D.B. Cooper historian leads a dig along the Columbia River in WA in hopes of finding new evidence

On the night of Nov. 24, 1971, a man the world would come to know as D.B. Cooper vanished when he jumped out the back of a Boeing 727 mid-flight after ransoming the plane’s passengers and some of its crew for $200,000.

He was never caught.

Now, nearly 50 years later, a de facto expert on Cooper and his infamous skyjacking is conducting a dig along the banks of the Columbia River in Vancouver, Washington, where, in 1980, a boy found $5,800 in Cooper’s ransom money while raking the sand to build a campfire.

That expert is Eric Ulis, an Arizona-based author and documentary filmmaker whose investigation into Cooper has been featured on the History and Discovery channels. In an interview Monday, the 55 year-old Ulis said he'd been aware of the case since the late 70s, but didn't start his independent investigation until the late 2000s. 

"I called it a 'guilty pleasure.' It was just one of those things I was fascinated with," he said. 

Ulis and a team of three others began the dig on Friday. They're searching an area of roughly 300 square feet between a dirt road and the spot where the money was found. Ulis, who got permission from the land’s owners to conduct the dig, said the area has never been searched by authorities.

The four-person team spent the weekend breaking through a 2-foot layer of dirt and large rocks the landowners placed on the beach to help prevent erosion. Ulis expects the dig to be complete sometime in September.  

The Cooper case is one of the most well-known unsolved crimes in the U.S. The FBI Seattle field office said the 45-year investigation is one of the longest and most exhaustive in the agency’s history.

On that night in 1971, a man described as being in his mid-40s with dark sunglasses and an olive complexion boarded a flight from Portland, Oregon, to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. He bought his $20 ticket under the name "Dan Cooper," but an early wire-service report misidentified him as "D.B. Cooper," and the name stuck.

Sitting in the rear of the plane, he handed a note to a flight attendant after takeoff. "Miss, I have a bomb and would like you to sit by me," it said.

The man demanded $200,000 in cash plus four parachutes. He received them at Sea-Tac, where he released the 36 passengers and two of the flight attendants. The plane took off again at his direction, heading slowly to Reno, Nevada, at the low height of 10,000 feet. Somewhere, apparently over southwestern Washington, Cooper lowered the aircraft’s rear stairs and jumped.

The $5,800, which was divided into three bundles and identified as Cooper’s using serial numbers, is the only evidence that’s been recovered in the years after the incident.

Ulis is hoping to find one or both of Cooper's parachutes — he left the plane with only two — and the attaché case that ostensibly carried the bomb. He believes Cooper survived the jump and buried the cash and other items on the riverbank using nearby trees as landmarks he could reference when he came back to recover the money.

Going off this theory, Ulis selected the dig spot using two older trees that he says would have been on the shore in 1971. He says if one were to draw lines between the trees, they would converge in an "X" over the spot where the $5,800 was found in 1980.  

"In my mind, that’s just a little bit too coincidental," he said. "I didn’t just pull this spot out of thin air."

As for the money itself, Ulis believes Cooper recovered the bulk of it prior to 1980.

He says Cooper likely removed several bundles of bills from the cumbersome, open-top bank bag the ransom money came in before he jumped, and then buried them loose alongside the sack. Ulis believes Cooper came back for the money shortly after June 12, 1972, when the Columbia River flooded.

He says the highly publicized flood probably spurred Cooper into action, worried that the items he buried might be uncovered. Ulis said Cooper could have easily missed the $5,800 in loose bundles while retrieving the rest of the money from a waterlogged hole.

“He pulled out the bank bag from its watery grave, probably scooped up as many of those packets as he could, perhaps thought he had all of them, but three of them simply went unnoticed and just got left behind,” he said.

Over the years, the FBI and amateur sleuths have examined innumerable theories about Cooper’s identity and fate, from accounts of unexplained wealth to purported discoveries of his parachute to potential matches of the agency’s composite sketch of the suspect.

But after nearly five decades, the most widely accepted theory is that Cooper died during his escape and his body and belongings are simply lost to the elements. 

"Perhaps Cooper didn’t survive his jump from the plane" the FBI wrote in a profile of Cooper and his crime on its website. "After all, the parachute he used couldn’t be steered, his clothing and footwear were unsuitable for a rough landing, and he had jumped into a wooded area at night—a dangerous proposition for a seasoned pro, which evidence suggests Cooper was not."  

The FBI announced in July 2016 it was no longer actively investigating the case.  

"The mystery surrounding the hijacking of a Northwest Orient Airlines flight in November 1971 by a still-unknown individual resulted in significant international attention and a decades-long manhunt," the FBI said at the time. "Although the FBI appreciated the immense number of tips provided by members of the public, none to date have resulted in a definitive identification of the hijacker."

That means, if the case is ever to be solved, it's up to independent sleuths like Ulis. He maintains that the mystery will be unraveled, and says time is the best ally investigators have in helping them do so.  

"Time is a double-edged sword. In one respect, people pass on and memories fade and that type of thing, which works against us," he said. "But in another sense, you have enhances in science and technology and you learn other things with the passing of time, and that actually serves to help us. On measure, I think time will benefit us and help us solve the case."