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Feb. 18, 2019 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:09:32
Edition 383 - D B Cooper Update

Investigative journalist Bruce A. Smith and the latest on his work to solve this infamous 1970s skyjack case...

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast.
My name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Return of the Unexplained.
Nice to know that you're there.
Thank you very much for all of the emails.
Thank you for all of your thoughts and suggestions about the new website.
I think that most of the problems that we had with it are beginning to dissipate now, and we seem to have got solutions for those things that needed solving, which is good news.
But if you have a problem receiving the show or anything to do with the website, get in touch with us through the website theunexplained.tv and there is a new link there so you can directly contact Adam Cornwell, the webmaster, and tell him if there are issues, and he'll help you get it sorted.
So, you know, we're getting there.
The direction of travel is good.
Your comments about things are pretty good.
Thank you.
And keep those coming.
Nice to hear from new people, which I seem to be all the time.
So the roadmap for this edition of the show is I'm going to say hello to some people, do some shout-outs.
If I can't get round to your email, then please know that I have seen it because I do see them all and I try to reply in person to as many as I can.
But we're going to do some of those.
Then we're going to do Bruce Smith talking about the D.B. Cooper case, one of the greatest aviation mysteries there has ever been.
Early 1970s, if you haven't heard of this before, I'll give you a snapshot of it before we talk to Bruce Smith.
How is it?
How could it be?
That a man could hijack a plane, a 727, on an internal flight in the US, get $200,000 supplied to him, and then parachute his way off the back of the plane in the days when some planes, I think they were mostly McDonnell Douglas and the Boeing 727, had rear steps.
Remember those that would fold downwards at the back of the plane?
A very few planes, I think, still have those.
And he was able to parachute off the back of that and apparently disappear into complete thin air, leaving a few apparent clues behind.
But mostly, nobody knows now, really, whether the man died or whether he got away with the $200,000, which I guess by today's values will be more like $2 million.
So we're going to explore that with Bruce Smith coming very soon.
He's written a book about this and done a lot of research.
Shout outs, Kev in Waltham Abbey.
Kev, nice to hear from you.
And I've got it right this time, haven't I?
It's Waltham Abbey.
James, nice to hear from you.
Brett in Pilbara, Australia, involved in the mining operation there.
Brett, nice to know that you're listening and please stay safe, especially in those temperatures of 50 degrees or so that you have there.
Good to hear from you.
Lewis in Canberra, remarkable story, Lewis.
Thank you for that from the Spanish flu era.
Jev, thank you for your email.
Robert Brown, thank you for getting in touch.
Nice to read your email.
Brittany in Knoxville.
Good to hear from you, Brittany.
Gareth in Morpeth, Northumberland, UK.
Thank you for your email, too.
And finally, this time, Bill sent me an astonishing photograph.
And I've looked at this photograph that you sent me, Bill, that I know was taken on a family holiday in Cornwall, in a place that you were renting.
And there is something that appears in that photograph that looks like some kind of, I don't know, apparition or artifact or something.
But it looks real and three-dimensional.
And it doesn't look as if it's been put there after the fact or appeared there because of something wrong with the technology.
It looks like it is actually there.
But whatever it is, I can't work out.
And I keep looking at this picture.
It's got depth.
It's got three-dimensionality to it.
And it doesn't look like it is something caused by a problem with the light, an artifact with a lens or whatever.
Strange photograph.
If I had a way to show you this photograph, I would, but it's weird.
It really is.
And I'll keep looking at that.
And if I come up with an idea for having that analyzed, if you'd like me to, then I'll try and do that, Bill.
And thank you very much for sharing that.
The D.B. Cooper case, then.
This is the case of an aircraft hijacking and a man who gets away.
Apparently scot-free, as we say here, with $200,000.
How did he do it?
Who might he be?
What became of him?
And what about the investigation?
How was that handled?
And how do we look at this case?
All of these decades on.
The man who knows the answers to some of those questions, I think, and more, is Bruce Smith.
He's on the line to the unexplained right now.
Bruce, thank you for coming on.
I understand that you are in the grip of a bit of a deep freeze at the moment.
Yes, we are.
The polar vortex has wiggled its finger upon us, and we are shivering and dealing with snow and ice and wintry conditions.
Well, you're in my thoughts here.
I know that when it turns cold where you are, it gets pretty cold.
You're Seattle area, aren't you?
Correct.
I'm out in the woods.
I'm not downtown.
I'm halfway between the city and the mountains, so I'm out in the woods.
Yeah, you see, you're just one step away from Alaska, really, aren't you?
Something like that.
Yeah, B.B. Cooper flew right over my house.
So it's a personal story.
I mean, everybody in my neighborhood talks about Cooper with frequency.
They do.
Even after 40 years, it's still a topic of conversation.
You know what?
That is the remarkable thing about this story, that people are indeed, as you say, what is it now, 47, 48.
This is the 48th anniversary, isn't it?
I think we're heading towards 48, yeah.
And people are still fascinated by it.
I was mentioning to my listener here before we started doing this that I work with a guy called Bob Mills on Sunday nights.
He's a famous British comedian.
There's a radio show before mine.
And Bob always says to me, so who was D.B. Cooper then?
Are you going to be doing D.B. Cooper tonight?
He is fascinated by D.B. Cooper.
So, you know, it's transatlantic.
It is such a phenomenon.
Simply because I think nothing like that had ever happened before.
By today's standards, it sounds outlandish that somebody could do that.
And then for this whole legend and myth and enigma to grow up out of it all is equally astonishing, I think.
So we're going to pick our way through the case.
First question for you, though, Bruce, is why the interest?
I think the D.B. Cooper case has multiple levels of passionate fascination.
To begin with, it's the Only unsolved skyjacking in the history of the world, let alone the United States.
So, right off the bat, you have a compelling mystery story.
And the fact that nothing has ever been found just adds super duper icing on the cake.
And the fact that we don't even know the identity of D.B. Cooper, who he was, where he came from, where he went back to when he left the airplane, none of that is known.
There is no information whatsoever on that.
So this is an absolute, the mystery is complete.
It is the blackest of black holes, and it just sucks you in.
And we call it the vortex.
Those of us who research Cooper and comment on Cooper and all the resulting, you get the good, bad, and ugly.
You get geniuses who are researching and you get the wackadoodles along with them, you know.
