On November twenty-fourth, nineteen seventy-one, a man using the name Dan Cooper boarded a short flight from Portland to Seattle. Before the aircraft reached its destination, he claimed to have a bomb and demanded two hundred thousand dollars and four parachutes.

Hours later, the passengers were safe, but Cooper remained aboard with part of the crew. Somewhere above the Pacific Northwest, he apparently lowered the rear stairs of the Boeing seven twenty-seven and jumped into the darkness with the ransom money.

He was never positively identified, and more than half a century later, no one has conclusively established what happened after he left the aircraft.