In a new Netflix documentary series, the unsolved case of skyjacker D.B. Cooper is examined once more!

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You’d think interest in the case would be waning given that the skyjacker who became known as D.B. Cooper committed his act more than 50 years ago. But the D.B. Cooper myth persists, partly because the mystery guy has never been recognized and because he jumped out of a plane carrying $200,000 in a briefcase and got away with it. The most recent illustration of the continuous fascination with the legend is the four-part Netflix documentary series “D.B. Cooper: Where Are You?!” The series starts with what we already know once more. A man by the name of Dan Cooper purchased a ticket at Portland International Airport on November 24, 1971. He boarded aircraft 305 of Northwest Orient Airlines, which would have been a quick trip to Seattle.

The business suit-clad man placed his order for bourbon and soda, and the aircraft took flight. The man informed the captain and a flight attendant that he had a bomb in his briefcase and demanded $200,000 and four parachutes while they were flying to Seattle.

The plane touched down in Seattle, the passengers were escorted out, and then it took off again with only a few crew members and Cooper in charge of the cash and the parachute equipment. Cooper, carrying the cash-filled bag, parachuted out of the aircraft as it was flying over the Pacific Northwest.

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No one is certain what transpired after Cooper leaped into the darkness, earning the name D.B. Cooper due to an early misunderstanding. That, however, has only served to fuel hypotheses, investigations, conspiracies, and other notions about who he was, whether he lived, whether he had collaborators who were part of the plot, what happened to the money, and other such topics.

DB Cooper

Marina Zenovich’s film “D.B. Cooper: Where Are You?!,” which examines some of the people who have been working to solve the Cooper mystery, also touches on “Cooperates,” or would-be sleuths who trawl the Internet for information.

The series also serves as a reminder of the Cooper mythology’s pervasiveness in modern culture, which has given rise to numerous books, TV episodes, movies, and far-fetched hypotheses. Don Draper, played by Jon Hamm in the TV series “Mad Men,” was once mistaken for Cooper by some ardent fans. Or even more recently, the “Loki” sequence from the Disney + Marvel series, which made fun of the idea that Tom Hiddleston’s trickster might have been the infamous skyjacker?

Over the course of the four episodes, a variety of interviewees share their insights, favorite theories, and explanations for why D.B. Cooper has endured as a source of curiosity for so long.

Bill Mitchell remembers boarding the 1971 Northwest Orient trip to Seattle when he was a sophomore at the University of Oregon. According to Mitchell, the passengers were generally oblivious of the potential danger they might be in even as Cooper was penning notes with his requests.

Vintage footage illustrates how different flying was at the time Cooper committed his crime. airport safety There was none. Additionally, stewardesses—as they were referred to at the time—frequently faced sexual harassment. One man with a bushy ’70s-era mustache declares in an old interview that he admires Cooper and calls the skyjacker “one of the slickest cats that ever walked on the face of the Earth.”

Several writers have written on Cooper and people who follow the case, including Geoffrey Gray. In his book, “Skyjack: The Hunt for D.B. Cooper,” Gray discusses how Cooper came to be seen as a folk hero and how the chase rather than the skyjacker occupies a significant portion of the Cooper story.

Tom Colbert, a former TV journalist turned documentary producer and investigator, is one of those persons, and “D.B. Cooper: Where Are You?!” spends a lot of time on him. The 2016 History Channel program “D.B. Cooper: Case Closed?” featured Colbert and one of the many prior Cooper documentaries. Colbert discusses how he felt the History Channel special dissed the work he and his cold case team had done, which led them to believe that a man by the name of Robert Rackstraw was Cooper, in the Netflix series.

A search for Cooper’s parachute and money is also featured in the Netflix series, along with visits to a “undisclosed” Oregon location. There is also a video from the 2021 “CooperCon,” a gathering of “Cooperates” and other people interested in the Cooper case that was held at the Kiggins Theater in Vancouver, Washington. Eric Ulis, a Cooper researcher who is featured in “D.B. Cooper: Where Are You?!,” is one of the featured guests. Ulis also appeared in the History Channel special “The Final Hunt for D.B. Cooper,” which focused on Ulis’ hypothesis that Cooper may have landed in a region close to Ridgefield, Washington.

The documentary “D.B. Cooper: Where Are You?!” goes over a list of some of the suspects but doesn’t come to any firm conclusions. Instead, it seems to accept Gray’s theory that Cooper will likely remain a mystery to us forever and that this is what keeps us fascinated.