This is something everybody has followed over the years. There are a lot of mysteries out there.

There’s no question about it. And this is going to be one of those. People are still making original content about Cooper 50 years later.

Once you get sucked in, you can’t escape. Who knows when or where another piece of the puzzle could show up.

Every few years, someone claims they’ve solved the DB Cooper mystery, and every time it falls apart under scrutiny.

A case that the FBI has referred to as one of the great unsolved mysteries in FBI history.

It’s also considered one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in US history. But this time is different.

The people coming forward aren’t researchers chasing book deals. They aren’t thrillsekers looking for 15 minutes of fame.

They’re his alleged children. And they’ve handed the FBI physical evidence the agency never examined before.

So what is this new evidence? On the afternoon of November 24th, 1971, the day before Thanksgiving, a man walked up to the Northwest Orient Airlines counter.

But today, after hijacking a Northwest Airlines jet, the description on one wire service, master criminal, at Portland International Airport and bought a one-way ticket to Seattle.

Dan Cooper purchased the ticket with cash for the last leg of the flight, Portland to Seattle.

He paid $20 in cash and gave his name as Dan Cooper. He bought the ticket with $20 bill at the airport.

There was no ID required and he gave the name Dan Cooper. Dan Cooper was unremarkable in almost every way.

Witnesses described a white male in his mid-40s with dark hair and brown eyes. He wore a black business suit, a white shirt, a thin black clip-on tie, and a black raincoat.

The old clip-on tie from JC Penny is said to be spotted with evidence. He carried a briefcase and a paper bag.

He’s a Caucasian male. He’s got on a dark suit, black tie, carrying a briefcase.

He looked like any other businessman catching a short commuter flight. But Dan Cooper was not an ordinary businessman.

And those flying him didn’t know the man they were flying with would become one of the world’s greatest mysteries.

Flight 305 departed Portland at 2:50 in the afternoon with 37 passengers and a crew of six.

The flight to Seattle should have taken 30 minutes, but Cooper had other ideas. He settled into seat 18e in the last row of the aircraft.

He’s one of the last to board the plane. Sits in the last row in 18E.

Ordered a bourbon and seven up and lit a rally cigarette. He was calm and seemed content.

Then shortly after takeoff, he handed a note to flight attendant Florence Shaner. She assumed it was his phone number.

Another lonely businessman making a pass. She had gotten enough of those and she politely tucked the note into her pocket without reading it.

This was a slight interference with what Kooper had planned, but it didn’t matter. Cooper knew exactly how to deal with the situation.

So, he leaned toward her and said she had better look at that note. He had a bomb.

Now, he had her attention. And that note became the most single important thing in flight attendant Florence’s hands at that period.

The note said he was hijacking the plane. He opened his briefcase just enough for Florence to see what appeared to be red sticks wired to a battery.

His demands were straightforward. $200,000 in $20 bills, four parachutes, and a fuel truck waiting when they landed in Seattle.

For the next 2 hours, the plane circled Puet Sound while authorities scrambled to meet his demands.

The passengers were told there was a minor mechanical problem. They had no idea what was happening in the back of the cabin.

Meanwhile, Cooper sat calmly with flight attendant Tina Mucklo, who had taken Florence’s place beside him.

He was polite. He ordered another drink and paid for it. He offered Mucklo a cigarette.

When she asked why he was doing this, he said only that he had a grudge.

He never raised his voice. He never made threats beyond the initial bomb claim. Muckllo would later describe him as not nervous and even thoughtful.

That composure would become one of the defining mysteries of the case. This was not a man acting on impulse.

This was someone who had planned every detail, who knew exactly what he was doing, and who seemed entirely confident he would succeed.

That confidence was so high that Cooper didn’t feel the need to threaten anyone with a gun to show he meant business.

When flight 305 finally landed at Seattle Tacoma Airport, Cooper released all 36 passengers and two of the flight attendants.

He kept the pilots, the flight engineer, and Tina Mucklo. The money and parachutes were delivered.

The plane was refueled. Cooper then ordered the crew to fly toward Mexico City at no more than 10,000 ft.

At the slowest speed, the aircraft could safely maintain with the landing gear down and the cabin unpressurized.

The [snorts] pilots warned him they would need to refuel again in Reno. He agreed.

