Part 50, page 192

Transcript

The scan is the source; the transcript is machine-generated from it.

THE SEARCH FOR D.B. COOPER

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The hundreds of anxious spectators assembled near the small logging town of Ariel, Washington had been [guess: tilting] their heads skyward for almost an hour. Standing in a wide clearing on the east bank of Lake Merwin and sipping cans of Olympia Lite while awaiting a break in the misty overcast, they had come for the occasion from as far away as California, Texas and Maryland.

Suddenly a red-and-white Cessna 172 pulled out of a banking turn and leveled off at 6,000 feet. Then, one by one, sky divers began plunging from the plane, each of them wearing a conservative business suit and carrying an attache case. As their colorful parachutes opened, onlookers cheered this symbolic reenactment of a legendary jump performed eight years before by D. B. Cooper—the absent guest of honor.

In November 1971, Cooper had been the focus of a headline-making drama that captured the public's imagination. He had threatened to blow up an airliner, held angry FBI agents at bay, parachuted from the plane with $200,000 in ransom money and disappeared into the night.

Despite the largest manhunt in FBI history, Cooper was never found. His hazardous escapade remains today as the only unsolved skyjacking in American history. Since then the gutsy adventurer who got away, with one of the most daring crimes on record, has achieved the status of popular folk hero.

That accounted for the exuberant spectators, [guess: now] singing along with a bluegrass band's rousing version of The Ballad of D. B. Cooper—a tune honoring the

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ARTICLE BY BRUCE HENDERSON Illustration by John Andrews

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DB Cooper-20797