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A tangled, torn parachute found buried last month last month is not the one used by plane hijacker D.B. Cooper when he bailed out of a plane over the Pacific Northwest, the FBI said Tuesday. Investigators reached that conclusion after speaking with parachute experts, including Earl Cossey, who packed the chutes provided to Cooper that rainy November night in 1971.
"From the best we could learn from the people we spoke to, it just didn't look like it was the right kind of parachute in any way," said FBI spokeswoman Robbie Burroughs.
Further digging at the site in southwestern Washington turned up no indication that it could have been Cooper's, she added.
A man calling himself Dan Cooper — later mistakenly identified as D.B. Cooper — hijacked a Northwest Orient passenger jet from Portland, Ore., to Seattle on Nov. 24, 1971.
At Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, he released the passengers in exchange for $200,000 and four parachutes and asked to be flown to Mexico. He jumped out the back of the plane somewhere near the Oregon line.
Some of the cash has been found, but his fate is unknown, and investigators doubt he survived.
Children playing near a recently graded road found the parachute, and they urged their father to call the FBI because they had seen recent news stories about Cooper's case. The parachute was the right color, and the location was in the middle of what could have been Cooper's landing zone.
That got the attention of FBI agent Larry Carr, who drove to the site to see the find for himself.
But Cossey told Carr that Cooper's parachute was made of nylon. The one the children found was made of silk and did not feature a harness container. Cossey sold parachutes at a skydiving operation in Issaquah in the 1970s.
Cossey has been through the drill before; this is the third time the FBI has asked him to examine parachutes to see whether they might have been Cooper's.
One chute found long ago — he couldn't remember when — was just a "pilot chute," used to pull the main chute out of the pack. The other time, in 1988, it was a parachute found by a Columbia River diver seeking clues to Cooper's fate.
"They keep bringing me garbage," Cossey said. "Every time they find squat, they bring it out and open their trunk and say, 'Is that it?' and I say, 'Nope, go away.' Then a few years later they come back."
Cossey, though sounding cantakerous, appeared to relish the spotlight Tuesday. He answered his cell phone with "D.B. Cooper" and said he got a kick out of telling some reporters that the parachute was, in fact, the hijacker's.
One reporter called him back angrily, saying he could be fired for writing a false story, but another said the newsroom enjoyed the April Fool's joke.
"I'm getting mixed reviews," Cossey said. "But I'm having fun with it; what the heck."
Parachute isn't hijacker Cooper's
D.B. Cooper's Parachute Possibly Found
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The FBI is analyzing a torn, tangled parachute found buried by children in southwest Washington to determine whether it might have been used by famed plane hijacker D.B. Cooper, the agency said.
Children playing outside their home near Amboy found the chute's fabric sticking up from the ground in an area where their father had been grading a road, agent Larry Carr said Tuesday. They pulled it out as far as they could, then cut the parachute's ropes with scissors.
The children had seen recent media coverage of the case — the FBI launched a publicity campaign last fall, hoping to generate tips to solve the 36-year-old mystery — and they urged their dad to call the agency.
"When we went to the public, the whole idea was that the public is going to bring the answers to us," Carr said. "This is exactly what we were hoping for."
A man identifying himself as Dan Cooper — later mistakenly but enduringly identified as D.B. Cooper — hijacked a Northwest Orient flight from Portland, Ore., to Seattle in November 1971, claiming he had a bomb.
When the plane landed at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, he released the passengers in exchange for $200,000 and asked to be flown to Mexico. He apparently parachuted from the plane's back stairs somewhere near the Oregon border.
Agents doubt he survived because conditions were poor and the terrain was rough, but few signs of his fate have been found.
Carr spoke with the children's father, whom he declined to identify, early this month and learned the chute was white, the same color as Cooper's.
And when Carr overlaid the family's address onto a map investigators made in the early days of the investigation, he learned another encouraging fact: They lived right in Cooper's most probable landing zone, between Green and Bald mountains.
Carr hopped in his car and drove down. He dug around the property for about 45 minutes, unsuccessfully looking for a harness or other remains from the parachute, but the children weren't home, and the father wasn't sure exactly where they found it.
There are no obvious markings on the parachute to indicate whether it's the type Cooper used, a Navy Backpack 6 with a 26-foot canopy, Carr said. He's hoping a member of the public who has expertise in the parachutes will come forward and confirm whether it's the right kind before the FBI bothers to excavate the property. Barring that, the agency could turn to scientific analysis of the fabric.
"We've got to be pretty darn sure we're not wasting time and money here," he said.
If it is Cooper's parachute, that will solve one mystery — where he apparently landed — but it will raise another, Carr said.
In 1980, a family on a picnic found $5,880 of Cooper's money in a bag on a Columbia River beach, near Vancouver. Some investigators believed it might have been washed down to the beach by the Washougal River. But if Cooper landed near Amboy and stashed the money bag there, there's no way it could have naturally reached the Washougal.
"If this is D.B. Cooper's parachute, the money could not have arrived at its discovery location by natural means," Carr said. "That whole theory is out the window."
DB Cooper's Parachute Found?
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D.B. Cooper, the name is synonymous with getting away with crime. Then, there is the other aspect of his legend that is domestic hijacking of airplanes. What he did is such a rarity, the vulnerability of 9/11 struck America to its core.
Cooper stands out because of the nature of his crime and now he is in the news once again. After taking a small aircraft hostage, he landed it, was paid the money he demanded and disappeared into history.
The FBI is reporting that it is taking a long look at a segment of a parachute found in Washington state earlier today and its implication to this almost 25-year case.
So, who is D.B. Cooper?
He is the man who hijacked a Northwest Orient flight from Portland to Seattle in 1971, got what he wanted and was never heard from again. The aircraft landed at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport and he released the passengers for $200,000 in cash.
D.B. Cooper then demanded that he be flown to Mexico where he promptly parachuted out of the airplane flying him to his desired locale. He has never been seen since. Cooper’s tale was chronicled in the 1981 film, “The Pursuit of D.B. Cooper.”