Somewhere over the forests of southwest Washington, Cooper told Mucklo to join the pilots in the cockpit and close the curtain behind her.

A few minutes later, the crew felt a change in cabin pressure. An indicator light showed that the rear air stair door had been opened.

When the plane landed in Reno, Dan Cooper was gone. He had jumped into a freezing November night into rain and wind and darkness, carrying $200,000 and wearing loafers.

The temperature outside the aircraft was 7° below zero. Visibility was near zero. He had no helmet, no jumpsuit, no reserve parachute, just a business suit, a briefcase full of cash, and a canopy he had never tested.

The FBI would later conclude that the jump was borderline suicidal. Cooper had chosen a non- steerable military parachute.

His clothing and footwear were entirely unsuitable for a rough landing. He had jumped into heavily wooded terrain at night with no way to see where he was going.

Either he was the luckiest man alive or he was dead before he hit the ground.

No one ever saw him again. The FBI launched what would become one of the longest investigations in the AY’s history.

They called it Norjack for Northwest hijacking. They interviewed hundreds of suspects. They searched thousands of square miles of wilderness.

Soldiers from Fort Lewis joined the effort. Air Force personnel scanned the flight path. Civilian volunteers combed the forests.

They found nothing. No body, no parachute, no briefcase, no trace of a man who had stepped off a plane and vanished into thin air.

[snorts] But three things proved Cooper didn’t vanish into thin air. In 1980, a young boy discovered three bundles of deteriorating $20 bills along the Colombia River.

The serial numbers matched the ransom money. It was the only confirmed physical evidence ever recovered.

And in [snorts] 2016, after 45 years of investigation, the FBI announced it was closing the case.

They had no body, no confession, no confirmed identity. The hijacking would remain unsolved. Or so everyone thought.

We’ll elaborate on this later on. 5 months after Dan Cooper vanished into the night, another man boarded another plane with another demand for ransom.

On April 7th, 1972, Richard Floyd McCoy Jr. Stepped onto United Airlines flight 855 during a stopover in Denver.

The plane was a Boeing 727, the same model Cooper had hijacked. It had stairs just like Cooper’s plane.

Richard Lloyd McCoy used a gun and a hand grenade to hijack a United Airlines flight from New Jersey to Los Angeles.

McCoy was 29 years old, a Vietnam veteran who had served two tours of duty.

He had been a helicopter pilot and a demolition expert with the Green Berets, one of the most elite units in the US military.

He had been awarded the Purple Heart for wounds sustained in combat. He was also an expert sky diver who had made dozens of jumps, a skill that set him apart from almost anyone else who might attempt this kind of crime.

In the 1970s, hijacking of planes was quite common, and others like DB Cooper and Richard McCoy did it for money.

But by 1972, the war hero had fallen on hard times. He was deeply in debt, struggling to support a wife and two young children while attending Brigham Y Young University on the GI bill.

He had dreams of becoming a Utah State Trooper, of building a respectable life after the military.

Instead, the bills kept piling up. The pressure kept mounting. And somewhere along the way, Richard McCoy decided that hijacking an airplane was the answer to his problems.

20 minutes after takeoff, McCoy revealed a hand grenade and a pistol. He handed the flight crew an envelope labeled hijack instructions containing typed demands, $500,000, and four parachutes.

The parallels to the Kooper hijacking were striking. The same type of aircraft, the same demand for parachutes, the same plan to jump from the rear stairs.

McCoy had clearly studied Cooper’s playbook, but there were differences, too. McCoy was more aggressive, brandishing weapons instead of just claiming to have a bomb.

He demanded more money and unlike Cooper who remained calm and polite throughout his hijacking, McCoy grew visibly nervous as the operation progressed.

The plane was diverted to San Francisco where authorities delivered the ransom and parachutes. McCoy then ordered the aircraft back into the air and bailed out over Provo, Utah, landing near his own home.

He made it exactly 2 days. A citizen who knew McCoy called the FBI to report that his acquaintance had recently described a foolproof plan for hijacking an airplane.

The tipster knew McCoy was a skilled sky diver. He knew McCoy was desperate for money.

He knew McCoy had been talking about how easy it would be to pull off exactly this kind of crime.

Investigators matched McCoy’s fingerprints to a magazine left on the plane. They matched his handwriting to the hijack instructions.

