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? On May 20, 1967, a prospector in Manitoba walked up to a landed craft near Falcon Lake. It blasted him with hot gas and left a grid of burns on his chest matching its vents. Three governments investigated. Canada put it on a coin. Hoax, or the real thing?
What do you think about this? Serpent Mound in Ohio is a 1,348 foot snake of earth, its head aimed at the summer solstice sunset, its body built on the rim of an ancient meteor crater. One dating puts it right after Halley’s Comet in 1066. Sacred art, or a message for the sky?
What do you think about this? Since the early 1990s about two percent of people in Taos, New Mexico, hear a low hum like a distant diesel that never shuts off. In 1993 Los Alamos and Sandia scientists came to find it. Their instruments found nothing. Trick of the ear, or a hidden signal?
What do you think about this? In 1974 a retired air traffic controller cast footprints in Louisiana’s Honey Island Swamp: three webbed toes, a foot long. He had reported a seven foot gray haired creature with yellow eyes standing over a dead boar in 1963. Hoax, or the Letiche?
What do you think about this? For nearly three years beginning April 2, 1968, a glowing figure of a woman appeared on the roof of a church in Cairo, seen by crowds of tens of thousands, Christians and Muslims together, and caught in press photographs. Mass illusion, or a visitation?
What do you think about this? A 2,200 year old wooden bird dug up at Saqqara in 1898 has no legs, no feathers, straight wings and a tail that stands upright like the fin of an airplane. Some replicas glide. A child’s toy that looks like a plane, or a memory of something that flew?
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