D.B. Cooper — The Unsolved Skyjacking

On November 24, 1971, a man using the alias "Dan Cooper" — later misreported as D.B. Cooper — hijacked a Northwest Orient flight from Portland to Seattle, extorted $200,000 in ransom, and parachuted from the plane over the Pacific Northwest, never to be definitively identified. The FBI's decades-long investigation, codenamed NORJAK, examined hundreds of suspects without producing a confirmed match. In 1980, a small bundle of the ransom money was found along the Columbia River, but no further physical evidence has been located. The case remains the only unsolved airplane hijacking in American aviation history.