And you never know exactly who you're talking to.
So there's that aspect.
Then when you get into it a little deeper, such as someone like myself who's an investigative journalist, and start reaching into the FBI, reading files, and you start seeing the contradictory information, the sloppy record keeping, the documentation that is erroneous and is the summary reports that are misleading and incorrect and incomplete.
You begin to see how the FBI and all, and by extension, all law enforcement and all large bureaucracies who are charged with fairness and justice and investigations can be very limited and very, it's a very messy kind of thing.
And it's not like what you see on TV at all.
The FBI had trouble in 9-11 connecting the dots.
So that's Condoleezza Rice's famous quote.
We didn't know 9-11 was going to happen because we couldn't connect the dots.
Well, the reality is that law enforcement always has trouble connecting the dots.
And they certainly had trouble in the D.B. Cooper case.
So when you commit an innovative, out-of-the-box kind of crime that's never been performed before, and you do it spanning multiple jurisdictions, you're probably going to get away with it because the bureaucracies can't catch up fast enough.
They're just, they're not built for speed.
And you have to remember, of course, Bruce, don't you, that this is 1971.
So yes, there are fax machines available then, I think, but there's not the instant communication that you've got now.
So even America, the great thing about America is it is a federal system.
It's federated states and various agencies that are involved in this.
That's great for separating powers and maintaining our freedoms.
It's lousy for detecting crimes.
Yes, yes.
So when you start getting into this and you start seeing all the mistakes and the messiness of the FBI investigation and the fact that 48 years later, we still don't know exactly where Cooper landed.
We don't know where the plane was when he jumped out of it.
We can't find radar scripts.
There's missing information.
There are strangely redacted transcripts of communications between the pilots and the control towers.
When you start getting into this kind of thing, you're going, uh-oh, conspiracy.
And the D.B. Cooper case for me is the kind of case that has all of these mysteries, all of this juicy stuff to dig into, but it's small enough that you can wrap your head around it and not get overwhelmed.
Yeah, you're dead right.
On one level, it is a web, a complex nexus, a web of complexity.
And on the other hand, it is a simple crime of somebody getting an awful lot of cash and getting away with it, seemingly.
Yeah, it was a one-guy thing.
You know, it was a one-guy, one-day deal.
It wasn't like JFK.
It wasn't like 9-11.
It wasn't like any of the big super-duper conspiratorial mysteries that consume us often.
D.B. Cooper is the perfect fit, I think, to have these kinds of conversations and not just say, well, who knows?
We'll never know.
But we can certainly ask the questions, and that is a valuable thing to do.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
I think for our listener here in the UK, maybe a little younger than perhaps you or I, may not have followed and watched this, I think I need to let you tell the story from the beginning then, the what happened in this, you know, because the actual unfolding of this is eyebrow-raisingly fascinating.
Yeah.
Okay, right off the bat, you have something unusual.
In the day before Thanksgiving in 1971, the actual date was November 24th.
You had a middle-aged man.
Now, these kinds of crimes generally aren't committed by middle-aged men.
They're usually committed by young 20-somethings who are crazy and stupid and think they're bulletproof.
That's not the case with the fellow who called himself Dan Cooper and bought himself a one-way ticket for 20 bucks in the Portland, Oregon airport, boarded a Northwest Orient jetliner, which happened to be a 727, that was en route to Seattle.
It was going to be a 40-minute flight.
And as the plane rolled down the runway, he handed a note to the stewardess sitting right behind him in her jump seat by the galley.
And the note said, Miss, I want you to sit next to me.
I have a bomb, and I'm hijacking this airplane.
The woman's name was Florence.
She was exceptionally rattled and anxious.
She got in the seat next to him, and he opened up his briefcase, and he showed her what appeared to be six or eight sticks of dynamite, a large battery, lots of wires and switches and things like that.
And she was Convinced that this was legit.
She really began to shake and just become agitated.
Her colleague, Tina Mucklau, saw that her colleague was in rough shape emotionally, came over, said, What's happening?
Florence handed her the note, got up, and Florence, I mean, I'm sorry, Tina then went to the intercom, called the cockpit, and said, we're being hijacked.
We have a fellow back here in row 18 who says he has a bomb.
Florence just saw what appears to be a bomb.
She's heading to the cockpit with the note.
And you've got to remember, this is 1971.
And the only experience that most people will have had of anything like that was watching reports of what was going on in the Middle East.
There were people like, wasn't it Layla Khaled was the name?
These things were happening, you know, in this direction.
They weren't happening on domestic flights in America.
That's not true.
Before Cooper, there had been hundreds of skyjackings of U.S. airplanes in the United States, but most of them were political, and it was all Flying to Cuba to the point where it became a joke for comedians.
Right, so I can remember Flying Me to Cuba.
Are you going to Habana?
You know, that kind of thing.
This was the first time it was a straightforward extortion crime.
There had been monies requested in other skyjackings prior to Cooper, but mostly they were whackadoodle kinds of things like, I'm hijacking this plane.
I want $100 million and I want all of the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court to get on board with me.
We're going to fly to Cuba and we're going to solve the world's problems.
It was that kind of thing so that there would be pronounced mental health issues alongside all the dangers that are concomitant to a skyjacking.
But this was very different in that the person who perpetrated this under the name of D.B. Cooper clearly had a very carefully formulated plan.
Exactly.
So this was very different.
As the case, when a case agent told me, he says, I treated this as a bank job in the sky.
And it had all those earmarks of a well-planned, well-executed operation.
As it turns out, D.B. Cooper, so on the flight, to get back to some of the basics, Cooper in his conversations with the pilots, he never met the pilots and they did not leave the cockpit, but he communicated with them through this new flight attendant named Tina Muklau and sent them a lot of notes.
And basically, he wanted $200,000 in cash and four parachutes.
And he wanted two specific kinds of parachutes.
He wanted two front and two back.
Most people knew that the two front meant he wanted two reserve chutes, which are smaller parachutes.
And the two back chutes would be main parachutes or primary parachutes that most people would associate with skydiving.
He said, give me the parachutes, give me the money.
When we get to Seattle, I'll let you have the passengers.
We'll make an exchange.
And after that, I want the pilots to fly me to a destination and I'll let you know where I want to go after we make the exchange.
That was done.
He was on the ground for two and a half hours.
