Synopsis
Max Gunther’s D.B. Cooper: What Really Happened recounts the unsolved 1971 hijacking of a Northwest Orient Airlines flight by a man who used the alias Dan Cooper (later popularly known as D.B. Cooper). The book details how the hijacker boarded the plane in Portland, claimed to have a bomb, demanded $200,000 in cash and four parachutes, and ordered the plane flown to Seattle. After receiving the ransom and parachutes there, he directed the aircraft southward and parachuted into the night somewhere over the Pacific Northwest with the money, vanishing without a confirmed trace.
Gunther presents the official investigation’s findings and the many dead ends that followed, including the partial recovery of some of the ransom money years later along the Columbia River. He then advances a theory that the hijacker survived the jump and lived under a new identity. Drawing on interviews and material from a woman who claimed to have been close to the man, Gunther constructs a narrative of Cooper’s post-hijacking life, his alleged true identity, and the circumstances that eventually led to his death. The account blends the known facts of the case with this purported inside story, offering one of the more detailed early attempts to resolve the enduring mystery of what became of the skyjacker.