After boarding a plane with a fake name, a briefcase full of wires,   and a daring request.

D.

B.

Cooper is one guy that gave law enforcement sleepless nights for decades, and worst of all, no one knew who he was—well until now.

For over 50 years, D.

B.

Cooper was the ghost America couldn’t catch.

With conspiracy theories running wild, it was only a matter of time before it would have been discovered.

Now, after 54 years, the true identity of D.

B.

Cooper has been revealed.

How was he found, and what truths will be uncovered? Let’s find out.

How on earth did one man successfully pull off a heist that left Americans in awe and the law enforcement frustrated? With a mysterious parachute and a persistent investigator, all evidence points to one man.

The truth is finally coming to light.

But let’s take a trip back to how it all began.

Thanksgiving Eve, 1971 It was the day before Thanksgiving, 1971.

The airport was filled with people rushing to get home, and Flight 305 was just another short hop from Portland to Seattle—nothing fancy, nothing out of the ordinary.

But somewhere between row 18 and the cockpit, a man in a dark suit, clip-on tie, and sunglasses was about to turn a simple flight into one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in American history.

He gave his name as Dan Cooper.

Just an average guy in line for a short flight, except he wasn’t.

Flight 305, a Boeing 727 operated by Northwest Orient Airlines, was only supposed to be in the air for 30 minutes, and that’s it.

But halfway through that short ride, something happened that no one on board could have predicted.

Cooper, calm as ever, passed a handwritten note to the flight attendant.

She smiled politely, thinking it was just another lonely guy giving her his number.

She tucked it away in her pocket.

That’s when Cooper leaned in close and whispered something that changed American aviation history forever: “Miss, you’d better look at that note.

I have a bomb.

” In that minute she froze.

Cooper had laid out his demands in the note.

He wanted two hundred thousand dollars in twenty-dollar bills, four parachutes, and a fuel truck waiting on the runway in Seattle, and if he didn’t get it, he’d blow the whole plane sky-high.

And it didn’t seem like he was bluffing because when the flight attendant hesitated, he popped open the briefcase just enough to reveal what looked like dynamite sticks wired to a battery pack.

The flight attendant appeared calm as she nodded and casually walked up to the cockpit like she was just doing her usual rounds.

She slipped into the cockpit and informed the pilot, William Scott, who immediately looped in the co-pilot and the flight engineer.

At this point, they had no idea who they were dealing with.

Was this guy ex-military? Was the bomb real? Was this some kind of political stunt? From there, the pilot radioed in a hijacking code to air traffic control.

That set off alarms on the ground, and within minutes, the FBI was notified—this was now a federal case.

By the time Flight 305 landed in Seattle, the FBI had scrambled into action.

The passengers were safely let off the plane, completely unaware they’d just been part of what would become the most legendary hijacking in American history.

The cash was delivered, the parachutes handed over, and with only a skeleton crew onboard, the plane took off again under Cooper’s instructions—heading south toward Mexico.

Then, somewhere over the dense forests of Washington state, while rain whipped across the aircraft and the winds howled at 200 miles an hour, D.

B.

Cooper opened the rear stairs of the jet and jumped at around 8 PM.

And just like that, he was gone.

One moment, D.

B.

Cooper was in seat 18C, and the next, he was falling through ten thousand feet of pitch-black sky with a bag full of money strapped to his chest and nothing but the night to catch him.

But what he didn’t know was that before he jumped, he left his clip-on tie that he took off.

The crew landed the plane in Reno empty-handed.

Cooper had jumped somewhere over the thick pine forests near the Washougal River in southwestern Washington, and the FBI had no idea where to begin.

By morning, the search was in full swing.

Hundreds of agents.

State troopers.

Paratroopers.

Helicopters.

Bloodhounds.

They combed every inch of forest they could find.

They scoured riverbanks and small towns.

But there wasn’t so much as a boot print.

Not a shred of fabric.

Not even a broken twig they could trace back to him.

It was like the man had melted into the trees.

And to make matters worse, the media got one crucial detail wrong, which was his alias.

The name on his boarding pass was Dan Cooper.

But when the story made the media rounds, there was a mistake with the hijacker’s name, and just like that, “Dan” became “D.

B.

” And “D.

B.

Cooper” stuck like glue.

The FBI chased down every tip they got.

Over a thousand suspects were investigated.

One man even confessed on his deathbed, but it turned out he was just lonely and wanted attention.

None of the DNA collected, none of the handwriting samples, and not even the ransom bills turned up any solid leads.

Well, except for one.

An innocent camp trip turned out to be a turning point for the FBI,   as a solid lead finally became one of the reasons to reopen the case nearly a decade later.

After nine years, when the drama had cooled off a bit, an eight-year-old boy camping with his family found something strange buried in the sand along the Columbia River.

It was three bundles of twenty-dollar bills, rotted and sun-damaged, but still bound in rubber bands.

They thought it was odd and alerted the police, and after a series of investigations, the FBI got into the case and confirmed that the serial numbers on the bills were a perfect match to the one packed in the bag of the guy that they had painfully searched for.

This was a lead, and probably it was enough to reopen the case.

It was the first and only physical clue Cooper left behind.