The FBI began to monkey around with the plane, as they like to do.
In the airline industry, there was a very uneven relationship with the FBI.
The FBI were called cowboys because they like to have gun battles and shoot it up.
They wanted to get their guy.
The airplanes, the airline industry realized that it was much cheaper to go comply with the skyjacker's demands, fly him wherever he wants to go, do it the way he wants to do it.
And at the end of the day, you get your plane back with no holes in it, and all your passengers are good to go.
They're a little grumpy.
You give them a free meal, a couple drinks, and you're good to go.
And the day is over.
And that's the way they are.
But it's for the airline, it's damage limitation.
You said the FBI began to monkey around with the plane.
Yes, exactly.
Two weeks prior, they had intercepted a skijacking of a small charter airplane.
They shot out the tires, refused to refuel the plane, and the hijacker shot the pilot, killed the pilot, killed his hostage, and then killed himself.
And the FBI was taken to court for wrongful death and was successfully prosecuted.
So the FBI, by the time it came to be D.B. Cooper, and that prior skyjacking was known as 58 November.
There's documentaries made on it.
It's well established what the protocols and procedures and the mindset, the culture of the FBI was.
And there's a wonderful book written about how the FBI approached skyjackings and how the airlines would often collude with the hijacker to circumvent the more violent tendencies of the FBI.
And that book is called The Skies Belong to Us, Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Skyjacking by Brendan Corner.
So in other words, the responsibility, according to that claim, for keeping everybody safe and minimizing the harm, you would expect that to be taken up by the authorities and the FBI.
But it was actually, in some cases, you say, the airline colluding with the hijacker to make sure the whole thing was dealt with as quickly as possible, even if the hijacker got the money and got away.
Exactly.
So what the FBI tried to do is they started delaying the refueling.
Cooper got agitated.
The pilot saw that Cooper was getting agitated.
And the pilot told me, he said, I had to put my foot down with the FBI.
And yes, I did raise my voice.
And that's all I'm going to say about it.
He told the FBI, this is a matter of life and death.
I'm the captain of this airplane.
Refuel the sucker and let's get going.
And the FBI ultimately complied and filled the plane.
By the way, in 1971, to give you a view of what the economy and what the world was like in 1971, the entire plane was refueled for $116 worth of fuel.
It was probably 40 cents.
I think it was 11 cents a gallon for airplane.
That was a different era.
Definitely a different era.
So, not only no cell phones, no computers, no internet, you had cheap gas.
Okay, so they make the exchange, and Cooper says, let's go fly to Mexico.
And he gave very strange, very unusual metrics.
He said, I want you to fly no higher than 10,000 feet.
I don't want you to go any faster than 200 miles an hour.
I want you to lower the landing gear, the wheels, and lock them down.
And I want you to lower your wing flaps to 15 degrees.
The pilot told me, he says, when Cooper said set them at 15, he said, I knew I was dealing with a guy who really knew his way around airplanes because the 727 was a very popular airplane in its day for one main reason.
It had its own internal staircase system so it could fly to small airports that didn't have jetways.
And it also is the only Boeing product that has a predetermined setting on the control panel for 15 degrees.
So when the pilot said that his hijacker told him to set it at 15, he knew that the hijacker would be familiar with the cockpit instrumentation.
So he knew that it had to be flown at 15 degrees, and he also knew that there would be a 727 on that route on that day, which of course has those elevating or tipping out rear stairs, which planes these days tend not to have.
Exactly, exactly.
And one of the reasons they don't have them is because they don't need them, because jetways are ubiquitous now.
Every airport has them.
And the aft stairs, what they call the ventral stairs of the Boeing 727 were used because in those days before jetways, you would have to roll up a staircase.
And that was very cumbersome and left a lot more equipment out on the Taramac and became just, you cluttered up the runways with all this stuff getting people on and off the runways.
Excuse me.
So Cooper's on his way out of SeaTac.
They fly at 10,000 feet.
They're going to 200 miles an hour.
And they're going very slowly.
And they're burning a lot of fuel.
And they say, look, we're not going to be able to make it Mexico.
We've got to stop and refuel someplace along the way.
And after a lot of argumentation back and forth, they decide on Reno, Nevada.
So they set the navigation controls for Reno.
Now, when you fly out of Seattle Airport at 10,000 feet, unbeknownst to most people, all commercial airliners don't fly just anywhere they want to.
They fly in predetermined air corridors, no matter what elevation or altitude you're flying at, or whatever speed you're flying at.
They're like highways in the sky.
And coming south out of Seattle is an air corridor known as Victor 23.
And it basically follows the I-5 corridor in the sky, which would be the large intermountain valley that runs between Seattle down to Portland and then through the Willamette Valley through central Oregon all the way down to California.
Because there's the Cascade Mountains, which go up to 14,000 feet to the eastern side, and then you have the coastal range, which has some mountains at 10,000 and 11,000 feet off to the west.
So the safest place to fly when you're flying below some of these summits is to go through Victor 23 and basically fly above the I-5 corridor, the interstate, the main highway between Seattle and Portland.
About 40 minutes later into the flight, the cockpit reports a lot of oscillations and pressure variations, and they realize that Cooper has lowered the aft stairs.
And they didn't know that the plane could be flown with the stairs actually suspended.
They radioed into flight operations of Northwest Orient.
No one there could tell them that this was safe.
And ultimately, the CIA and Boeing had to tell Northwest Orient, who then relayed the information to the pilots, oh yeah, Cooper knows what he's doing because we do that all the time with the 727s over here with Air America.
So a little known facet of the plane's capabilities, but D.B. Cooper knew that he could do that.
Exactly.
So Cooper knew more about the plane than the pilots or anybody in flight operations at Northwest Orient.
Cooper's knowledge of the plane was considered to be top-secret information, known only to selected military commanders in Vietnam and to certain engineers and executives at Boeing.
This was a quiet capability of the 727.
It's now understood that Boeing would make planes with certain capacities, such as the 727 with the eventual staircase, and would do the testing to let the military know how it would be safe to jump commandos out of the back of the airplane.
And so that you could use the 727 for covert operations.
This was a selling point for Boeing that was kept under the radar and was kept top secret.
And apparently, the information was very well guarded because most people in the skydiving community had no idea that you could actually skydive out of a 727.
