A HIGH school geography teacher found himself in the unlikely position of being the most wanted man in America after the FBI mistakenly identified him as the brazen crook DB Cooper.
Michael Cooper was traveling home for Thanksgiving when his flight, Northwest Orient 305, was hijacked on November 24, 1971 by a smartly dressed man named Dan Cooper.
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Then a 31-year-old teacher at Missoula Sentinel High School in Montana, Michael had ducked out of his classes early to make the flight, which first took off from Missoula at 1:13 pm.
The Boeing 727 stopped in Spokane and then Portland, where DB Cooper boarded, took a seat in the last row of the aircraft just behind Michael, and ordered a bourbon and 7UP.
Shortly after taking off for the final leg of the journey to Seattle, DB Cooper – wearing sunglasses and a suit – handed a note to a flight attendant warning her he had a bomb in his suitcase and ordered her to sit down next to him.
In exchange for the lives of everyone onboard, Cooper was seeking two things: $200,000 in $20 bills and four parachutes.
Michael and all of the other passengers remained completely oblivious to the dangerous situation quietly unfolding in the cabin until the flight touched down at SeaTac airport more than two hours later than scheduled.
He recounted to The U.S. Sun how he’d taken notice of Cooper shortly after he’d boarded, identifying something strange about his behavior.
“He was probably in his 40s, and he was wearing a jacket and a tie and he was just real quiet,” said Michael, now 84.
“He had a little briefcase and took the middle seat of the back row which I thought was kind of unusual, but at that time I had no idea that anything bad was happening.
“Then something else strange happened when we took off: the stewardess came down and sat next to him in the aisle seat, and they were engrossed in a deep conversation.
“He never got up to go to the bathroom, which I had to do at one stage.
“But I couldn’t catch wind of anything he or the flight attendant was saying.
“He was just, I would say, cool. Whenever I looked at him, he just looked right back and stared at me like he was the boss.”
The only inclination that something was wrong aboard Northwest 305 came when the pilot announced over the intercom that the aircraft was experiencing minor engine trouble and they needed to burn off excess fuel before attempting to land in Seattle.
In reality, the pilot was circling in the sky to buy authorities enough time to scramble together Cooper’s ransom money and parachutes.
Michael’s focus on the odd dynamic between Cooper and the flight attendant was temporarily diverted when he realized Flight 305 had passed over Seattle.
“The pilot’s explanation for what was happening didn’t make sense to me,” remembered Michael. “I just kept looking out the window and wondering why the hell we were doing this.
“I had no idea a hijacking was going on but I realized there was probably something special going on between the guy in the back row and the stewardess.
“Occasionally a stewardess would come from the front of the airplane to the back, talk to the stewardess sat next to the hijacker, and go back to the front of the plane.
“We were totally without knowledge that a hijacking was going on. I was more concerned that the pilot was lying and there was something seriously wrong with the airplane.”
Whenever I looked at him, he just looked right back and stared at me like he was the boss.
Michael Cooper
A FRIGHTENING MISHAP
Before landing, all passengers were asked to move up to first class and everybody obliged, except for DB Cooper and another passenger, Bill Mitchell, who was sitting across the aisle from the hijacker.
Mitchell eventually moved too at the persistent pleading of a flight attendant.
After two and a half hours, Flight 305 finally landed.
The aircraft taxied to the end of the runway and parked a significant distance from the terminal and all other aircraft.
“It all seemed suspicious at that point,” said Michael. “I was then sitting next to a guy who worked for some government agency who’d recently investigated a hijacking and he thought something unusual was going on too.
“And then the next thing we know, a fuel truck pulls up alongside the plane and then a few minutes later a stewardess came walking down the aisle holding a huge sack with the name of a bank written across it.
“You could tell clearly it was filled with money. And then she came back with a couple of parachutes.
“That’s when the pilot came on the speaker and told us to exit immediately.”
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The passengers left the plane through the door at the front of the plane and crossed the runway to an airport bus.
While on the bus, Michael and his fellow passengers learned for the first time the truth of what had unfolded on Flight 305.
But this would be only the beginning of Michael’s entanglement with DB Cooper.
He explained: “Several burly FBI agents were waiting for us on the bus and one of them had a sheet of paper, and he started calling out the name of the passengers.
“The agent called D. Cooper and nobody answered. He called again and again nobody answered.
“I thought he’d made some kind of mistake, so I spoke up and said, ‘I’m M. Cooper, Michael Cooper,’ and I saw the guy standing at the head of the bus scratch something off his sheet.
“They then took us to the terminal building where we were interviewed by a handful of people. I gave them my identification and my information, described to them what happened, and then my sister picked up, where I spent the rest of the evening in Seattle.”
Michael’s sister drove him back to her house and left him for the night to go out to a party.
