and Laos, Cambodia at the time, and then also in. I want to say it’s Arizona. Could be New Mexico. Don’t quote me on that. But the CIA was essentially doing the same thing with 727s, which is sort of connected to air America, which is, I want to say the company is called intermountain Aviation or something. Don’t quote me on that one. But, yeah, so there’s these two spots where people would have noticed. And would Ted Braden have been aware of that at Macvsog? Absolutely. He would have known about that because he was doing that kind of stuff.

And so. But who, it’s not like the CIA keeps a list of who is doing their shady aviation stuff in New Mexico or Arizona. So I don’t have a list of those names. The same way we would for Macv Sog. If, let’s say I’ve got a bomb in my briefcase, and I’m like, you got to make a decision, Darren. DB Cooper was ex military, current military intelligence or civilian? Do you have. Can I. Can I force you with the bomb on my brief face to pick one of those two categories? Yeah, I’m picking the first. I think at the very least, he was a veteran.

Is there a CIA tie? Very possibly I don’t think Cooper was FBI. I really don’t, and I don’t think there’s any sort of FBI cover up. If there was, they’re not showing that to me, and I haven’t heard anything about it. But I could see, like, maybe Cooper was CIA adjacent or an asset at some point or got some of that knowledge from doing something like that. Very, very possible. But then how do you explain the weird particles on his tie? Well, I mean, you said that there’s pictures of all sorts of FBI agents handling this thing bare handed.

Right? So were they handling rare metals just before that? I mean, yeah. I mean, yeah, I mean, I guess that is a very real possibility who know, intentionally or not. I mean, that it almost seems, again, if you go with the intelligence angle, like, let’s just throw some random rare metal on this thing and just throw people for a loop, make this thing almost impossible to trace back to anything that would make any sort of sense. Let’s plant this money in a different place where the. Again, I understand the amount of coordination and conspiracy that is involved in all of that.

It’s kind of my thing, though. So I kind of go that angle of the. Like, why would the CIA do it? It’s sort of the same joke is like, why does a dog lick its balls? It’s sort of like. It’s what. It’s what they do. Like, that is. That is their currency is to do these covert ops and training. And maybe I would subject, you know, doing it domestically as, like, a training operation, because if you got caught doing this elsewhere and all of a sudden, you might have, like, an actual political issue on your hands.

Whereas if you do it stateside domestically, then you also have sort of the resources to cover up your tracks to make sure, like, normies don’t find out how this went down. The same thing. Is that why? I mean, he had full control. No one knew that they were in a hostage situation until they all went away. Seems like something. Again, I’m some. You know, I’m being the subjective one here, but it seems like. Yeah, it all fits into place, that if everyone was in on, if all of the agencies that could have raised an alarm and, like, been more proactive in the role, if they were all in on it, or if the right people were in on it, then all this kind of goes perfectly.

Yeah, very well could be. You want to. You want a suspect that I can connect to the JFK assassination also? Yeah, let’s go. Is it. Is it going to be the guy with the eyebrows. Uh, no, not the eyebrow guy. But, um. So, DB Cooper is described as having. He’s described as caucasian, but having, like, olive or swarthy skin. And then even one witness said possibly hispanic or native american heritage. And so if I lined up all of the DB Cooper suspects for you and put them on a wall, it’s a lot of pasty white faces, not a lot of dudes, where I’m like, that’s a real swarthy, olive skinned guy.

Or maybe he has some darker skin in his heritage. But there is one new suspect. Who’s Skip? Lauryn Hall. John Limbach wrote a great book called where was Skip? His name’s Lauryn hall, went by skip. He had a bunch of different aliases, but he is directly involved in. If he didn’t pull the trigger, he’s still involved in the JFK assassination. He’s talking to everyone involved. He testified on those public hearings. His name is all over it. If you’re deep into JFK, you’ve heard Lauryn hall or Skip Hall’s name before, and he is now linked to DB Cooper via this timeline in this book.

Where was Skip? One of the things I think is so interesting about him is the fact that here’s a guy who was, like, a cuban freedom fighter. He got involved with all these mob guys with casinos. He obviously had some, like, if he was an informant or worked for some intelligence agencies at some point. Seems like he was on both sides of various different political disagreements and battles. But he also went by this alias, Lorenzo Pacia. And if I told you my name was Lorenzo Pasia, you’d be like, no, it’s not. That’s not your name. I could tell by looking at you that’s not your name.