And that's one of the things that people looking at the story today, it's what makes them mistake this for a piece of fiction because they think, well, that couldn't possibly happen.
Now, this is beginning to point the finger then, and I haven't heard these aspects of the story before, at somebody who is perhaps ex-military, is connected to the aviation sector, has a remarkable amount of aeronautical knowledge.
So it becomes clear when you look at these facts, this guy's an insider.
Bingo.
When you talk to covert commandos, covert ops guys, guys who are commandos and making a living at it, they're absolutely convinced that Cooper is one of their guys.
As one commander told me, he was from Special Ops, Special Forces.
He told me, he says, look, if it walks like a duck and cracks like a duck, it's a duck.
Cooper was one of us.
He did it exactly the way we would do it.
It has Special Ops signatures all over it.
It was well planned, well executed.
He never broke a bead of sweat.
He had crowd control.
He was with his passengers, or at least some of the crew members.
Tina Muklow sat next to him for five hours.
He had full command of his environment.
He knew what he was doing.
He was a trained professional.
This was not some bozo who concocted this idea on a barstool the night before.
not at all just think of the well i'm thinking for a Think of the kahunas that you've got to have to be able to lower the steps and actually jump that jump.
Yes, yes, yes.
Mucho kahones.
Yeah, bingo.
So at approximately 8.15 on the evening before Thanksgiving, there's a super duper bump in the fuselage, and the pilots figure that must be Cooper jumping off the bottom step of the aft stairs, and that when he leaves, the aft stairs spring back up like a springboard and slam into the fuselage.
There's what they call a pressure bump.
The plane begins to curtsy back and forth, to use their term, and the pilots had to trim it out as they described it.
They regain control of the airplane and continue on to Reno.
Now, the question is, where was the plane when Cooper jumped?
And Northwest Orient got on that right of way and determined that he was probably just about coming into the Portland, Oregon airport area, where he had started his skyjacking a few hours earlier.
And the area is rolling countryside.
It's got some trees.
It has some hills and some small mountains.
It's not wilderness area.
It's more like agricultural and what we call McMansions around here, big homes owned by hedge fund owners and that kind of thing on 20 acres, and they're running horses and things like that.
So it's kind of gentlemanly country kind of thing.
It's former timberland country.
There's a lot of clear cuts and things like that.
So it was a mixed environment for a skydiver to jump into.
But it's the kind of place that you can melt away from because, yes, not everybody lives there, but at least it's got communications, it's got roads.
Yes, and lights, ambient lights.
It's suburban, so there's going to be ambient light.
We have a lot of light reflecting off urban centers coming off the clouds.
So it never gets really truly dark unless the fog sets in.
But in most rainstorms, there's an ambient light.
It's a grayish kind of thing in the glow from urban lights.
So Cooper's on the ground one way or the other by 8.30.
So either he landed safely or he crashed landed and is dead.
and we just haven't found the body.
Interestingly enough, everything...
They didn't think he was going to jump.
So right off the bat, the FBI was caught flat-footed.
It's like, oh, my God, he really did jump.
We got to go look for him now.
Holy shimole, where do we look?
So there are two ways of looking at this then, aren't there, Bruce?
I'm sorry to interrupt.
One of the ways to look at it is they assumed this was a suicide mission, so they let him get on with it.
And the other side of it is that maybe somebody actually knew about this on some level and let it happen.
There's not.
There's commentary on both elements that you described, but they're not considered to, they're not given much weight.
Very few people think of Cooper as being on a suicide mission, and that was not the FBI's perspective when they found that he wasn't on the plane.
The fact that the FBI has publicly speculated that they think Cooper died in the jump is something that really has emerged in later years.
It was not their thinking on the night of the skyjacking.
They were pretty impressed with the guy and, in fact, thought that they were dealing with a master criminal is one way to put it, or they were dealing with a professional skydiver and also to possibly a commando, ex-military.
And so they began to interrogate troopers coming out of Vietnam and from special forces and the covert ops, and particularly an operation called Mac V SOG, which was a super-duper covert operation, but very large, large scale, which is called Material Assistance Command Vietnam Special Operations Group.
And these were guys who were special forces and reassigned from the Army to the CIA, and they conducted special operations outside of Vietnam that were illegal and were supposedly totally off the books.
So you would need to have had that kind of expertise and come from that kind of background to pull off a stunt like this.
The guys in MAC v Sag are absolutely convinced that Cooper's one of them.
Absolutely convinced.
In fact, they even name a name.
And they say Sergeant Ted Braden is probably your guy.
He's probably Cooper.
I don't think he is because he's too short.
He was like 5'7, but he was a tough son of a bitch.
And as one of the commanders, one of his commanders told me, he says, Braden had cajones bigger than watermelons.
Look, wouldn't the person who was going to carry out something like this then, if they were connected in that way and if they were part of special forces in that way, whoever they are, he needed to gather and garner information.
He needed to know stuff.
There would have been things that he needed to find out.
Didn't he leave a trail behind him?
Well, that's the thing.
He didn't leave a trail.
Everything that was not found on the plane has never been found.
So things went Out of the plane.
When Cooper left the plane, he took a lot of stuff with him.
But I mean, an informational trail with the place that perhaps he'd once worked, or the ways that he'd tried to garner information about pulling this thing off and planning it.
You know, even if he wasn't in the service at that point, he may have used contact.
CE, you know, he'd have been seeking information.
Surely that leaves some kind of trail.
There has been some kind of trail, but it's been inconclusive.
And I don't think Cooper left any kind.
I don't think he was sloppy.
There are some skydiving drop zones, particularly that are known to be recruiting stations for the CIA.
And one is called Elsinore, and it's down in California.
And there have been investigations of the people who went down there to learn special kinds of skydiving techniques and were known before Cooper to be asking the kinds of questions that somebody like Cooper would be asking to get himself prepared for a skydiving hijack.
Those investigations have been inconclusive.
There's one fellow by the name of Walter Recker, who is now being promoted actively as a Cooper suspect, and he did spend time in Elsinore.
Ironically, he was rejected by the CIA, but according to the people who are promoting Walter Recker, Walter was later recruited by the CIA and had a career as a special assassin kind of contract for hire gunman internationally.
And so that's the Recca story.
If that is true, that rules him out then.
Well, I don't know if it rules him out, but it just makes the story bigger.
How do you accommodate or include the full Walter Reca story?
