By now, a lot of people know about the DB Cooper case. As far as unsolved crimes go, this one is a fascinating story because so little, in fact almost nothing, is known about the perpetrator and, by some estimates, he appears to have gotten away with the skyjacking. With so many unanswered questions, it inevitably attracts a large number of hobbyists, amateur sleuths, conspiracy theorists, and cranks. Of the latter category, it is tempting to include Bruce A. Smith, author of DB Cooper and the FBI: A Case Study of America’s Only Unsolved Skyjacking.
This book starts off with a standard account of the DB Cooper adventure. The day before Thanksgiving in 1971, a solitary man checked onto an airplane in Portland, Oregon. After the flight took off, he told a stewardess he had a bomb in his suitcase. He demanded the plane be grounded and also requested four parachutes and $200,000 in cash. The FBI handed over the money and parachutes, then the plane took off again in the direction of Mexico City. But en route to the Land of Manana, DB Cooper jumped out of the plane, disappearing into the freezing cold night. He and his money were never to be seen again, except for a small stash of bills that were found at a beach on the Columbia River seven years later. Ever since then, the skyjacker has been an endless source of fascination for certain kinds of people. The beginning of Smith’s book does an adequate job of telling the story, but this is no great literary feat. The same story has been told dozens of times in other books so no new ground is broken here.
From there, the author tracks down other people who might have knowledge of the case including FBI officers and other authors who have covered the DB Cooper case. Things start to get a little creepy while he stalks Tina Mucklow, the stewardess who spent the most time with Cooper during the flight. At this point, the author’s sanity comes into question. He not only stalks this woman, who clearly wants to be left alone, but he also states his pet theory that she and everyone else in the Cooper case were part of a brainwashing program conducted by the CIA.
From there a big chunk of the book is dedicated to people who have either admitted to being DB Cooper or have been identified by family members as the unknown skyjacker. Yes, believe it or not, there have been hundreds of people who were suspected of this crime by their own families. Some of the evidence is as flimsy as can possibly be; typically some dysfunctional family in rural Washington or Oregon wonders why Uncle Joe unexpectedly didn’t show up for Thanksgiving and then they later found out he had gone on a gambling spree in Las Vegas or something like that. People who admitted to being Cooper are no more promising. The most interesting one was a transgendered pilot who supposedly carried out the skyjacking for therapeutic reasons; after having the surgery, he needed to do something macho to feel like the transition to manhood was complete. The evidence linking this lady who became a dude is flimsy. The author takes himself pretty seriously when stating that this pilot and Cooper could have been the same because both of them wore loafers and smoked cigarettes. I could never imagine this kind of evidence being considered admissible in court.
Then we get to the really kooky stuff. Smith presents his conspiracy theory that DB Cooper was a participant in the CIA’s MKUltra mind control experiments. I guess they wanted to brainwash people into skyjacking commercial American airliners for some incomprehensible purpose and DB Cooper happened to be their most successful experiment. He entertains the thought that this was done to force the privately owned airline companies into taking safety a little more seriously. There is also something about Cooper’s clip-on tie, which he left behind before parachuting into the wilderness. Smith believes that everyone who has come into physical contact with the tie has developed amnesia regarding details of the case via post-hypnotic suggestion. There is also a lot about clandestine military operations in the Vietnam War and an FBI plot to avoid solving the case to cover up the activities of the CIA. To Smith’s credit, at least he is man enough to admit that he has no evidence to support any of this bunk.
But then it gets even weirder. Bruce Smith, admitting to being a member of the Ramtha the Enlightened One cult in Washington, has some meditation and hypnotherapy sessions in which he claims to meet DB Cooper somewhere in the afterlife. This doesn’t yield any useful information, except that it vaguely justifies the author’s conspiracy theories. I suppose DB Cooper was some kind of supernatural being from another dimension and the author has pursued him so vigorously because he thinks of him as some kind of long-lost (imaginary) friend.
At least the author was smart enough to save his most loony ideas for the end. He is probably sane enough to know that he would lose any of his more skeptical readers if he had mentioned that stuff in the beginning. Then again, maybe he just thought he was saving the best parts for last, thereby making a horrible miscalculation. To be fair, the majority of the book is about relaying information he found during his own research. He presents his ideas clearly and in an orderly fashion which is great if you’re writing something for a freshman composition class. But for the world outside of community college writing classes, the ideas presented need to carry a little more weight to be plausible unless you are a conspiracy theories or a religious nut. The conspiracy theories and mysticism might appeal to other cranks, but for people who actually want a realistic theory of what happened with DB Cooper, this information just ruins the whole book which was nothing exceptional to begin with.
DB Cooper and the FBI is not the best book to read if you want to learn about this skyjacking. There are plenty of other books on the subject and most of them are shorter too because they aren’t bulked up with nonsense. Actually, all the facts that are known are readily available on the DB Cooper Wikipedia page. In the end, this book is more like a chronicle of a Ramtha cult member who spends too much time going down internet rabbit holes and associating with too many other online kooks.
If you really want to know who DB Cooper was and what happened to him after he jumped out of the plane with the money, you aren’t going to find the answers here. You aren’t going to find them anywhere because there isn’t enough evidence to solve the case and it happened so long ago that the surfacing of new evidence is extremely unlikely. But this is the appeal of it all. Just reading the story will make you try to fit the pieces together and fill in the blanks while the uncomfortable lack of closure will leave you wondering about it for long stretches of time. In the end, my gut feeling is that DB Cooper survived the jump and escaped with most of the money, but then again, I am the kind of person who places little value on gut feelings. Maybe DB Cooper lost all his money in a poker game with Bigfoot. My personal theory is that DB Cooper and Thomas Pynchon are the same man.
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