They found a witness at a roadside hamburger stand who remembered selling McCoy a milkshake the night of the hijacking.

They found a teenager who said McCoy had paid him $5 for a ride home while carrying a duffel bag.

When they searched his house, they found $499,970 of the ransom money stuffed in a cardboard box.

They also found skydiving equipment, a typewriter with key impressions matching the type demands, and a pistol.

The evidence was overwhelming. McCoy had executed the hijacking flawlessly and then made every possible mistake in the aftermath.

McCoy was convicted and sentenced to 45 years in federal prison. His wife Karen, who had helped plan and execute the crime, was never charged.

Court records would later reveal that Karen had been deeply involved. She bought the parachute, typed the hijack instructions, drove her husband to the airport, and helped him recover and hide the ransom money after he landed.

But McCoy wasn’t finished. 2 years into his sentence, McCoy used his access to the prison dental office to fashion a fake handgun out of dental paste.

On August 10th, 1974, he and three other inmates commandeered a garbage truck and crashed it through the main gate of Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary.

McCoy was free, but the FBI weren’t about to let him go just like that.

3 months later, the FBI tracked him to a house in Virginia Beach. When agents moved in to arrest him, McCoy drew a weapon.

An agent shot him with a shotgun and thus ended the tale of Richard Floyd McCoy Jr.

He died on November 9th, 1974 at the age of 31. He never confessed to being DB Cooper.

He never denied it either. The FBI officially ruled him out as a suspect, citing physical description mismatches.

Witnesses had described Cooper as being in his mid-40s with an olive complexion. McCoy was 27 at the time of the Cooper hijacking, younger and lighter skinned than the composite sketches suggested.

But the similarities between the two crimes haunted investigators for decades. The identical aircraft, the identical escape method, the military precision, the parachuting expertise.

Either Richard McCoy was DB Cooper or he was the most sophisticated copycat in criminal history.

For 50 years, no one could prove which. Then suddenly, two people could. Richard McCoy left behind a wife named Karen and two young children, a daughter named Shante and a son named Richard III, who went by Rick.

They grew up knowing their father had been a hijacker. That much was public record.

What they didn’t know or couldn’t prove was whether he had done it twice. The suspicion lived in the house like a ghost.

There were things that didn’t add up. Timing, skills, opportunity. The way their father had known exactly how to execute a parachute hijacking as if he had done it before.

The way he had the equipment, the training, the desperation. The children noticed details over the years that suggested their father’s criminal history might extend beyond the 1972 conviction, but the family didn’t talk about it.

Their mother, Karen, was still alive, and the children believed she had been involved in the Utah hijacking.

If their father was also DB Cooper, their mother would have known. She would have helped him just as she had helped him in 1972.

And implicating their father meant implicating her, too. So, they stayed silent for decades. They kept their suspicions to themselves.

They watched documentaries about the Kooper case and saw their father’s name mentioned as a suspect and then dismissed.

They saw amateur investigators claim to have solved the mystery with other suspects. They saw the FBI close the case in 2016, declaring that resources would be better spent elsewhere.

And still they said nothing because saying something meant betraying their mother. Then Karen McCoy died in 2020.

With both parents gone, Shantae and Rick were finally free to speak. But they wanted more than speculation.

They wanted proof. They started going through the family property, through the things their grandmother had kept, through storage sheds and outbuildings that hadn’t been opened in years.

They found it in a storage shed on the family property in Cove City, North Carolina.

And what they found changed everything. In 2022, amateur investigator Dan Grider, a retired pilot who had been researching the Kooper case for 20 years, finally made contact with the McCoy children.

He had tried to reach them before. They had always declined. This time, they were ready to talk.

Grider had spent two decades studying the case, analyzing flight paths, interviewing witnesses, and examining every piece of available evidence.

He had produced a series of YouTube videos documenting his investigation. He believed McCoy was Cooper.

There was a first one, the the DB Cooper one, and then the same guy, Richard Floyd McCoy, he went back and did the exact same thing.

But he had never been able to prove it. And now the McCoy children were offering him access to something no investigator had ever seen.

They told him about the storage shed, about the things their grandmother had kept, about the suspicions they had carried their entire lives.

Grider drove to North Carolina. The McCoys let him search the property. In an outbuilding on the family land, he found crates containing skydiving equipment that had been stored there for decades.