Walter Recca was discovered the night of the D.B. Cooper case wandering in the woods, soaking to the skin and in the mountains due east of Seattle.
So he was near the area, but he wasn't in the drop zone area, unless all of the official narrative in terms of where the plane was and where Cooper landed and where he jumped and all that, if all of that is BS, then maybe the Walter Record story has some truth to it.
And he was, in fact, a couple hundred miles away up in the mountains, deep in the mountains.
Is he still with us?
Walter Recker died a few years ago.
And did he have anything to say about any of this while he was living?
He said he was D.B. Cooper.
He signed an affidavit claiming he was D.B. Cooper.
So he's 901 in terms of the confession.
Yes, because as you said, as you have said, there are more than 900 people who've confessed to doing this, which just makes it even more smoky and impenetrable.
Yeah, and who knows, and a few of them have signed these kinds of affidavits or legal documentation.
So much, you know, the value of a piece of paper.
After the event happened, and I'm sorry again to, I think we've got a bit of delay between us, and I'm sorry to interrupt, but after the event happened, I understand that a piece of a tie was found and some banknotes, but that's all that's ever been found.
Is that right?
Correct.
The FBI apparently picked up a tie on one of the seats when the plane got to Reno.
It is widely believed that the tie belonged to Cooper.
He was seen wearing a tie when he boarded the plane.
We don't know if he took the tie off and left it behind, but it's presumed that he did.
The tie is a treasure trove of clues because it's filled with rare earth minerals, particles, subatomic particles and microscopic particles from rare earth minerals, particularly titanium and the kinds of phosphors that you would see in oscilloscopes and airplane instrumentation panels.
So it's believed that the tie was used by somebody who would be working in a high-end metallurgy foundry or was a fabricator or an engineer or a designer or an inspector at Boeing or things like that.
Also, four different kinds of DNA, three or four different kinds of separate samples of DNA have been found on the tie.
The FBI says the DNA is inconclusive.
I find that very hard to believe in the day and age now of touch DNA analysis and things like that.
Especially with today's technology.
Exactly, exactly.
The FBI has totally walked away from all of that.
They have never commented on any investigation that they might have done on the particles that were found on the tie.
And they say, well, there's not enough stuff for us.
There's not enough human tissue material on the tie for us to determine DNA.
I simply find that impossible to believe in this day and age, as you said, due to advanced technology.
And what about the banknotes that were found apparently on the ground, weren't they?
Now, somebody who was that organized wouldn't have left a clue like that, would they?
You would think not, would you?
But here's the deal with the banknotes.
About $6,000 U.S. the money was found in $20 bills in a very deteriorated state, but the bundles still had rubber bands around them, and they were very compressed to the point where the bills actually stuck together.
And if you tried to pry it apart, you would get chunks of the money coming off.
It was found by a family who were not familiar with D.B. Cooper.
It was found about eight or nine years after the skyjacking on a beach, a sandy beach on the Columbia River.
And to this day, nobody knows how the money got there or when.
And it's the only incontrovertible piece of the D.B. Cooper, of physical evidence in the D.B. Cooper case that has ever been discovered.
So the tie and the money Is it in terms of physical evidence?
Now, D.B. Cooper, in getting away, assuming D.B. Cooper parachuted with the money out of the plane, successfully got to the ground, and this person was very cool and calculated.
We know that already, he would have needed to have had a plan on the ground.
He wouldn't have just walked for miles and miles and miles, would he?
He would have rendezvoused with somebody or picked up a vehicle somewhere.
He'd have got himself away from there.
You would think so.
From my point of view, the Cooper case was crafted to such a fine degree that you would think that he'd have a very strong getaway plan.
Now, I would like to add some speculation here.
If Cooper had advanced knowledge of the 727, such as he would get by being a commando, if he had access to that kind of information, it's plausible that he also had access to people who knew that information and would be willing to be part of an extraction team.
I would think that based on the kinds of delays and the timing factor in his departure, that there had been possibly multiple people stationed along the I-5 corridor waiting to pick him up, and that in his pockets or in a bag that he carried on board, a small brown paper bag or burlap bag, we're not exactly sure.
It's either tan or yellow.
Witness accounts vary in terms of what they saw.
There may have been some kind of communication device.
And it's plausible that he had a well-oiled getaway team waiting for him on the ground.
And we've got to remember $200,000.
Today you would think, well, there wouldn't be enough money to pay a team.
But we're talking about more than a million dollars today.
Yes.
Well, here's a couple things on the $200,000.
To begin with, the $200,000 was the most amount of money ever extorted at any one crime up until that point in a legitimate fashion.
None of these $100 million and give me all the Supreme Court justices of the United States.
None of that.
But in terms of straightforward actual crimes that were considered to be legitimate, Cooper's money was the largest request.
It was a million, over a million dollars in today's value.
And also, too, the $200,000 in 20s weighed about 20, 25 pounds and is considered by most people to be the maximum amount of weight that you would want to carry in a skydive because it would make you asymmetrical.
would be weighted unevenly in terms of your body.
And it could be flapping around unless...
20, 25 pounds is considered the maximum weight that you would want to have strapped to yourself.
You even thought about that, the maximum amount of cash and in what denominations in order to make the jump feasible.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So how far does $200,000 divvy up if you've got to split it up between five guys waiting for you on the ground?
Well, you give each 10 grand.
It's a pretty good night's work, you know?
And there's circumstantial evidence to support the getaway team.
There's another writer who has done some research into that.
His name is Jeffrey Gray.
His book, Skyjack, is an excellent account of the D.B. Cooper case.
And he talks about a fellow by the name of Jake who contacted and said that, yes, I was part of an extraction team.
Jeffrey Gray has not been able to prove that there, conclusively that there was a getaway team, but he proved to his satisfaction and to mine that the story that Jake told of who he was and how he got recruited for this operation is legitimate.
So Jake was telling, when he talks about himself, was definitely telling the truth.
Now, whether he is actually part of a getaway team for Cooper, that has yet to be determined conclusively.
There's an old phrase that we use both sides of the Atlantic, and it works here.
That phrase is follow the money.
What about actually laundering and dispensing with the cash when you've got it?
Assuming he gets away with the money, pays off the people he's got to pay off.
They keep their mouths shut.
Everybody involved is going to have to find a way of disposing of, laundering, or spending the money.
