Part 54, page 181

Transcript

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immediately upon opening the door of the plane, which was traveling at nearly 200 miles per hour. The experts have said Cooper would also have been blinded by the wind. "With that 28-foot canopy he would have descended 26 miles an hour ver- tically. Add a 30 to 55 mile an hour wind and he would have hit at a speed of 50 to 70 miles an hour. The experts say it is inconceivable that he could have escaped serious injury or instant death — even assuming his parachute opened." Shortly after the hijacking, the FBI conducted a dummy run of the incident, dropping a deadweight from the plane. It's trajectory was plotted and com- puters figured in wind speeds and other factors. The authorities wound up with a likely landing area for Cooper that was 6.5 miles long and four miles wide. The area was the subject of an in- tensive search that uncovered the body of a murdered girl and some parachute canopies attached to weather balloons. But there was no sign of Cooper or his white chute. "It is impossible to conduct a 100 per cent effective search in some of this area," Himmeslbach said. "There are acres and acres of blackberries so dense as to be inpenetrable and some of the terrain is too steep to be searched on foot. A man could fall into one of those blackberry patches and disappear.

"From all I've seen I lean to the hypothesis that he landed in the dense woods either dead or mortally hurt. It could be years before he is found. Planes have disappeared in that kind of terrain and been missing for 10 years or more." None of the money Cooper took with him has showed up yet, adding further evidence to the belief that he died when he bailed out that stormy night. But Himmelsbach and other FBI agents continue to check into leads. "We still get several tips every week," Himmelsbach said. "We pledged at the outset to investigate any information we received from the public. "We have checked more than 1,000, maybe several thousand, reports altogether. We have checked a long list of missing persons. And after five years we still don't know if there ever was a Dan Cooper. We have no more in- formation on his identity today than we had five years ago." The incident was not without its side benefits, however. Cooper's hijacking led to an airport security program which Himmelsbach says has stopped several possible hijacking attempts. The Federal Aviation Administration says that during the first six months of 1976, the security efforts resulted in the con- fiscation of 2,840 firearms and seven explosive or incendiary devices, and the arrest of 422 persons.

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