And it raised more questions than it answered.

Did he die in the fall, and the money washed downstream? Or did he plant it there just to mess with the feds? The FBI, still persistent, ramped up the investigation again.

The teams searched the Tena Bar area, divers scoured the Columbia River, and forensic analysts examined the money   for clues.

But after all that, they had nothing.

No parachute, no gear, no body.

There were no traces of Cooper.

Just three crusty bundles of twenties found by a little boy and thousands of new unanswered questions.

Despite that, the case remained technically open.

For decades, the FBI kept it on the books as an “active but cold” case.

But by 2016, the FBI had exhausted every angle and finally decided to officially close the case after 45 years, shelving it as one of the greatest unsolved crimes in American history.

But while the trail may have gone cold, somewhere out there, someone was about to blow it wide open.

The Breakthrough No One Saw Coming While the feds had been digging through and through looking for clues that could finally reveal or lead them to who D.

B.

Cooper really was, another guy behind the scenes was also doing his own investigation.

Dan Grider, a retired commercial airline captain with over 24,000 flight hours under his belt, is a YouTuber with a channel on which he talks about flying an aircraft and all   that good stuff.

It was no surprise to know he took an interest in the D.

B.

Cooper case, and for some reason, he just couldn’t let it go even after the FBI had given up on it.

He spent years studying flight logs, terrain maps, wind speeds, and FBI files most people didn’t even know existed.

He recreated jump scenarios, dissected parachute models, and went over every last detail of Cooper’s escape.

Not for clicks, not for fame—but because he genuinely believed he could solve it.

And in 2023, more than fifty years after the infamous skyjacking, Dan stumbled into something that would make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

Dan followed a hunch to a dusty storage unit in Utah.

The unit had once belonged to a woman with ties to the family of Richard Floyd McCoy Junior, a name that had floated in D.

B.

Cooper circles for years but had never quite stuck.

Most thought it was just another dead end.

But Dan had found something.

This was going to change the trajectory of what the FBI, the whole country, and even Dan thought he knew about Cooper.

Inside that forgotten unit, buried beneath boxes of books and memorabilia, Dan found…a parachute.

And not just any parachute.

It just fit the same description as the one Cooper had requested.

This rig was old, military-style, with peculiar modifications that matched specific details from FBI files dating back to 1971.

But it was where the parachute came from that sent chills down Dan’s spine.

The unit had a direct link to McCoy—the man who, just five months after Cooper’s vanishing act, hijacked a plane using the exact same playbook.

That’s when Dan knew the two events weren’t a coincidence.

This parachute was the one object that tied two unsolved crimes together with shocking precision.

And suddenly, McCoy wasn’t just a footnote anymore.

He was the front-runner.

Because if that parachute belonged to Cooper and it came from McCoy, then maybe, just maybe, they were the same man all along.

What Dan found next wasn’t just another clue.

It was a buried truth, hidden in plain sight, with the power to rewrite everything we thought we knew about the most   legendary mystery in American history.

But the main piece hidden in sight that was crucial for everyone was to find out exactly who Richard McCoy was.

Who was he? And why does he keep coming up in odd places in the D.

B.

Cooper case? Richard McCoy Junior If you wrote down Richard McCoy Jr.

’s resume without context, you’d probably think he was straight out of a patriotic Hallmark movie.

Born and raised in Utah, McCoy was a devout Mormon, a decorated Vietnam War veteran, and a helicopter pilot who flew into combat zones and made it back home intact.

He was also a family man, as he was married with kids, and at the time of his arrest, he was working toward a law degree at Brigham Young University.

His neighbors described him as polite, quiet, and deeply religious.

To everyone around him, McCoy looked like the American Dream wrapped in a clean-cut uniform.

Behind that perfect image was something no one expected because five months after D.

B.

Cooper vanished into legend, McCoy did the exact same thing—but this time, it was louder.

It happened on April 7, 1972.

McCoy boarded United Airlines Flight 855 in Denver, carrying a briefcase and dressed in a business suit.

He didn’t shout.

He didn’t panic.

Just like Cooper, he handed a note to a flight attendant and calmly informed her that he had a bomb.

Then came the demands of five hundred thousand dollars in cash, four parachutes, and a refueled plane ready to head to San Francisco.

Sound familiar? McCoy executed the plan like he’d studied it line by line.

After the ransom was delivered, he ordered the pilots to take off again, and somewhere over Utah, just like the ghost before him, he jumped.

The FBI was stunned.

It was déjà vu but with more money, more precision, and one big difference: this time, they got him.

McCoy made one big mistake, actually two.

First, he left behind a handwritten note in the cockpit.

The kind of thing that doesn’t scream   professional.

And second, his fingerprints showed up on an in-flight glass of water.

The FBI matched those prints back to McCoy within days.

They tracked him down at home in Provo, Utah, where he was just at home with his family like nothing had happened.

When   he got arrested, the questions came running in.

Why would a man like that—a soldier, a husband, a student—risk everything for a crime so bold and dangerous? And why did his hijacking look like a carbon copy of the Cooper case? The eerie similarities sent chills through investigators.

The same type of Boeing 727, the same rear stairwell parachute escape, the sa