So, he had enough look to him that he could go by Lorenzo Pacia and still pull it off. I highly recommend that book. Where was Skip? He’s another DB Cooper suspect. Where? Like Ted Braden. I’m 100% confident that he could have planned something like this. I’m 100% confident he could have pulled something like this off. But I I can’t put him on that plane. I can’t put him in Portland that day. I can’t finish. It’s just like, yeah, he could have done it, but I can’t push the ball any further. Wait. You’ve opened the door to this one.

So if we sidestep a little bit. You brought up the JFK assassination, where you are on that one. The government killed him. Anyone in particular? I’m not sure if the government specifically killed him, or they stumbled across a plot and we’re like, let’s let it happen. It just. I haven’t got too deep into that one, but just Kennedy had a lot of enemies. There would have been a couple of groups that would have interest in that. Maybe it’s some sort of a captain planet version with our powers combined, I’m not sure, but it really seems like if the CIA is not directly involved, their involvement was letting it happen.

That, or they’re just the least competent intelligence network on the planet in the middle of one of the. Yeah. Okay, so government did it. You’re not afraid to sort of take a stake in that one, right? So what is it about DB Cooper that. That there’s less for you to kind of, like, put a stake in the ground? Is it just a lack of any evidence whatsoever? Like, how much, if we were to be relative to the JFK? Right. How much definitive evidence would you have in the JFK assassination other than it just. It makes sense that the government would have been involved.

Well, with JFK, I mean, you have. You have it on tape. You had many people there yet, witnesses. You had other people involved. You had reports and commissions. Whether or not you believed what they said. You still had that with Cooper? Like I’ve said, Cooper exists for 5 hours. That’s it, really. One person got a real good look at him and spoke to him for a little bit. And that’s Tina Mucklow. Bill Mitchell was the guy. Referred to him as a geeky old guy, sat across from him, only really got one good look at him because he thought, why is she sitting next to that loser? Other than that, he was unremarkable.

He was average. He was average for being average, unassuming. He didn’t talk to anyone. He didn’t. He didn’t make himself noticeable even. One of the things I think is so interesting about this case is you do have these copycats, but Cooper is able to be so calm, so cool, so collected, in complete control of the situation, and nobody else was able to do that. None of the other copycats were. But what does it say about that type of a person? Like, someone who’s able to do something like this and be calm and cool? You don’t see a lot of cool, calm bank robbers or any type of hijackers, for that matter, really.

So what does it say about this? We have an older guy who is able to just remain calm, cool, and collected during this wild operation and keep everyone else that way. You know, the stewardess, Tina Mucklow, she’s interviewed immediately after, immediately after. She hasn’t gone home or anything. She’s still just getting off the plane. And she says, I’m paraphrasing, but this is as close to a direct quote as I can get. That he was kind, polite, he was never cruel. He got annoyed at one point, but was never even unfriendly to me. That’s what she said immediately after being hijacked.

She described him as a nice guy. He also, he knew that that was going to be that plane’s last stop and that flight crew was done. How he knew that, I’m not sure, but he knew that. And so in Seattle he knows he’s going to take these people for an extra ride and he’s making their workday 4 hours longer. So he asked for, as part of his ransom demands, meals for the flight crew. Are there any other theories or sort of like case mystery cases that tend to come up in the DB Cooper crowd? Like for example in Bigfoot crowd.

Not that I’m equating any of these, but like in the Bigfoot crowd sometimes there’s like a huge dovetail where there’s like UFO enthusiasts or some, I mean the JFK crowd, you’ll have like a huge group of people that then get into like George Bush kind of theories because of his ties politically and stuff. Is there something like that? And the DB Cooper crowd where, okay, if you really like DB COOper and you’ve exhausted all the options, like here’s these other flavors that you can kind of wander into. I would say there’s a lot of Zodiac crossover and for a couple of different reasons.

