D. B. Cooper

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Skyjack: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper by Geoffrey Gray

airport security, Boeing 747, company town, D. B. Cooper, Google Earth, industrial robot, off-the-grid

There have been several other books written on the Cooper case, all of them worth reading, and some which I relied on to re-create the lives of Cooper suspects and Cooper hunters, most notably D.B. Cooper: The Real McCoy, by Bernie Rhodes, research by Russell Calame (University of Utah Press, 1991). The others are D.B. Cooper: What Really Happened, by May Gunther (Contemporary Books, 1985); NORJAK, by Ralph Himmelsbach and Thomas K. Worcester (self-published, 1986); The Legend of D.B. Cooper, by Ron and Pat Foreman (self-published, 2008); Into the Blast: The True Story of D.B. Cooper, by Skipp Porteous and Robert Blevins (Adventure Books, 2010), and D.B. Cooper: Dead or Alive? by Richard Tosaw (Tosaw Books, 1984). THE JUMP Quote: “Bombproof.”

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Flipping around the dial, Lyle settled on the program Unsolved Mysteries. The topic of the episode was D.B. Cooper: the famous hijacker who in the fall of 1971 parachuted out the back of an airplane with $200,000 in stolen cash—and was never seen again. D.B. Cooper had become a famous American outlaw, the legendary Robin Hood of the sky. The subject of poems and ballads and rock songs, D.B. was up there in the crime annals with Billy the Kid, Bonnie and Clyde, and Bigfoot. D.B. Cooper, where are you now? We’re looking for you high and low. With your pleasant smile And your dropout style, D.B. Cooper, where did you go? His identity is a mystery.

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Cooper will be available to autograph his book Night Skydiving for Fun and Profit 8:30 p.m. at the bookstore, weather permitting.” Others build a mock grave on a country road east of Woodland, with a corpse fashioned out of driftwood. D.B. COOPER’S GRAVE, the sign says. DIED NOV 24 1971 FROM A FREE FALL. Entrepreneurs manufacture T-shirts. One design: “D.B. Cooper Fan Club.” Another: “Cooper Lives!” A local songwriter, Judy Sword, records “D.B. Cooper, Where Are You?” The song gets constant airplay. With your pleasant smile And your dropout style, D.B. Cooper, where did you go? In Woodland, in Battleground, in Ariel, in the logging towns that make up southwest Washington, agents knock on doors and stop drivers at roadblocks.

Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire L. Evans

4chan, Ada Lovelace, air gap, Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, Colossal Cave Adventure, computer age, crowdsourcing, D. B. Cooper, dark matter, dematerialisation, Doomsday Book, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, East Village, Edward Charles Pickering, game design, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Haight Ashbury, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, junk bonds, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Network effects, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, PalmPilot, pets.com, rent control, RFC: Request For Comment, rolodex, San Francisco homelessness, semantic web, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telepresence, The Soul of a New Machine, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K

By the late 1990s, technology investors finally hipped to the fact that although “content is king”—this being the unofficial mantra of Alley types in the early years, so much so that Word staff printed ironic T-shirts reading CONTENT PROVIDER in big block type—the increasing volume of free content on the Web would drive advertising rates into the ground, and nobody was going to pay for subscriptions to digital magazines. Word was brusquely shut down by its parent company in March 1998, prompting a flurry of obituaries. A competing online magazine, Suck.com, pondered its “D. B. Cooper–ish disappearance.” Wired called it the end of an era. But by September, it was back from the dead. Here’s where the story gets weird. Being a trophy wife on the arm of an infrastructure company was one thing, but the holding company that bought Word for two billion dollars in 1998 made industrial-grade fish meal.

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“He’s an artist”: Ibid. “We were essentially artists and bohemians”: Ibid. sold ads at around $12,500 a pop: Kaplan, “Word Up?!” “For us, the creative team”: Naomi Clark, interview with the author, March 25, 2017. “Going public was the business model”: Bowe, interview with the author, July 26, 2016. “D. B. Cooper–ish disappearance”: “Hit & Run 05.31.01,” www.suck.com/daily/2001/05/31. Wired called it the end of an era: Silberman, “Word Down.” “It made so little sense”: Clark, interview with the author, March 25, 2017. Their new owner, Zapata Corporation: Lisa Napoli, “From Oil to Fish to the Internet: Zapata Tries Another Incarnation,” New York Times, May 18. 1998.

Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide by Robert Michael Pyle

back-to-the-land, clean water, D. B. Cooper, dark pattern, Donald Trump, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the High Line, the scientific method, trade route

Before rounding Hat Rock I turned and took a mind-picture of the panorama straight across the low point of the Divide to Dumbo, Mounts Rainier and Adams in peripheral view, the entirety of Juniper Ridge from Tongue Rock to Dark Mountain laid out before me. The country looked so big that I could imagine D. B. Cooper, Monty West, or Sehlatiks hiding out here forever. A deep cleft took the trail through Hat Rock. In the cut I found a steep rock garden. The blossoms were mostly blown, except for lavender asters, orange hawkbit, scarlet gilia, and yellow wallflowers. The incredibly sweet smell of the wallflower was worth a precarious kneel, and I didn’t keel over this time.

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Then, as I rounded a bend, Quartz Creek muffled, the silence was palpable. A big downed log spanned eighty feet of the gorge, rising thirty feet to gain the far side. I declined to cross it. Would Bigfoot? Has Bigfoot? This is so deep, I thought as I walked, so wild—no place to hide, my foot! After all, D. B. Cooper parachuted into these woods and was never found. And he didn’t even know his way around. Nor did I, apparently. I lost the trail in the dimming green light after detouring around a massive log. All I had to do was work my way downstream to find the trail eventually. Even so, I felt a rare little sense of alarm.

Cockpit Confidential: Everything You Need to Know About Air Travel: Questions, Answers, and Reflections by Patrick Smith

Airbus A320, airline deregulation, airport security, Atul Gawande, Boeing 747, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, collective bargaining, crew resource management, D. B. Cooper, high-speed rail, inflight wifi, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, legacy carrier, low cost airline, Maui Hawaii, Mercator projection, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, New Urbanism, pattern recognition, race to the bottom, Skype, Tenerife airport disaster, US Airways Flight 1549, zero-sum game

Radicals then blow up the plane. 1970: In what were known as the Black September hijackings, five jets, including planes belonging to TWA, Pan Am, and Israel’s El Al, are commandeered over Europe during a three-day span by a group called the Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). After all passengers are freed, three of the five planes are diverted to a remote airstrip in Jordan, rigged with explosives, and blown up. A fourth is flown to Egypt and destroyed there. 1971: A man using the name D. B. Cooper skyjacks and threatens to blow up a Northwest Orient 727 flying from Portland, Oregon, to Seattle. Over southwestern Washington, he parachutes out the back of the plane with a hefty ransom and is never seen or heard from again. 1972: A JAT (Yugoslav Airlines) DC-9 en route from Copenhagen to Zagreb explodes at 33,000 feet.

Test Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut by Nicholas Schmidle

Apollo 11, bitcoin, Boeing 737 MAX, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, crew resource management, crewed spaceflight, D. B. Cooper, Dennis Tito, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, game design, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, no-fly zone, Norman Mailer, Oklahoma City bombing, overview effect, private spaceflight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, time dilation, trade route, twin studies, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

“He jumped out,” said Fisch. They piled into Paul’s Plymouth Valiant. Fisch led Paul to Mark’s prearranged landing spot. Mark was standing on the side of the road, Fisch recalled, “this massive billowing orange thing blowing in the wind and this big, shit-eating grin on his face. He looked like D. B. Cooper or something.” Paul scolded Mark and said he bought him the parachute to be safe, not stupid. They never spoke of it again. When Mark was about to graduate, the alumni magazine profiled him and put him on the cover. BORN TO FLY, read the headline. He was asked about his plans and admitted that he dreamed of becoming an astronaut but, “I hate to tell people that, because it seems like such a kiddie dream.”

Getting Past Your Past: Take Control of Your Life With Self-Help Techniques From EMDR Therapy by Francine Shapiro

Columbine, D. B. Cooper, epigenetics, fear of failure, financial independence, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Oklahoma City bombing, randomized controlled trial, traumatic brain injury

Substance Abuse Brown, S. H., Gilman, S. G., Goodman, E. G., Adler-Tapia, R., & Freng, S. (in submission). Integrated trauma treatment: Combining EMDR and seeking safety. Brown, S., Stowasser, J. E., & Shapiro, F. (2011). Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR): Mental health-substance use. In D. B. Cooper (Ed.), Intervention in mental health-substance use. (pp. 165–93) Oxford: Radcliffe Publishing. Kessler, R. C., Sonnega, A., Bromet, E., et al. (1995). Posttraumatic stress disorders in the National Comorbidity Survey. Archives of General Psychiatry, 52, 1048-60. Najavits, L. M. (2002). Seeking safety: A manual for PTSD and substance use treatment.