A man in a suit, with a briefcase full of dynamite, hijacks a plane and parachutes into the night with $200,000… and vanishes forever.
It’s the greatest unsolved skyjacking in U.S. history.
Was he a criminal mastermind, a folk hero, or something else entirely?
It’s like “Catch Me If You Can” meets “Zodiac”.
Trailer for “The Mystery of D.B. Cooper”
Watch “The Mystery of D.B. Cooper”
You can watch The Mystery of D.B. Cooper on HBO Max at https://play.max.com/show/5ecc0c1a-a770-4a70-bd43-46bff6a43dc2
You can find the latest streaming options at https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/the-mystery-of-d-b-cooper
If you don’t have HBO Max you can watch Netflix’s take (“D.B Cooper: Where Are You?”) here: https://www.netflix.com/title/81349547. I prefer the HBO take, but Netflix’s version is decent.
Ratings:
- My Rating: 90/100
- IMDB Rating: 6.5/10
- Rotten Tomatoes Ratings: 56/100 (Users); 91/100 (Critics)
Release Date: November 25, 2020
My Review of “The Mystery of D.B. Cooper”
The Setup
On Thanksgiving Eve November 24, 1971 a man calling himself “Dan Cooper” boarded a Boeing 727 Northwest Orient Airlines flight from Portland to Seattle.
Mid-flight, he handed a flight attendant a note claiming he had a bomb and demanded $200,000 in cash and four parachutes.
After securing the ransom in Seattle, he let the passengers go, kept the crew on board, and then—somewhere between Seattle and Reno, possibly over the town of La Center, Washington.—he jumped out of the plane with the money. He was never seen again.
Director’s Note — John Dower (also known for “Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos”, “Sophie: A Murder in West Cork” (Netflix), and “Lockerbie”) directs this 84-minute HBO documentary.
You Can’t Make This Sh*t Up
- The perfect crime? Cooper pulled off an airline hijacking by asking the plane to stop to pick up $200,000; then having them take flight again to enable him to parachute into a remote area around Seattle/Reno. No one even knows if he survived the jump.
- Doppelgänger theory: Some believe D.B. Cooper and a similar-looking man named Richard McCoy *(who hijacked a plane in 1972 using nearly identical methods)—are the same person.
More Highlights from the Doc
- The FBI spent 45 years investigating Cooper, only to close the case in 2016. They had over 800 suspects at one point.
- The Columbia River clue: In 1980, an 8-year-old boy found $3,000 buried in the sand on the Columbia River. The bills matched the serial numbers of the ransom money.
- Cooper was so polite during the hijacking that some flight attendants thought he seemed nice.
- He ordered a bourbon and soda mid-crime—just a chill guy committing air piracy.
- His parachute choice was controversial: experts argue that he picked an unreliable one, meaning he might not have survived the jump.
- The ransom bills were never found in circulation, suggesting that either Cooper died or hid the money too well. Lost evidence: The FBI misplaced the cigarette butts Cooper smoked on the plane. If they still had them, modern DNA testing could’ve solved the case.
- Did the FBI get his fingerprints? Unclear. They lifted prints from the plane but never confirmed whether they were Cooper’s.
- Wildest theory? Some claim that D.B. Cooper later had a sex change and is now a woman.
Lesser-Known Details from the Doc
- At least four different men were seriously investigated as potential Coopers, each with compelling evidence against them.
- Some ex-military paratroopers insist that no one could have survived jumping out of a plane into a storm at night over the dense Washington forests.
- The FBI initially suspected the wrong guy—a Portland man named D.B. Cooper—because of a mix-up in the press. The name stuck.
Wrap Up
D.B. Cooper is the ultimate American outlaw: no confirmed identity, no body, no resolution—just a perfect vanishing act.
“The Mystery of D.B. Cooper” doesn’t solve the case, but it’s a wild ride through the theories, suspects, and absurdities of America’s most famous unsolved hijacking.
Thanks for reading!
Rob Kelly, Chief Maniac, Daily Doc