I think that’s just the type of person that’s interested in an unsolved mystery or figuring something out, figuring out who this guy was, who this criminal was. There’s a lot of that. It’s just two people from around the same time period that are both missing. The other reason for that is there are a handful of people that have tried to say that DB COOPEr and the Zodiac killer are the same person. I’ve read three different books proposing that. I’ve had a handful of people on my show that have proposed that theory. One of them was doctor David Gold, who believes Frank Morrison, the Anglin brothers are the Zodiac killer and DB Cooper.

That’s fun. Yeah. And there’s Ed Edwards, who is the Zodiac killer. He’s dB Cooper. He, as the Atlanta child killer killed JonBenet Ramsey and Teresa Hallback. Do you get some kind of reward? Like, I guess I’m thinking of all the different people, too, that turn themselves in or claimed DB Cooper, what do you think the motivation for that is? Is it just I want to get my name in the history books or mental illness? All the above, I guess I would say all the above. I don’t know the answer to that when I’ve asked it on my show.

Like, why would you confess to this? And if I was going to confess to a crime, it would be this one, because Cooper didn’t hurt anyone. Is it awesome to threaten people with a bomb? No, it is not. But at the end of the day, the only person who is potentially hurt by Cooper would have been Cooper himself. If he died in the landing or had some sort of a rough landing, broke his ankle, whatever, he would be the only one that was hurt in the skyjacking. So there’s not a lot of even new. Right. Like, they would.

They would have been the only one that would have even had, like, a mental trauma from in the moment, I guess. Yeah, absolutely. Because none of the other passengers knew, so. And Tina Mucklow, I’m paraphrasing this also, but I believe she said at one point that the harassment to her about DB Cooper was worse than the DB Cooper hijack. I totally understand that. If people are wanting a definitive answer and she’s the only one willing to talk and not able to give that definitive answer, I could see people trying to get answers out of her to say things that she didn’t want to say.

This might be a stretch, but it’s the other thing that comes to mind. Malaysian air airline flight 370, the one that just kind of, like, disappeared and was never seen again. And there’s speculation that maybe it was, like, in the ocean, or does that dovetail with this at all? Because it. It does. Because there is. That’s a separate group of Cooper. So there is, like, the. The true crime and the mystery subset of people in DB Cooper. And then you have the skydiving, an aviation group, which they might not give a shit at all about true crime or unsolved mysteries, but, boy, they really care about skydiving or they really care about aviation.

And so they’ll come to it from that angle. And that group of people would be the ones who are looking at the Malaysian Airways and Amelia Earhart and all the aviation related stuff, but don’t really care about true crime. I don’t care about true crime when it comes to, like, the fictionalized version of DB Cooper, cartoons and tv shows and movies and dramatizations. Do you have any that are favorites that don’t even necessarily have to be accurate. But do you have any that are like your go to when I mention that you’re like, oh, yeah, that one.

I like the storyline in prison break where DB COOper, I think the actor’s name is Charles Westmoreland, plays DB Cooper and has a cat. There’s an episode of a TV show, leverage where the guy from tremors, the one who’s not Kevin Bacon, I don’t remember his name in real life, but that guy plays DB Cooper. Loki did that brief thing. See that one? Made me so mad because that was the trailer for Loki. So I was just freaking out. I’m like, oh, there’s going to be a DB Cooper storyline. It’s going to be so great. I can’t wait.

And I like literally like tuned in for the live as soon as it came out. And have you watched it? It was a throwaway line, essentially. They showed the entire thing in the trailer. It’s a joke during an episode, has nothing to do with the show. I was so angry about that for like two months. I was like, oh, there’s going to be a dB Cooper storyline without a paddle is probably one of the best dB Cooper movies. Their DB cooper facts and everything are completely wrong, but it’s still a fun movie. If you like soft core gay erotica.

There is a fantastic movie called Bigfoot versus dB Cooper. There is not much Bigfoot or DB Cooper content in that movie, but there is a lot of shirtless dudes working out. So they just put the name on it and got people interested. And you get ten minutes and you’re like, I don’t care that. No, there’s no Bigfoot here. I would highly recommend watching it. It doesn’t make sense. The whole time you’re gonna be like, how is this a movie? I mean, it sounded like there’s a gap in the market. If the one option for that sort of material doesn’t even deliver on the premise, it sounds like they’re just waiting for someone to jump in.

