Siblings claim mysterious hijacker D.B. Cooper is their father

A pair of siblings from North Carolina believe their deceased father is the infamous Boeing hijacker D.B. Cooper after an investigator claimed to have found his hidden parachute in their home.

Who is D.B. Cooper?

D.B. Cooper, also known as Dan Cooper, was an unidentified man who hijacked an aircraft on November 24, 1971.

After telling a stewardess that he had a bomb, held the plane and its 36 passengers hostage, demanding four parachutes and $200,000 in twenty-dollar bills.

The plane landed in Seattle, where the passengers were allowed to exit in exchange for the ransom. Cooper kept a few crew members, ordering the plane to take off again toward Mexico City.

According to the FBI,  somewhere between Seattle and Reno, shortly after 8:00 p.m., Cooper jumped out of the plane with a parachute and the money, and was never seen or heard from again.

In 2016, the FBI ended their investigation, and his fate remains a mystery to this day.

The story of D.B. Cooper is often considered one of the great unsolved mysteries in FBI history.

Dan Gryder's investigation

However, over 50 years later, retired pilot Dan Gryder told Cowboy State Daily that he may just have discovered Cooper’s identity after uncovering a modified bailout rig he believes was the parachute used by Cooper in the heist.

The rig, which Gryder described as “literally one in a billion,” belonged to Richard Floyd McCoy, who was initially the FBI’s top suspect after pulling off a similar hijacking less than five months after Cooper’s flight, leading to his arrest and subsequent death in a shootout in 1974.

According to the FBI, McCoy was ruled out because he “didn’t match the nearly identical physical descriptions of Cooper provided by two flight attendants and for other reasons.”

McCoy’s children, Chanté and Rick, told Gryder that they’ve long suspected their father was D.B. Cooper but stayed silent for fear of implicating their mother, Karen, whom they also believe was involved in both hijackings.

The siblings have been in contact with Gryder since their mother died in 2020.

The FBI has not made any public statements about the supposed development or acknowledged that it has been actively looking into the DB Cooper case since 2016.

Online community

Online conspiracy theorists have expressed their doubts about Gryder’s theory, with one Reddit user saying, “Dan Gryder has a fairly bad track record with the truth.”

Another member of the D.B. Cooper conspiracist thread raised the question, “If he was Cooper, why the hell would he drag a used parachute 3000 miles back to NC?”