The crates were dusty, undisturbed. Whatever was inside had been sitting there since the 1970s, preserved by neglect and the passage of time.

What he pulled out of those crates stopped him cold. The first item was a parachute harness and container, not a standard rig.

This one had been heavily modified in ways that made it almost unique. The ripcord handle had been moved from the left side to the right.

Straps had been cut and D-ring attachments added. The pack tray had been enlarged to accommodate a larger canopy with a deployment sleeve.

Grider had seen photographs of the parachutes given to DB Cooper. He had studied the specifications for years.

He knew exactly what he was looking at. Grider recognized the modifications immediately. He had studied the Kooper case long enough to know exactly what the FBI had provided to the hijacker in 1971.

The parachutes given to Dan Cooper had come from a skydiving instructor named Earl Cy.

On the night of the hijacking, with the FBI scrambling to meet Cooper’s demands, CSI had provided four parachutes from his own inventory.

One of them was an olive drab green military NB8 container that CSI had personally modified to convert it from a standard bailout rig into a sport parachute.

The modifications were extensive and distinctive. CSI had moved the rip cord handle from the left side to the right.

He had cut certain straps and added D-ring attachments. He had enlarged the pack tray to accommodate a larger canopy with the deployment sleeve.

These alterations were not standard. They reflected CSY’s personal preferences and techniques. No other parachute in the world would have the same combination of modifications.

The FBI knew exactly what those modifications looked like. CSI had worked with investigators for decades, helping them understand exactly what Cooper had taken into the night.

They had been searching for that parachute for 50 years. The rig grider found in the McCoy storage shed matched those specifications, every modification, every alteration, every distinctive feature that made CSY’s work identifiable.

Was this enough to prove that Richard McCoy was DB Cooper? So, was Floyd McCoy a copycat or was he the real McCoy?

Was he DB Cooper pulling off the perfect crime twice? That rig is literally one in a billion.

Dryer said later, “It’s as unique as a snowflake.” The second item was a skydiving log book.

Shante had found it among her grandmother’s possessions. The entries showed that Richard McCoy had taken a series of practice jumps in the months leading up to both hijackings.

The log book documented training sessions with an instructor named Larry Patterson, who taught McCoy the freef fall techniques he would have needed to survive a nighttime jump from a commercial aircraft.

McCoy [snorts] had military jump training as a Green Beret, but that training was for static line jumps where the parachute opens automatically.

A freef fall jump from 10,000 ft in the dark in freezing rain wearing a business suit required different skills.

The log book showed he had acquired them. The third piece of evidence was more circumstantial but no less significant.

The timeline matched. McCoy had the opportunity. He had the skills. He had the financial desperation.

And he had proven 5 months later that he was capable of executing exactly this kind of crime.

In September 2023, Grider and Rick McCoy met with FBI agents in Richmond, Virginia. It was the first investigative action the agency had taken on the Kooper case since announcing its closure in 2016.

The agents were professional, serious. They examined the parachute. They photographed the modifications. They asked detailed questions about where it had been stored and who had access to it over the years.

Then they asked to take it. Ryder and Rick handed over the parachute, the harness, and the log book.

Rick provided a DNA sample. The agents signed for the evidence and took it into custody.

If the modifications matched Earl CSY’s documented work, they would have physical proof linking Richard McCoy to the equipment DB Cooper carried into the night.

If DNA on the harness match samples from Cooper’s clip-on tie, which the FBI had preserved since 1971, they would have something even more definitive.

One month later, the FBI called back. They wanted to search the family property in North Carolina.

Seven agents arrived and spent four hours going through the grounds, the storage shed, the outuildings where the parachute had been found.

Grider watched from a distance, documenting everything on video. The agents were thorough. They were looking for something or they were making sure nothing had been missed.

Since then, silence. The FBI has not commented publicly on the investigation. The agency has not confirmed that it has reopened the case.

The official position remains that DB Cooper was closed in 2016 pending credible new evidence.

But they have not returned the parachute. They have not returned the log book. They have not told the McCoy children that the evidence was worthless.

For 53 years, the FBI searched for a parachute that vanished into the forests of Washington State.

Now they have two, and they were found in a storage shed in North Carolina, kept by the family of a man who knew exactly how to hijack an airplane and jump into the night.

So, is this the man, the FB I have been looking for?