And then there was a treat Williams movie, the pursuit of D. B. Cooper with Robert Duvall in it. And that movie starts with him jumping out of the plane in the daytime and then it, like Robert Duvall is some like hillbilly sheriff that chases him across the country. He goes on this chase with the girl in a truck. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. And the only DB Cooper related thing in the movie is the opening scene where he jumps out of the plane. They even got that wrong? What do they get wrong about it? It’s during the daytime.

Oh. So what time? I guess that means this happened at nighttime. Yeah. So that’s another thing. So in the Pacific Northwest, Portland Seattle area in November, it gets dark around 04:00 and by 05:00 it is dark outside. And so Cooper boards the plane at 250. So unless it’s his first time in the Pacific Northwest, he has to know that it is going to be dark any minute now. And by the time he does this first half of his hijacking and gets ready for his jump, it is going to be pitch black. What kind of environmental conditions are we talking? Like, uncomfortable but livable? Like, was it freezing out? Was.

It wasn’t freezing out. It would have been like a really light rain, which is just sprinkling a little bit overcast and, like, 45 degrees. So Seattle, just a normal day in Seattle. Exactly. A completely normal day in November. The area he jumped is a mix of wooded area and farmland. If he would have jumped sort of north of Longview, Kelso, around Mount St. Helens. That is the woods. That is legit. The woods where you could end up in a place where you have a multiple day walk to get somewhere that’s not where he jumped. He jumped in a place where there’s towns and rivers and roads and railroad tracks and people and businesses.

So, like, in without a paddle, there’s this scenario where he burned all his money to. To survive, basically. Well, that’s ridiculous. I’m a small, weak wuss and you could drop me randomly in that area at night and I will get out of there. It’s not. You don’t have to survive in the woods, especially not if it came down to, like, burning $200,000 or minus. What was the full amount of the deteriorated money that got found? Like that big brick? It’s $6,000, I believe, around 5800 they could recover, but because it was so damaged, that was the number they came up with.

But it should have been three packets bundled together. So each specific bundle. See, I’m getting lost in bank currency jargon, but each specific bundle would have been 100 twenties. So $2,000. Okay, so we’re talking like 3% of the full amount that he got away with. Essentially, yeah. Where’d the rest go? All right, well, I want to ask your opinion on a whole bunch of other non DB Cooper stuff now. Is there anything at all that we left on the table that you need to let people know about that we didn’t already cover? There’s one thing I like to talk about, please.

And it wasn’t even discovered until, like, the late nineties, I think. As far as being related to Cooperative, there is a franco belgian comic book called Dan Cooper about a Royal Canadian Air Force pilot, stunt pilot, daredevil test pilot. There are issues of this comic book where he defuses a bomb aboard a commercial airliner. There are images of him jumping out of commercial airliners. And this comic book predates the skyjacking. So here you have this guy, Dan Cooper, Daredevil pilot, de arms a bomb on a commercial airliner. And then you have this DB Cooper case. And we know the real name he gave wasn’t dB Cooper.

It was Dan Cooper. Now, Thomas, was that an homage to a comic book that was never printed in English? Or was that a randomly chosen name that happened to be also this comic book character? That matches up quite well to DB Cooper? Where does the b come from? Did he give that as his name when he entered the gate? No, the DB Cooper is a press mix up. So he gives the name Dan Cooper. All the passengers get off the plane. There’s one name from the flight manifest that’s nothing standing there. Dan Cooper. So they go out, we’re looking for a Dan Cooper.

And then a reporter in Portland is talking to a police officer, and they’re like, yeah. And then we’re going to go look for this guy who has a record, DB Cooper. And so in that mix up, they went to go talk to this guy, DB Cooper. You can see that in the police report. He’s like, living in a trailer and was watching a game show on tv when the police knocked on his door. And he’s like, no, that’s not me, dude. Doesn’t even make sense. Here’s where I was. It checked out. It obviously wasn’t him. But because of that one mix up, it got reported as DB Cooper.

And hilariously, the black and white news program. I can’t remember that anchor, but it was like, in other news, da Cooper. I’m not sure where the Da Cooper one came from, but I. It got, it ran as DB. And I can’t verify this, but I believe that the FBI liked that the public knew that it was DB Cooper. Because if they could talk to someone that really knew, he would know. I never gave that name. I gave the name Dan Cooper, not dB Cooper. Because you really have to get into this case a little bit before you know that he never went by dB Cooper.

