The FBI files on D. B. Cooper | Hacker News Reader

The FBI files on D. B. Cooper

vault.fbi.gov

62 pointsfogus21 comments

Since I had no idea:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._B._Cooper

  D. B. Cooper is a media epithet popularly used to refer to an unidentified man who hijacked a Boeing 727 aircraft in the airspace between Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington, on November 24, 1971, extorted $200,000 in ransom (equivalent to $1,170,000 in 2015), and parachuted to an uncertain fate.
  Despite an extensive manhunt and an ongoing FBI investigation, the perpetrator has never been located or positively identified.
  The case remains the only unsolved air piracy in American aviation history.

For those who have never read it, the Wikipedia article reads almost like an action novel. Highly recommended (fun) reading.

Also Numb3rs s6e10 has a plot related to D. B Cooper.

Prison Break tied a storyline into the D. B. Cooper story as well. A pretty popular story it seems :)

Another pop culture reference: The comedy 'Without a Paddle' is about a group of friends searching for D.B. Cooper's treasure

The "... in Popular Culture" section is large enough to have been spun off into it's own article on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._B._Cooper_in_popular_cultur...

And another: 30 Rock implies that Kenneth's father was D.B. Cooper. In one episode he's wearing a suit passed down from his late father. The inside pocket of the suit coat is inscribed "D.B. Cooper."

Weirdly, this happened in season 6 episode 10, like the Numb3rs episode.

I am a different DB Cooper.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dale_Cooper

  I got this girl and she wants me to duke her
  I told her I'd come scoop her around 8, she said "Super!"
  That sounds great, shorty girl's a trooper 
  No matter what I need her to do, she be like "Super!"
  Own his own throne, the boss like King Koopa
  On the microphone he flossed the ring "Super!"
  Average emcees is like a TV blooper
  MF DOOM, he's like D.B. Cooper

I was really hoping the end to Mad Men was Don Draper being DB Cooper. It would've made for a much better ending.

I found that theory before I got into the show, it would've been really perfect. Totally fit with his appearance, manner, and history too.

Except most (all?) of the show takes place before 1971, right?

Correct. The last season ends in November 1970.

The two greatest unsolved FBI cases of all time are D.B. Cooper and the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa. They're still trying to dig him up in Michigan and elsewhere. I was by the Machus Red Fox building in the past two weeks with my Dad who had his own run in with Jimmy over 75 years ago.

http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/oakland/2015/...

Nice segue.

The interesting thing about the case is that as recent as 5-7 years ago people have been finding money with serial numbers matching the ransom payment. More over, the FBI confirmed that the ransom money never entered the circulation again. Honestly, after doing some random research and listening a few radio shows on this subject, it almost seems like Cooper accidentally dropped the money bag but survived the actual parachute landing.

Source? I do not recall anything about DB Cooper in regards to the money other than the money that was found in the river in the 1980s and was later sold in 2008. And that has been the only source of serial numbers matching the ones found in ransom.

According to http://www.onedollarbill.org/decoding.html , serial numbers are not globally-unique identifiers:

"The letter which precedes the numbers must be the same number that you saw identifying the Federal Reserve Bank. The last letter of the serial number or suffix letter identifies the number of times that the Bureau of Engraving and Printing used the sequence of serial numbers: A is the first time, B is the second time, C is the third time and so on. With one run for each letter of the alphabet (26) and 32 bill per run, there are a total of 832 bills per serial number."

That seems to be contradicted by

http://www.moneyfactory.gov/resources/serialnumbers.html

as well as

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replacement_banknote

Am I misreading something?

The site you quoted seems to be something that someone copied & pasted and slapped together. When the author says "32 bill per run", he seems to imply that the whole sheet always has the same serial number. Well, it certainly is not always true as you can see in this high-res photo of an uncut sheet of 1985 bills:

http://ultrafree.org/graphics/1985-1uncut.jpeg

A much more informative site which seems to be someone's labor of love says there is an exception with old Nationals "in which all notes on a sheet had the same serial number and had to be distinguished by their plate position letters." Although he's not explicit, my reading of that site suggests that modern bills (including the time of the D. B. Cooper incident) should be unique.

[1] http://www.uspapermoney.info/general/number.html

Odd that the text (presumably OCR?) version is pretty much garbage. What happened?

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