He would later discover that the agent who conducted the roll call had counted D. Cooper among the passengers on board the bus but not M. Cooper.
M. Cooper, as far as federal authorities were concerned, was unaccounted for and therefore presumed to be the hijacker.
After all the passengers exited, Flight 305 was instructed by DB Cooper to take off again in the direction of New Mexico.
Somewhere over southwest Washington, he parachuted out of the flight with the ransom and all of his belongings, never to be seen again.
Michael Cooper, meanwhile, was left alone with his thoughts at his sister’s home.
He was unable to call any of his friends or family members because she didn’t have a phone.
He could barely believe the events of the past few hours – and his disbelief was further suspended when he switched on the 10 o’clock news to see his name on the screen, identifying him as the skyjacker at large.
“The top story that night was the hijacking,” said Michael. “I was watching the footage, when one of those messages appeared along the bottom of the screen saying that the FBI was seeking Michael Cooper, a high school teacher from Missoula, Montana, in connection with the hijacking.
“I just shook my head in disbelief. I thought, ‘This can’t be true, what the devil has happened?’
“Because I couldn’t call anyone – not my wife, my parents, or friends – and say I didn’t do this, that’s not me.
“I just got up and went to bed. It was all just too much for me to process.”
A SOUR TASTE
While Michael slept, back in his hometown of Missoula, the Cooper family’s phone was ringing off the hook with agents and reporters quizzing Michael’s wife regarding his whereabouts.
She was unable to provide them with any details – nobody had heard from him since the plane landed.
Administrators at Missoula Sentinel High School were also contacted by the FBI, who informed the Bureau that Michael had left school early that day to catch a flight.
Speculation about Michael Cooper began to build on local news broadcasts, and his parents were also eventually quizzed by cops in Sequim, Washington.
Within 24 hours, the FBI’s error was finally rectified and reports were changed to name Dan Cooper (who later became known as D.B. Cooper due to a printing error in an early news article) as the culprit cops were seeking.
Michael Cooper was never contacted by the FBI again.
More than 50 years later, he said he is still waiting for an apology from the Bureau.
“The whole situation scared the hell out of me and made me never want to fly on an airplane again,” admitted Michael.
“It took me quite a while before I was able to find the guts to go back.
“I also lost my faith in the federal government,” he added.
“I used to think that the FBI was the most professional organization in the world, and knowing that they made such a stupid mistake of just crossing off the wrong name and never even bothering to apologize just left a sour taste in my mouth.
“For years afterward, my income taxes were quite often checked and I had to go into the Bureau and justify my expenses, so clearly I still had a red flag against my name.”
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LASTING IMPRESSION
Even now, every time Michael steps foot on a plane or hears one flying overhead, the first thing he thinks of is DB Cooper and his brush in with death.
Some of his friends still tease him by calling him “DB,” much to his amusement.
For years, Michael held an annual event to recall the story of Flight 305 at Sentinel High and later Sequim High School, where he retired in 2011.
Michael doesn’t believe DB Cooper survived his perilous skydive and is doubtful investigators will ever learn who he truly was.
But he called the two FBI sketches of him “extremely accurate” and said he still believes he could pick the culprit out of a lineup today, all these years on.
“I think this Cooper guy was a very independent, very strong individual but I think he made a stupid mistake; I don’t think he’d have survived jumping out that plane, but that’s just my opinion,” said Michael.
“I think he died during the jump because the weather was so crummy.
“Maybe he was the perfect smoke jumper type […] but I always suspected he ended up in the woods of the area where he jumped and hit the ground.
“They found $5,800 of his money along the Columbia River [in 1980], I doubt he’d just be throwing away that kind of money if he’d lived.”
AN ENDURING MYSTERY
Where Cooper landed, and whether or not he even survived his jump, has never been determined.
The FBI considered more than 800 potential suspects in the five years after the heist, though failed to find any evidence to determine a conclusive match.
The only trace of Cooper ever yielded came in 1980 when a child digging along the banks of the Columbia River in Tena Bar, north of Portland, unearthed stacks of rotting $20 bills totaling $5,800.
Further investigation linked the bills back to Cooper’s ransom.
The FBI published the bills’ serial numbers in the hope of fresh leads, but the vast majority of the cash was never recovered.
Cooper’s trail went cold again and the case has continued to baffle law enforcement and amateur detectives alike in the years since.
Today, the hijacking of Northwest 305 remains the only unsolved skyjacking in US history.
The FBI closed its investigation into DB Cooper for good in 2016.
Like Michael Cooper, fellow passenger Bill Mitchell told The U.S. Sun he also doesn’t believe DB survived the jump.
He, however, voiced confidence the case could be solved.
A key to finally unmasking Cooper may lie in a strange incident that happened over Eugene, Washington, the night before the heist, believes Cliff Ammerman, a retired air traffic controller who supervised Northwest 305 after its second takeoff.