He went by Dan Cooper. I mean, again, man, putting fuel to the fire. But like, the CIA loves their misinformation. It’s like sugar on top of their cereal in some ways. So, yeah, they. They would also be like, hell yeah. Let’s make. Let’s make it dB Cooper. Like, we love this. So. Okay, that’s fascinating, man. I’m glad that I asked you that. There’s a comic book that might have inspired. I mean, I kind of have this rule, and I don’t know where I’m at on it right now with the DB Cooper stuff, but everyone can believe in a coincidence.

It’s not weird to believe in coincidences, but I do think it’s weird if someone sat down and they thought that 200 things were all just coincidence at a certain point, you’re like, no, dude, you’re describing objective reality. Once you get to 200 coincidences about something that can’t exist, but then you’ve got this, I guess, like an abstract dilemma, right? Like, exactly how many coincidences does objective reality make right for some people that like to jump it thing? You said that you’ll read a book and you’ll be like, he did it. You know what I mean? And you have to be talked down from the ledge.

I would say that in that range, you probably are good with three to five coincidences until you’re like, okay, this is definitely a thing. Some people are like, they need to see 20. And they might be like the most ultimate skeptic kind of person, but how many coincident? And you don’t have to have an exact number. But how many coincidences are in this DB Cooper case? For example, the fake name that gets spread around the comic book that, you know, might have sort of been the basis for this. Like, do you have a, is it five? Is it ten? Is it 50? It would depend on your suspect.

Because if you’re pushing Dwayne Weber, for example, there are eleven coincidences with Duane Weber that are wild and crazy. But then you go to Ted Braden, you’re like, okay, well, there’s eight coincidences here with Ted Braden that are wild and crazy, but it’s just a lot of it is. Like I said, we have no evidence in this case. Cooper only exists for a few hours. So much of all the details you have to fill in yourself. What is your expectation of some new break in the case coming? I don’t know. I get a little bit discouraged when I think about that because it’s been 53 years now since where would it come from if there was some break in the case? Where do you like, aside from hearing it on a forum or something.

But, like, FAa, FBI, treasury. I don’t think it’s coming from there. It’s definitely coming from an independent source. I think the way this case gets solved is maybe, hopefully, somewhere there is a guy waiting for his mom to die so he can release the story of what his dad did and his mom was the accomplice is the reason why this story can’t come out. And she was 20 years younger than him. So Cooper’s mid to late forties, obviously. He was a pretty good smoker in 1971 and a daredevil. I don’t see those dudes living into their nineties, which is at least what Cooper would be at this point in time.

But maybe he had a young wife, and she’s only 77 right now, and she knows the whole story, but she’s worried about her involvement in it. And so they’re going to wait till she passes away, and then their son Johnny can come forward and tell us all about it. I pray that day comes, hopefully, and Johnny knows the whole story and he can fill in all the details. I think that’s one way it gets solved. The other way would be for the vortex or this community itself to just keep constantly moving the ball forward just a little bit, just a little bit, until we can get some sort of a breakthrough or a lead that can push us in a solid direction or land us on a suspect, and then we can work that suspect to the point where we can be confident that that’s who it was.

Do I think that that’s going to happen? Oh, I’m real skeptical of that. I. I ask everyone on my show, do you think this case will ever be solved? And even amongst the people that are researching it the most, it’s. It’s probably less than 50% say yes. And that’s people that have put hundreds of hours into this that are like. I just. I don’t know. I’m not sure if it can be solved. And then to what point. If. If we could get some sort of a magical DNA thing. And all of a sudden it’s Chris Baird.

It was DB Cooper, but unfortunately, he died in 1998, and there isn’t much record of him. So now what do we do? We have to fill in his life. We’re going to track down all of his friends and family and see if they have anything to say, and I don’t think they will, because it doesn’t seem like DB Cooper ran his mouth. I mean, CIA agent, it just. It all points to that. For me, it’s my lens. So, okay, I want to get your opinion on a bunch of other stuff. Let’s just jump right into it.

