On the day before Thanksgiving in 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper bought a one-way ticket from Portland to Seattle, ordered a bourbon and soda once the plane was in the air, and then passed the flight attendant a note claiming he had a bomb in his briefcase. He demanded two hundred thousand dollars and four parachutes, and once the plane landed in Seattle, the airline paid it and let the other passengers go.
Then Cooper had the pilots take off again, told them to fly toward Mexico at a low altitude with the cabin unpressurized, and somewhere over the dense forest of southwest Washington, he lowered the rear stairs of the 727 and jumped into the night with the cash strapped to his body. Nobody has ever confirmed what happened to him next.
For nine years the case went cold, until February 1980, when a boy named Brian Ingram was digging along a bank of the Columbia River and turned up three decaying bundles of twenty-dollar bills, five thousand eight hundred dollars in all, with serial numbers that matched the ransom exactly. It remains the only piece of physical evidence ever recovered. The FBI carried the case as an active investigation for forty five years before finally suspending it in 2016.
Could it be that a man with no known parachute training really survived a night jump into freezing forest with two hundred thousand dollars strapped to his chest.
Vanished into the wilderness, or walked away and never told a soul?
What do you think about this? Edgar Cayce gave over 14,000 trance readings, all written down and still on file. He said proof of Atlantis would rise near Bimini in 1968. That year divers found a half mile road of giant stone blocks there. True seer, or lucky guess?
What do you think about this? Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Kentucky built a 500 foot tunnel just to move its dead out of sight of the living. It closed in 1961. Visitors still report a boy rolling a ball across empty floors. Restless spirits, or a dark building playing tricks on the mind?
What do you think about this? In 1891, a poor French priest named Bérenger Saunière began tearing up his church floor, then spent the next two decades funding lavish buildings on a stipend that should not have covered it. Real treasure, or a secret about how he ran his church?
What do you think about this? Puma Punku’s H-shaped stone blocks, cut from andesite by a culture dating to roughly 600 CE, are flat to within a couple millimeters, with no known metal tools hard enough to do it. Lost technique, or something we haven’t caught up to yet?
What do you think about this? The Georgia Guidestones were commissioned anonymously in 1979 by a man calling himself R.C. Christian, and no one ever learned his real name before the monument was bombed on July 6, 2022. Message, or a monument that did not deserve to stand?
What do you think about this? Pacifica’s Devil’s Slide has swallowed sections of Highway 1 since 1937, and a WWII watch bunker still perched on its cliff edge has sat abandoned there since 1949. Geology, or a stretch of coast that keeps trying to shrug people off?
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