Well, that opens up a whole nother question, and this is not very well examined in the D.B. Cooper case, and that is what do you do with laundering money?
How do you launder money?
Do you go to casinos?
Do you go to Hong Kong?
Do you go into the black market?
It's possible that all this money went directly into what's known as the black economy or the black market, where there are financial institutions that do nothing but deal with nefarious crimes.
And the money never has to be laundered because it always stays dirty.
But I would have assumed that in that era, there would have been a Tom Hanks, you know, that Catch Me If You Can movie with Leo DiCaprio?
There would have been a Tom Hanks agent on the case trying to find those banknotes.
You would think, but that individual has never appeared as far as I know.
So nobody in the FBI has come forward to apply that kind of rigor to the case and that kind of creative, determined genius to the point where he doesn't even have a family to go to for Thanksgiving.
I think in the movie, the two of them are alone for Thanksgiving or Christmas or something and talk on the phone.
That's the kind of single-mindedness that is rare, in my experience, in law enforcement.
It's commonplace on TV, but in real life, not so much.
So why do you think they haven't, the authorities, pursued this with the diligence over the decades that they might?
Is it because it was embarrassing, or is there another reason?
Well, there's multiple reasons.
It's easy to get to the conspiratorial aspect of things, and this was covered up right from the get-go that somebody in the CIA called Jay Ed Hoover and said, look, Jay, you got to keep this one quiet.
It's got too many implications that we don't want to be publicly discussed.
It's going to involve Vietnam and special operations and things like that.
At the very least, the night of the skyjacking, while the skyjacking is in place, we now know that a cover-up or a spin job, but perhaps a better way to put it, is the narrative began to be written about the kind of story we want to tell the public.
And it has ripple effects that perhaps are still playing out to this day.
The story we hear from the passengers conflicts sharply with what the crew have told the world.
Things didn't quite happen on the plane the way the crew said, where everything was cool, calm, and collected.
They moved the passengers up away from Cooper in the course of the flight, and that there was a buffer zone of at least three or four rows between the passengers and Cooper, and that safety was preeminent, and that a safe environment was maintained by Northwest Orient throughout the entire skyjacking.
That is now widely discredited because passengers have been talking and describing how they were overserved, the liquor was flowing on the two and a half hours that they circled before they landed, waiting for the parachutes and the money to arrive at the airport, that people got drunk.
Rowdy guys in row 12, it's not known exactly who, but it was somebody wearing a military uniform and somebody wearing a cowboy hat started having a fistfight.
It had to be broken up to the point where even Cooper was involved by shouting these guys down, telling them to sit down.
Also, too, we now know that an FBI agent did board the plane and got when they landed at SeaTac, an FBI agent came on board.
And I know that because the passenger who told me, his name is Larry Feingold, he was a U.S. district attorney and knew the FBI agent from the courts.
And Larry told me that the FBI agent came up to him and said, yes, there's a skyjacking in progress.
The skyjacker's on board.
I'll get back to you later and tell you more.
Larry told me the guy's name is John, John, and he couldn't remember the agent's last name.
That agent apparently was turned around.
I presume that the lead flight attendant, a woman by the name of Alice Hancock, turned him around and said, not on my ship, buddy.
You want to have a gun battle?
You're going to have to pick another airlines.
Because that was the nature of the flight attendants.
They were tough cookies.
And yet people were being plied.
The passengers were being plied with alcohol.
Surely.
They were cut off.
Well, I mean, surely, if you're in a situation like that, you need everybody alert just in case something happens that means that everybody's got to get out of there in a hurry.
If they're all smashed, you can't do that.
Well, it certainly complicates things, and the environment was pretty loosey-goosey.
Passengers were allowed to walk around the cabin.
fact one guy told me he was cracking jokes with db cooper while he was waiting in the laboratory line because cooper sat right next to the laboratory so um that's There are, and it's definitely not the narrative that the FBI and Northwest Orient have put out to the public.
You have to remember from Northwest Orient's point of view, is they didn't want anybody calling up the next day and saying, hey, look, I've got a ticket flying to Miami tomorrow from New York on Northwest Orient.
But after what I saw you guys do with that Cooper thing, I'm going to switch to United.
Northwest Orient didn't want to lose any passengers.
So they maintained this public image of we've got everything under control, everything's cool, calm, and collected, and you're safe to go.
Yeah, we had this little skyjacking, but it's just a little bump in the road, nothing to worry about.
That was not the case at all.
What about the, you mentioned this at the beginning, the redacted parts of the transcript of the radio traffic?
Yeah, that gets into a bigger thing.
So three planes were following, three jet fighters were following D.B. Cooper.
All of those radar transcripts have never been released to the public.
It's not known if there are any operative radar transcripts.
The pilots have publicly reported that they never saw Cooper leave the airplane and that they didn't see anything.
You have to remember that Cooper and his plane were flying in weather.
It was a rainy night.
They were in the clouds.
And so a trailing plane would have a lot of difficulty trying to find a skydiver, jump out.
Also, too, ground radar.
The military just installed a super duper high-tech radar system called SAGE.
It is widely believed now that the SAGE radar was a boondoggle and it didn't work and they couldn't pick up anybody like a skydiver, even though he was only 70 miles away from the nearest radar installation.
And the thinking is, is that the military did not want the Ruskies to know how bad our radar system was in 1971.
And worse, they didn't want the American taxpayer to know that they had just blown a billion dollars on something that didn't work.
So they pretended that it did work.
Well, they didn't say anything.
Okay, so there's no radar transcripts from SAGE at all.
And the redactions are from communications between a transcript between the airplane pilots and the flight control towers in Seattle.
And the FBI says the redactions are theirs and were put into the transcripts because it was extraneous communications with other kinds of airplanes in the area, in the environment around Seattle.
And for commercial and proprietary reasons, the communications have been withdrawn from the public.
I don't find that credible.
Doesn't sound it.
No.
So as we look at it now then, what are we to make of this?
You know, do you think we'll ever get any firm answers about this?
We have 901 people who've confessed, some more likely Than others to be D.B. Cooper.
We have a trail of circumstantial and actual evidence here and information, but we don't have a name.
We don't have a definite idea of, we know the kind of person, but we don't know who.
Yeah, well, there's a few things.
I think we're going to find out who D.B. Cooper is eventually.
