On a cold November night 36 years ago, in the driving wind and rain, somewhere between southern Washington state and just north of Portland, Oregon, a man calling himself Dan Cooper parachuted out of a plane he’d just hijacked clutching a bag filled with $200,000 in stolen cash.

Who was Cooper? Did he survive the jump? And what happened to the loot, only a small part of which has ever surfaced?

It’s a mystery, frankly. We’ve run down thousands of leads and considered all sorts of scenarios. And amateur sleuths have put forward plenty of their own theories. Yet the case remains unsolved.

Would we still like to get our man? Absolutely. And we have reignited the case—thanks to a Seattle case agent named Larry Carr and new technologies like DNA testing.

You can help. We’re providing here, for the first time, a series of pictures and information on the case. Please look it all over carefully to see if it triggers a memory or if you can provide any useful information.
www.fbi.gov

The good folks at the FBI don't like it when someone commits a high-profile crime and then simply vanishes. They go through the evidence over and over again, wait a while – decades sometimes – and then start investigating all over again. Suspects don't just disappear into thin air never to be seen again.

Well, one man did do that, literally. On Thanksgiving Eve in 1971, Dan Cooper, not his real name, blithely stepped off the back stairway of a Northwest Orient Boeing 727 at an altitude of about 10,000ft. Equipped with two parachutes and clasping a bag of $200,000 in ransom money, he hurtled through the rain clouds to the rugged terrain of Washington State below.

In these post-September 11 days of international terror threats, what happened that night seems almost like an innocent caper. No one was murdered or even grazed and the sum of missing money seems almost paltry. Yet it was an act of derring-do that quickly entered modern American folklore. Songs and books were written about it and a film was shot starring Treat Williams as Cooper. More than that, the seizing of Northwest Orient Flight 305 remains the world's only unsolved hijacking.

And so it is that, more than 36 years on, that the FBI has once again declared its refusal to admit defeat. It has reassembled the few fragments of evidence that it has and made a fresh appeal to the public for help. "Would we still like to get our man?" the FBI said in a release out of its Pacific Northwest office in Seattle this week. "Absolutely. And we have reignited the case."

The public is being invited to visit the FBI's website, FBI.gov, where, for the first time, it has displayed sketches of Dan Cooper – more commonly known as D B Cooper – together with photographs both of a cheap clip-on tie he left behind on the plane before making his mid-air exit and of ragged remains of a few $20 bills found in the vicinity on the ground by a boy in 1980.
www.independent.co.uk