I’ll explain how this works in a second. All right, let’s get me into some trouble. Hey, conspiracy buffs, I double dare you to take some PCP, the paranormal conspiracy probe. On your marks. Get set and go. Okay, really easy rules. You’re going to rate stuff from one to ten on how much credibility you give it. So, for example, if I was to say DB Cooper was a CIA agent, on a scale from one to ten, five being you’re on the fence and you don’t want to make a decision, where would you be on that statement? Seven.

How about Bigfoot exists? One. How about dinosaurs exist, existed, exist. Dead dinosaurs existed? Nine. How about fire breathing, flying dragons having existed at any point in history? I’ll go to. How about the concept of flat Earth? One. How about the concept that there is. There are other lands outside of the arctic wall? Have you heard of this before? I’ve heard of the arctic wall, but I’m not a big arctic wall guy. What about the concept of hollow Earth? One. What about angels and demonstration? I’ll go six on angels and demons. What about aliens, the little gray Roswell variety.

Nine. How about reptilian shapeshifter variety? Let’s go. Four. How about the idea that a human being has stepped but on the moon in the last hundred years? Okay, now we’re talking. If you would have asked me this six months ago, I would have said ten, but some clowns at work, we’re just talking about this nonstop, and now I. Okay, man walked on the moon four, but six months ago I would have said ten with that in mind, with you being at a four, that man walked on the moon. What’s the chance that the Apollo eleven footage that was shown on tv was real? Four.

What about the possibility that man could walk on the moon? Not. Not that we have, but that it’s even a realistic possibility. Possibility. I’ll go. I’ll go. Eight. Yeah, we could do that. So moon exists. The moon has to exist in order for that to be true. So the moon exists. I’m confident in that. Have you ever heard of the concept of a localized sun and a localized moon? I haven’t heard of a localized sun, so this is one of the areas where the flat Earth guys have kind of got me. I’ve heard someone that said that they believe in flat Earth, but that they also believe that man stepped foot on moon.

And I was like, how does that make sense. And the answer is that the moon is within our atmosphere. It just happens to be a lot closer than anyone says it does. Therefore, it’s actually even more of a possibility that man has stepped on. I always find that one really interesting because I had never thought of it from that angle. Okay, let’s get a little bit more into conspiratorial stuff. How about 911 was an inside job, one to ten? I have to go one on that because who inside for who? Well, I guess, just like you were describing JFK, that perhaps they knew something was going to happen and said, let’s just.

Let’s just kick back and see how this plays out. That would technically be an inside job in that government knew and did not act knowing the possible. Consequently, the only non inside job explanation that I’m aware of, if you were to have four, I guess the main four is that the government had no idea what was going on and it all just happened. Basically the official story. Then there’s the government knew didn’t do anything. Then there’s the government knew facilitated. And then there’s the government planned the entire thing start to end. So out of those four options, the only one that’s not an inside job is technically, the government had no idea at any point.

That’s true. Did they know about it and didn’t act on it? Certainly possible. Does that change your one to a two? Sure, let’s do that. Let’s go from one to two. Okay. Okay. How about celebrity clones? Do you know what I mean when I say that? Yeah, yeah, I’m gonna. I’ll go two on that. I gotta see that for myself. How about Ouija boards can invite like, objective negative energy or spirits into your life? I would say one. I have a Ouija board played with kids. How about be careful? How about AI? You think AI could like.

Because I’m going based on. I think you gave a six to angels and demons. Meaning maybe, you know, dipping your toe off the fence. So do you think there’s any way to contact either one of those by AI contacting another entity via AI? It’s interesting. I have no idea. So I’ll go five. I kind of consider AI just like a really fancy Ouija board. In a way that would be pretty cool if we got AI and all of a sudden it started talking to angels and demonstration. And I guess with that in mind, too. What about ghosts and poltergeists? Ghosts is a hard no for me, one for ghosts.

And does that include poltergeist or is poltergeist a separate entity from ghosts. No ghosts. No ghosts at all. And then I guess another one, too, that I’m a big fan of. But ancient alien tech, are you familiar with these kind of theories, either atlantean or otherwise? What? Zechariah sitchin? Are you familiar with any of that? I love all that stuff. So where would you rank that on a credibility scale? It’s real. Ten real or like six real? I’ll go. I’ll go. I want to say nine, but I’ll be conservative and say eight real. I love all that ancient civilization lost technology stuff.

