Considering the skyjacker who came to be known as D.B. Cooper committed his crime more than 50 years ago, you’d think interest in the case would be fading. But perhaps because the mystery man has never been identified, and he leapt out of a plane with $200,000 in a briefcase and got away with it, the D.B. Cooper story refuses to go away.
The four-part Netflix documentary series “D.B. Cooper: Where Are You?!” is the latest example of the ongoing fascination with the legend. Once more, the series begins with what we know. On Nov. 24, 1971, a man who called himself Dan Cooper bought a ticket at the Portland International Airport. He boarded Northwest Orient Airlines Flight #305, for what would have been a short flight to Seattle.
The man, dressed in a business suit, and wearing sunglasses, ordered a bourbon and soda, and the plane took off. En route to Seattle, the man informed a flight attendant and the captain he had a bomb in his briefcase, and that he was demanding $200,000 and four parachutes.
The flight landed in Seattle, and the passengers were ushered out, before the plane took flight again, with just a few crew members, and Cooper in possession of the money and the parachutes. As the plane flew over the Pacific Northwest, Cooper parachuted out of the plane with the briefcase full of money.
After Cooper – who became known as D.B. Cooper thanks to an early miscommunication – leapt into the dark, no one knows exactly what happened. But that has only fueled theories, investigations, conspiracies and other ideas about who he was, whether he survived, whether he had helpers who were in on the scheme, what became of the money, and so on.
“D.B. Cooper: Where Are You?!,” directed by Marina Zenovich, explores some of the people who have been trying to solve the Cooper mystery, while also touching on “Cooperites,” the would-be sleuths who scour the Internet for clues.
The series also reminds us of how pervasive the Cooper mythology has been in popular culture, where it’s spawned movies, TV shows, books, and far-fetched theories. Remember when some diehards thought Jon Hamm’s “Mad Men” character Don Draper was Cooper? Or, more recently, the Disney + Marvel universe series “Loki” scene, which has fun with the possibility that Tom Hiddleston’s trickster was the infamous skyjacker?
Over the four episodes, assorted interview subjects weigh in on their experiences, their pet theories and reasons why D.B. Cooper has remained such an enduring object of fascination.
Bill Mitchell recalls how, when he was then a University of Oregon sophomore, he boarded the 1971 Northwest Orient flight to Seattle. Even as Cooper was writing notes with his demands, Mitchell says, the passengers were largely unaware of the danger they might be in.
Vintage clips add context to how different the flying experience was when Cooper committed his crime. Airport security? There wasn’t any. And stewardesses, as flight attendants were then called, were often subject to sexual harassment. In one archival interview, a man with a verdant ‘70s-style mustache says he considers Cooper a hero, calling the skyjacker “one of the slickest cats that ever walked on the face of the Earth.”
Geoffrey Gray is one of several authors who have written about Cooper and those who follow the case. Gray, whose book is “Skyjack: The Hunt for D.B. Cooper,” talks about Cooper turning into a folk legend, and how much of the Cooper saga isn’t about the skyjacker, but about the people chasing him.
“D.B. Cooper: Where Are You?!” spends a considerable amount of time on one of those people, Tom Colbert, a former TV journalist-turned documentary producer and investigator. Colbert was featured in one of the many previous Cooper documentaries, the History Channel 2016 special, “D.B. Cooper: Case Closed?” In the Netflix series, Colbert talks about feeling like the History Channel special disparaged the work Colbert and his cold case team did, which resulted in their belief that a man named Robert Rackstraw was Cooper.
The Netflix series also includes visits to an “undisclosed” Oregon location, and a search for Cooper’s parachute and money, and footage of the 2021 “CooperCon,” a gathering of “Cooperites” and others associated with investigating the Cooper case, held at the Kiggins Theater in Vancouver, Washington. Among the featured guests is Eric Ulis, a Cooper researcher who is interviewed in “D.B. Cooper: Where Are You?!,” and who appeared in another History Channel documentary, “The Final Hunt for D.B. Cooper,” which focused on Ulis’ theory that Cooper may have landed in an area near Ridgefield, Washington.
After running through a list of some of the people suspected of having been Cooper, “D.B. Cooper: Where Are You?!” doesn’t land on any particular conclusion. Instead, it seems to embrace Gray’s idea that we’ll likely never know who Cooper was, and whether he got away with his crime, and that’s why he continues to fascinate us.
As author Bryan Burrough says of the notorious skyjacker, “I hope he’s never found.”
“D.B. Cooper: Where Are You?!” begins streaming July 13 on Netflix.
— Kristi Turnquist
kturnquist@oregonian.com 503-221-8227 @Kristiturnquist
