The articles I’ve read suggest that the money found in 1980 was in a watershed upstream of where the parachute was discovered. If that is his 'chute, it’s hard to see how his body could be nearby.
Or anywhere else, either. It had to have been eaten, and the bones scattered, within days.
I would love to hear what folks who know would put the odds of him surviving that jump at - taking out if he was an amateur etc - we can’t know any of that … just what are the odds of a guy jumping with his equipment in the speed/air conditions would survive. That would be my GQ because we get so many answers it is hard to tell what the real truth is.
To the OP what gets mixed in is that the scanty evidence we have : a scary Wilderness area that would be hard to survive at any time, a substantial piece of the money was found in a condition that suggested he didn’t make it out of the rough Wilderness area, none of the money seems to have been spent on the top of what was a crazy dangerous jump all points to the likelihood he didn‘t survive…. But I still am not sure if the jump itself was one he was unlikely to survive, almost impossible to survive, or was so extraordinarily dangerous it would take a miracle [akin to someone surviving a fall from a plane w/o a chute] for someone to survive it…. I have read variations on all three from pretty reliable sources
DB Cooper program on Discovery right now. They are going to do the jump.
So far they have a vintage type chute and everything he was carrying. They did it 4 times. Then did it at night like Cooper did. They say not easy but doable.
They mention the military offered him a parachute that would open right out of the plane. He rejected it.
They tested the water landing possibility. The money bag actually added buoyancy. He would have been able to get out of a river or near the edge of a lake. The money weighed 21 lbs.
Had to work tonight or I would have liked to see that show on Cooper. 
Oh, don’t get me wrong here…I don’t think he was a hero or anything. I also don’t see him as public enemy number one however. He took his chances and for my part if he happened to get away with the $200k then it’s no skin off my nose. Most likely he died in the attempt so it’s probably moot.
-XT
There was a death bed confession of a guy named Duane Weber. he told his wife he did it. They took the FBI drawing of Cooper to Las Vegas with the face recognition programs. They compared the drawing with photos of 3 guys who claimed to be Cooper. Duane was an overwhelming choice of the computer.
According to the FBI, Weber has been ruled out based on a partial DNA lift from the tie Cooper wore.
Bruno Hauptmann was caught by that process, all the way back in 1934.
Ruled out? We know that Duane Weber’s DNA doesn’t match some form of DNA evidence found on Cooper’s tie. Do we know for sure that the DNA on Cooper’s tie was Coopers? Could it have been someone else’s? Someone else who wore the tie prior to Cooper? Someone who lived with Cooper and did his laundry? Or, someone who handled the tie at some point?
I personally don’t think Duane Weber is D.B. Cooper (or Dan Cooper, rather.) But I also don’t think we have any conclusive proof that the DNA material found on the tie is necessarily from the hijacker.
On another note, they didn’t actually replicate Dan Cooper’s jump. They replicated a jump in an parachute of the same type he had with a 21 pound bag of money tied to the sky diver, they didn’t do the jump at the same speed Cooper did or from the same plane.
FWIW, there was another sky diver who was featured on the program (he wasn’t the one doing the stunts for Discovery) who said he has done a jump at around the speed Cooper jumped–and that it was extremely difficult but doable.
I think the consensus is, a trained sky diver could jump out of a plane traveling at that speed and survive the fall. But Cooper’s chances were compounded by the night jump, the disorientation of flashes of lighting, carrying a 21 pound money bag, and the fact he wasn’t jump into a clear area but an incredibly dense forest that he’d have a very hard time even seeing until he hit right into a tree.
Just to add, I think it’s possible D.B. Cooper survived. I think it is almost impossible he survived with the money, though. It actually isn’t unlikely that he could have spent that money and no one ever noticed, it’s pretty much impossible he could have spent that money and no one ever noticed. Believe it or not it isn’t as difficult as people think for the government to find certain serial numbers.
Any money he spends eventually goes from the business he spent it at to a bank. Eventually the money goes from the bank to one of the Federal Reserve banks, and from there those bills would definitely be noticed at some point.
If Cooper survived he lost his money in the jump, or possibly buried it hoping to come back for it one day and never did–maybe because he died before he got a chance or he could never find quite where he buried it.
If D.B. Cooper died, it’d be difficult to find his remains. As another poster said, in the wilderness a corpse doesn’t last very long.
How many deer or bear carcasses do you think are found in the woods? From animals who have died of natural causes? It’s actually quite rare. Sure, during hunting season you might wander upon an animal that has been killed in the past 48 hours or so. But animals that die of natural causes, for example , their corpses are gone almost immediately.
Could have used the money as collateral on a loan of some kind?
Repaid the loan, & never spent the money itself?
Just an anecdote: Mrsin and I were half-listening to a Chicago call-in program in 1977 about Cooper while working on our kitchen remodel. A guy called in and said that people were all misinterpreting Cooper’s motives. He went on to detail what Cooper’s motives actually were in great detail, very rationally. After a couple of minutes we started really listening because he sounded so confident in what he was saying. After several more minutes the host basically came right out and asked if the caller was Cooper, and the caller immediately hung up. We were convinced at the time it was really him.
At the time the government would have great difficulty tracking serial numbers. They were 20 dollar bills. Pre computer days.
Cooper picked a plane that had a ramp that when he jumped he would be away from the engine back draft. Their were only 2 around at the time. Makes me think he knew what he was doing.
I’ve seen a lot of evidence that Cooper wasn’t a crackpot who went into this with a half-assed plan. He definitely went into elaborate details when planning the flight.
He realized that he didn’t want the auto-deploying shoot, because if his chute had deployed too early it would have been torn to shreds if it deployed too close to the jet.
He realized he needed to have the plane flying lower and slower than it normally would.
So yeah, I think Cooper knew some of the details he needed to know to make the jump go off right. But, all that and he jumps into extremely hostile terrain at night, during a lightning storm.
Why wasn’t he checking the weather reports where he planned on jumping? Why wasn’t he taking a flight over better terrain?
If he’s expecting $200,000 he certainly can spend money on multiple flights to make sure that before he actually decides to hijack a plane he does it on a flight that is going to pass over more reasonable terrain and in more reasonable weather.
sigh See post #30, please.
So what did the caller suggest were the actual motives?
Hm. Hauptmann kidnapped and killed Charles Lindberg’s child: it was a highly celebrated case. The serial numbers were distributed to banks; after a while they appeared to be centered on the Bronx, making subsequent checking easier as it covered fewer institutions.
The DB Cooper case simply would not have the same degree of media attention and therefore less cooperation from local banks, assuming that DB sat on the money for a while.
Is this really the case? The average one dollar bill lasts about 18 months – that’s a lot of serial numbers to check, even today.
Ha, sorry, it was 31 years ago. All I can say, is we stopped what we were doing to listen and the guy sounded plausible and how do I describe this…invested in getting the correct story out. He said it definately wasn’t about the money, and he had some idealogical reason for doing the hijacking, but I can’t for the life of me remember what it was. I just asked Mrsin if he remembered the reason but he didn’t either. It was the 70’s…
Sorry all, I thought I was in MPSIMS. I never come to GD, only ended up here today because my daughter wanted me to read the Hillary Bosnia thread.