I eat it up. See, it’s interesting to me, though, that ancient alien tech gets an eight out of ten, but 911 inside job gets a two when one of them seems way more incredulous than the other. It’s fair, though. This is not an exact science. And these are all shooting from the hips. This is what I like about this. So this was fun. I definitely feel like I know more about DB Cooper at this exact moment than I ever have before in my entire life. And I also feel that I can claim myself as somewhat of an expert now just because it doesn’t seem like there’s going to be a lot of other things popping up and catching me by surprise, especially if I go back and I rewatch this and I take note of all the different names of the main characters that we kind of brought up.

Like, I could be you, right? I could be Darren. I could start a dB Cooper podcast. Yeah, I mean, this, like I said, this whole thing happened over 5 hours. It would be like being an expert on one super bowl, and there’s way more people in that. So it’s. If you read DB Cooper and the FBI by Bruce Smith, read that book and you’re an expert on this case. I do like that. I like being. Just read a book. And the way that you frame that, too. All you have to do is be an expert on this five minute moment in time, and you kind of have a good idea of a lot of.

Do you think, final one to ten. I get one to ten that somebody knows right now, somebody alive 100% knows who dB Cooper was. I’m going to say a very hopeful eight on that. It does sound like there’s a lot of hope back in that one because it might be that that 77 year old lady that married young, that’s like waiting for, or she’s going to die, and then the sun breaks it and then. I wonder too, though, haven’t enough people stood up and said that they were Spartacus that. Now when that kid’s like, yeah, it was my dad.

They’re like, yeah, kid, get in line. Like, you’re the 400th person this year that claimed your grandpa was DB Cooper. Oh, yeah. I mean, I had someone tell me about a year ago. They’re like. And they weren’t that familiar with the case, but they knew I was really into it. And they’re like, man, wouldn’t it be cool if there was, like, a deathbed confession and this could all just be done? I was like, there have been 27 deathbed confessions, and now it’s to the point where you make a deathbed confession, and I don’t believe you already.

Have you ever heard of John Peter? I don’t think so. Okay. This was a conspiracy theory in the nineties about a guy that they could time travel, and he went back into the nineties and told people about it. And I’ve heard this is when I was like, what are the most outlandish versions you’ve heard? I’ve heard some theories of DB Cooper could have been a time traveler, which could have explained how he got away. But again, nothing that has ever come up explains why the money was never spent except the transgender that wanted to prove that she was still a hardcore badass.

That one fits perfectly. I love that one, man. It’s probably my favorite one if she was. I mean, I guess she could be a CIA agent, too. So there you go. We’ve got them all buttoned up in one. I think that’s my favorite. Absolutely. It was Barb Dayton. Case closed. So if someone’s really, really interested in this and they want to listen to your podcast, tell them where they can find you. And then let’s say that, you know, someone’s out there, and it’s like, wait a minute. My mom’s on her deathbed. She told me about this.

Like, how do they get in contact with you? The Cooper vortex is the show. You can find out wherever you listen to your podcast at. If you want to reach out to me directly, you could find the Cooper vortex on Twitter, or you can email me dbcooperpodcastmail.com. and if you want to hang out with all the other DB Cooper nerds, come to Seattle this November. For Cooper Con, November 15 through the 17th, your ticket price includes admission to the Seattle Museum of Flight, which is pretty awesome, parachutes included. They have a DB Cooper statue there in a parachute.

But Boeing funds that museum, so it is well funded. Are there any DB Cooper experience flights where, like, you can jump out at the same place that DB Cooper jumped out, if not not the same place, but there was a. I don’t know if it was a DC nine or 727, but they were doing the DB Cooper jump, where, for X amount of money, you can jump out the back of this, what used to be a commercial airliner. My friend Nikki Broughton just did his first tandem jump off the aft stairs of. It was either a DC nine or 727, but pretty amazing.

That would be so cool. And they could get, like, the Hollywood money and give you, like, you know, 200 grand and twenties and, like, just do the whole thing. You got to smoke seven cigarettes on the way there. That would be the rough part. I’ll do the jump, but I don’t know if I could do it after seven cigarettes. All right, Dan, thanks for spending some time with me today. I appreciate it. And for making me up to date on DB Cooper, so appreciate your time here. Yeah, thanks, Thomas. It was my pleasure. I had a blast.

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