The question is, how long can we maintain the passion to keep up a robust investigation?
And I think there's a lot of new people coming into it.
I would say half the people I talk to who are D.B. Cooper researchers are under 30.
So the young stallions are coming on board, you know.
But of course, even if they get a definitive name, chances are by the time they get that name, that person is not going to be living anymore.
Yeah, well, that's true.
Because D.B. Cooper would be at least 90 now, maybe even older.
He was identified as being in his mid-40s.
And so 48 years later, you do the math and you're at 93.
So it's pretty unlikely that D.B., although remarkable person, maybe D.B. Cooper is still just about alive somewhere, maybe in a home somewhere, who knows.
That's right.
It's surprising, though, isn't it?
Maybe the biggest eye-opener about all of this is that you would have thought that the conclusion to this, or that a conclusion to this, would be sought with such vigor through the 1970s, 80s, and maybe 90s that we'd all be a lot further on with knowledge about this than we actually are.
I think at the grunt level, the FBI had a robust investigation.
They put a lot of bodies on the case.
They did a lot of investigation.
But clearly, there are a lot of gaps.
And that comes down to the bureaucracy, the culture of how the FBI functions.
What do they like to do?
What do they do well?
What are they prone to do repeatedly?
And what don't they do?
And for instance, the ground search for D.B. Cooper.
When the skyjacking took place, the instincts and the policy and the protocols and the decisions that were made by the FBI, both in Portland and in Seattle, was to do investigations.
That's what they do.
These are the guys wearing suits.
They got nice shoes and they're driving a car.
And so they drive down to airports, either Seattle or in Portland, to talk to people who dealt with Cooper in the airline environment.
The search for Cooper in the woods was outsourced to the law enforcement agencies who do the dirty work.
And generally, that's your local cop.
And it was outsourced in the Cooper case to the Clark County Sheriff's Department, who didn't have a lot of deputies.
And they're not going to be as interested because they've got other things to do with their time.
This is a federal matter, isn't it?
Well, it's a federal matter, but the local guys were very interested.
It was a Cooper electrified the population.
Everybody was talking Cooper was on TV all day long.
So I think the cops were, I talked to the guy who led the ground search.
His name is, he was the deputy sheriff for Clark County.
His name is Tom McDowell.
He told me that he was only authorized to go off into the woods with his team.
And he was able to rustle up about a dozen or so deputies, along with another couple dozen volunteers and firemen, local firemen who knew the woods, who would be able to go out in the woods in November, in the rain, in the cold, and be able to take care of themselves and conduct a professional search operation.
So he didn't want a lot of looky-loos and crazy people out there.
You wanted people that would respond to orders and work in an orderly fashion.
And he had about 25 guys.
Tom told me he had about 25 guys.
And he only went into the woods starting Friday afternoon after lunch.
So Cooper had a 40-hour head start on the ground.
Oh, boy.
And what about that?
That's how the FBI functions.
These are the kinds of thinking, the kind of thinking and the kind of decisions that were made in that era.
Nowadays, things you'd have guys jumping into the woods a little faster, I think.
But back in 71, that's how business was conducted.
And afterwards, there would be, if there had been no result, which there was no result in this case, there would be what we call over here a full steward's inquiry to determine how the investigation had ended up as it had.
And it seems that there was not the will for that.
Doesn't seem like there's never been any kind of congressional investigation or any kind of internal review, as far as I know, in the FBI, like what went wrong in the Cooper case.
And what about sightings of people matching the description of D.B. Cooper?
Were there people in gas stations in Tupelo saying he came here?
Well, I'll tell you, the D.B. Cooper case ended up being perhaps one of the FBI's largest romantic triangle investigation in recorded history.
Over a thousand women called in saying their ex-husband or their ex-boyfriend is D.B. Cooper.
And it turned out to be better payback than a divorce.
And there are rooms full of romance-related investigations to determine whether this boyfriend or that bad boy could be D.B. Cooper.
And then you have another room full of guys who are just named Cooper.
So it gets kind of crazy.
Now, to the FBI's credit, they treated all of these leads with a due respect.
And I think that's fair.
But it eats up a lot of manpower, and it's costly.
And as I've said previously, there are some things that they didn't do.
And one of the things that they don't do well is they didn't communicate very well between offices.
Now, you have to remember: the Cooper skyjacking started in Portland.
So that's the Portland FBI office that's in charge of that.
It landed in SeaTac, and the ransom exchange was made in Seattle.
And so, because of that, Seattle was given the lead in the case.
So the guys down in Portland got pissed off about that, and it still rubs them the wrong way that it was a Seattle case.
It should have been a Portland case.
Cooper landed in Reno.
The plane landed in Reno.
So you have, and Reno is administered by the Las Vegas FBI office, which ended up with all the evidence that they pulled off the airplane.
And then the lead, from the FBI's point of view, one of the lead suspects from their point of view was a fellow who skyjacked an airplane out of Salt Lake City a few months later, and they apprehended their guy.
And they thought when they got him that they also got Cooper.
So now you have the Salt Lake City FBI office involved.
Four prongs.
That's four major FBI offices in each other's face.
And I talked to the guy who led the FBI investigation out of Salt Lake City, and he's still convinced to this day that his guy is D.B. Cooper.
And he has documentation on evidence that his suspect, Richard McCoy, has unaccounted time during the Cooper period, like that would be the night before Thanksgiving.
McCoy did not have an alibi, legitimate alibi.
And the fact that he actually did commit a skyjacking, a Cooper-esque skyjacking a few months later shows that he had the cajones to do the job.
Military background, any military?
Yes, that military background, things like that.
Not as well-defined as some of these special operations guys, some of these covert op guys that we're talking about.
But he had enough chops to get the job done.
But at this point, the Seattle FBI office discounts or disbelieves the evidence and the documentation that the FBI people down in Salt Lake City have discovered.
So you have one office that doesn't believe another office.
That's how bad a bureaucracy can get.
Gee, it's the Keystone Cops, isn't it?
In these kinds of operations.
To call them Keystone Cops, I think, is unfair because these aren't clowns.
These are generally well-trained.
Like all FBI agents have got college degrees, and a lot of them have advanced degrees.
A lot of them are lawyers.
They went to law school.
They may not have passed the bar necessarily.
So Keystone Cops really is unfair.
I'll take that back.
But what we've got here is vested interests.