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Ammerman had just returned from his lunch break when he was informed by a colleague he would be supervising a “hijacked aircraft pretty soon” once it crossed over into Woodland, Washington.
“That was the first I heard about it,” remembered Ammerman, 81, in an interview with The U.S. Sun.
“We didn’t know much about what was happening onboard because we weren’t getting a lot of knowledge from the pilot.
“They were busy in the cockpit communicating with the company and other people on the ground.
“Also, you have to assume the hijacker is in the cockpit […] so we were being really careful with everything we transmitted.”
Ammerman said he had no idea the hijacker claimed to have a bomb onboard. He was, however, aware of the ransom fee paid out and the number of parachutes Cooper had requested.
Ammerman said he was worried that the hijacker was going to make the crew bail out of the aircraft with him, leaving the 727 to crash to the ground unmanned.
The controller’s fears would prove unfounded, with Cooper skydiving out of the aircraft around 8:13 pm.
Ammerman continued to assist Flight 305 up until it passed over Eugene, Oregon.
It later landed safely in Reno, Nevada, some seven hours after the terrifying ordeal began.
Ammerman was never interviewed by the Bureau.
He believes the FBI may have overlooked a few key details in their initial investigation, including a strange incident he was alerted to near Eugene, Oregon, the night before the skyjacking.
“They didn’t contact me, but the only thing I thought the FBI should know […] was something that happened the night before the hijacking that may have been pertinent,” he said.
“I was working another swing shift and late in the evening, sometime around 10 pm or 10:30 pm, someone from the Eugene [air traffic control] tower called and said there’s someone from an airplane dropping flares down by Cottage Grove, which is a community southeast of Eugene.
“He asked me if I’d heard anything about it and I hadn’t. So I checked the NOTAMs [Notice to Airmen] to see if anything was mentioned and there was nothing there.
“But after that hijacking happened I thought to myself, ‘if this guy’s got someone on the ground waiting for him in a certain area, what better way to see a guy coming down than if he was using a flare?'”
When Cooper first hijacked Flight 305, he opened his briefcase and showed the flight attendant what she later described as a tangle of wires and two rows of four red cylinders – which she assumed was dynamite – attached to a battery.
However, Ammerman believes the red stick may have instead been flares – and the incident over Eugene the night prior may have been Cooper conducting a test run for his jump.
He explained: “My thought was if they’re going to practice their getaway they’re not going to do it where they were going to jump out.
“I made sure my supervisor contacted the FBI the next day and let them know about the incident but I never got any feedback from them.
“So I just assumed they checked it out and nothing came from it.”
FLIGHT PATH CONFUSION
The FBI long believed that whoever DB Cooper was he was familiar with the area in which the hijacking was staged.
The subject of whether or not Cooper could’ve survived his jump has been fiercely contested for decades.
If he did, the FBI forecasted he likely jumped somewhere near the town of La Center, Washington.
The prediction was made using the Bureau’s estimated flight path for Northwest 305 and testimony from the pilots who reported feeling a change in pressure on the aircraft at around 8:13 pm.
However, numerous independent investigators believe the Bureau miscalculated Flight 305’s path.
Among them is Eric Ulis, who told The U.S. Sun last month that – after meticulously analyzing wind speeds, “free fall” data, and other information – he believes the FBI accidentally mapped the flight path of one of the military jets scrambled to follow the plane, which was also being advised by Ammerman.
Ulis believes Cooper instead landed on Bachelor’s Island along the Columbia River, north of where his stash of money was found in 1980.
Ammerman agrees with Ulis that the FBI’s flight path data may not strictly be accurate.
He also believes the hijacker had a detailed understanding of Boeing 727s and how they operated, hinting that he may have previously worked for the airplane manufacturer or was potentially ex-military.
Evidencing his belief is a series of covert military operations conducted by the US government during the Vietnam War that involved 727s.
The point of the tests, which were successful, was to determine whether the aircraft could be used for clandestine air drops — including cargo and jumpers — by modifying their built-in rear air stairs with a trough.
Cooper lowered the rear staircase of Northwest 305 himself before jumping and was detailed in his instructions for how the aircraft should be flown: gear down, wing flaps at 15 degrees, and flying no higher than 10,000 feet with a de-pressured passenger cabin.
“He knew that it could fly with the stairs down at a slow speed and have the gear and the flaps set at the positions they were and so it makes you wonder if he didn’t have something to do with either Boeing testing that or the Air Force doing the jumps,” said Ammerman.
“Because I do understand that the Air Force during the Vietnam era did drop spies into North Vietnam with that airplane, walking down that rear stairway, and of course at the time that was classified.
“It makes me think that there was some knowledge there that he had of that.
“Where it came from, I’m not sure, but you would think it was either from Boeing or being one of those people in the Air Force who were a part of the mission.”
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