Was hijacker D.B. Cooper French-Canadian?

Published December 1, 2011 |

The story of the D.B. Cooper hijacking has fascinated many people over the last 40years. No one knows who D.B. Cooper, or Dan Cooper as he referred to himself, was. Cooper after he jumped out of the plane he was never seen again. The FBI has opened up its evidence file on the D.B. Cooper case to amateur detectives and now new revelations have been discovered. The current line of thinking is that Cooper was a French-Canadian, because a 1960s comic book that was only published in French has a very similar story to Coopers. Randy Boswell for the Montreal Gazette reports on these new findings.

Forty years after his daring flight into criminal history as the mysterious hijacker-parachutist “D.B. Cooper,” the unidentified man who got away with a $200,000 ransom – or died trying – has led an FBI-backed team of “citizen sleuths” to conclude that he may have been a military-trained, French-Canadian factory manager or chemical engineer, probably from outside of Quebec.

A potential Canadian connection to one of the FBI’s most famous cold cases was first raised in 2009, when the U.S. agency revealed that Cooper appeared to have fashioned his identity and modus operandi from a 1960s-era, French-language comic book about a Royal Canadian Air Force test pilot and space traveller named Dan Cooper.

The hijacker – while popularly known as D.B. Cooper because of a news reporter’s error after the crime took place – actually identified himself as “Dan Cooper” when he first boarded a passenger plane on Nov. 24, 1971, at the airport in Portland, Ore.

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Chris Rivait

Chris loves history and hopes that Yesteeyear becomes a place where everyone can share their history knowledge. Chris owns an Internet Marketing company, Arrivait Marketing. He has a wonderful wife and four great children.