And when you get vested interests involved, you're never going to get anyway.
You have vested interests and you have political pressures.
You have to remember that the FBI's number one job is not necessarily to courage criminals or fight crime.
The FBI and all law enforcement, their number one job is to tell a good story.
So on the 11 o'clock news, everybody says, ah, so that's what happened, and they get a good night's sleep.
That's law enforcement's primary job, is to make sure everybody gets a good night's sleep around the world.
After that, we'll go catch as many criminals as we can.
And if the news is a little nasty, well, we'll find a way to sugarcoat it and let the public know, and hopefully they'll take some medication and be okay with it.
And in the meantime, people have got to feel safe about the land that they live in.
And I guess they kind of think that there are all people looking like Robert Stack with well-tailored suits and broad shoulders there looking after their interests.
As long as people feel that way, then life's okay.
Exactly.
The FBI's got to look competent.
They've got to look in charge.
And they're only going to tell the public.
As a reporter, I know all law enforcement, not just FBI, all law enforcement only tells guys like me what they want me to know when they want me to know it.
Same view as they do.
By the way, I'm a journalist too.
Same movie.
Yeah, and from their point of view, law enforcement views guys like me as being part of their team, that my job is to tell their story to the public and to sell it.
Because if I don't sell it, I'm not going to get any more stories.
If you're not going to play on the team, we're not going to tell you any more good stories.
We're not going to tell you anything more.
That's how it works.
I mean, it is a cooperation.
My dad was a cop.
I'm a journalist, so I know exactly how that works.
Okay, as we wrap this up then, Bruce, and listen, you tell an amazing story incredibly well.
So I'm very grateful to you, and I'm so glad that we got together to do this.
Is there a possibility, or would this only be in a movie, that D.B. Cooper may, because he was such an organized person very clearly, have looked after the end of this and perhaps left some kind of affidavit document, something in a safe deposit box somewhere to be opened at some particular time?
I doubt it.
I doubt it.
Cooper strikes me as being a solo combat warrior.
He did one job and he did it well.
We don't think that Cooper did any more crimes.
There's no compelling evidence that I've seen that D.B. Cooper committed any more skyjackings.
And it's almost as if Cooper came from nowhere and returned to nowhere.
And there's been a lot of interest when he jumped.
There's been a lot of interesting conversations about the kinds of environments or communities where somebody can hide in plain sight.
Like, for instance, gypsy communities or the mafia or covert operation communities where covert op guys come out of Fort Bragg or some other military installation and they live in their homes.
Their wives know not to ask them any questions and their buddies say, hey, Jemmy, I didn't see you around this weekend.
Where were you?
He says, oh, I was on a job.
And that's it.
And they don't say, what job?
Was it domestic?
Was it international?
It's like, I'm on a job.
And that's all you have to say.
Because he's going to tell you, hey, buddy, where were you?
Oh, well, I was on my job.
So there's no conversations about that.
Loose lips, sink ships.
And I think in certain communities, in certain relationships, you know not to ask.
You know not to push.
Wow.
So out of that environment.
amazing.
Thank you for making time for me.
There is more detail than we've been able to cover in your book.
So what's the title of the book and how do people get it?
Okay, the book is called D.B. Cooper and the FBI, a case study of America's only unsolved skyjacking.
And it's available through Amazon.
And in the UK, you can pick it up.
I get paid in pound sterling or something like, you know, translated into US dollars, but it's all good to me.
So you can also pick up an electronic copy or read it through the Amazon Library.
I'm surprised.
I'm a little surprised how many people actually read my book through the Amazon Library.
I think I get paid a penny a page for every page you read or something like that.
You know, I guess it mounts up.
How much shoe leather and how much time did this take you?
I'm still working on it.
I started on this back in 2008 and I have been robustly researching it since 2010.
I started slow.
I was working for another newspaper.
They weren't too interested in D.B. Cooper, but they were interested in what happened here locally since it's a local story.
So I had to find a local angle.
But once I started writing my own website, if you would like to read for free, you can come to my website called theMountainNewsWA, that's wa.net.
And it's an online news magazine.
And I have plenty of postings on D.B. Cooper.
A lot of the raw interviews.
So if you want to read about my interviews with Tina Mucklow, the flight attendant, or the pilot, or the passengers, things like that, you can get the full, full story at the Mountain News.
Do you have just finally a sneaking admiration for this man?
Yes.
It's more than sneaking.
And I'm not the only one.
Even FBI agents applaud him.
Say he was a cool guy.
He did it right.
You have to applaud his skill.
When it comes to the morality and the ethics of it all, then it gets to be...
That's another thing.
And I do recognize that, and I do respect it, and I do appreciate how D.B. Cooper negatively impacted a lot of people's lives.
The flight attendants, and an untold story, and this has got to be told by somebody.
What have flight attendants gone through in all of the skyjackings?
There have been hundreds of skyjackings, and that's a lot.
That's thousands of flight attendants who have been affected.
A lot of women have had guns put to their foreheads, have had to stare down at briefcases with bombs and hand grenades and things like that.
I would love to know their story.
And the flight attendants I've talked to about this don't want to talk about it.
So they've got PTSD as bad as they.
We call it today post-traumatic stress disorder, don't we?
Exactly.
Exactly.
Oh, boy, Bruce, thank you so much for giving me this time.
And, you know, you deserve to do really well with this book.
I'm sure you are already.
But, you know, I hope it brings you the results that you need.
And thank you.
Some of your colleagues are coming over in a couple of weeks.
BBC is sending somebody over here to talk about Cooper two weeks from now.
Well, this is great.
I'm going to look out for that.
And we must do a sequel to this at some point.
And I can only say again, thank you, Bruce.
Okay, my pleasure.
Well, Bruce Smith there with a fascinating take on the D.B. Cooper case that I guess will continue to baffle people for more decades to come, unless, of course, there's some great new big revelation about that.
And you can never write off the possibility of that, can you, really?
Fascinating.
So I'll put a link to him and his work on my website, theunexplained.tv.
And if you want to go there, then you can send me an email and I will get to see your email through the website, theunexplained.tv.
And if you can and would like to leave a donation to the show, then please do.
And if you have recently, thank you very much.
More great guests in the pipeline here at The Unexplained.
So until next we meet here, my name is Howard Hughes.
I am in London.
This has been The Unexplained.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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