Part 61, page 262
Document date 21 November 1976
FBI 164-81, Vault Part 61 p. 262 (DB Cooper-25471), News clipping, dated 21 Nov 1976, serial 16-4092-875 (as read from the transcript) — cooper.theunsolved.net/parts/Cooper-Part-61/pages/262
Transcript
The scan is the source; the transcript is machine-generated from it.
"Or does it?" "We're going ahead on the assumption that the statute doesn't apply, because when he did what he did, capital punishment was a possibility. Say, you might find a scrap or two of bone, if that. There's no statute on capital crimes," says FBI agent Ralph Himmelsbach.
Anyway, he says, chances are good that Cooper is dead.
"Not one of the 10,000 bills has shown up, and we know the serial number of every one of them," he said. And Cooper apparently knew nothing about skydiving.
In a business suit and street shoes, he jumped from the rear door of a jet going 197 m.p.h. at 10,000 feet. At that elevation it was seven below zero that night, with a wind-chill factor of 69 below zero.
The plane was in clouds. "Up looked like down to him. He had no visual reference. He couldn't have possibly known where he was."
Cooper picked some of the roughest country in the Pacific Northwest.
He took two of the four parachutes with him when he jumped. One was a small emergency chute of the type used by stunt fliers. Under ideal conditions, someone who knew what he was doing might break an ankle or leg with it.
The other was a training chute used for demonstrations. The panels had been sewn shut. It wouldn't have opened.
The next night the FBI re-enacted the skyjacking using the same plane, crew, fuel load, speed and altitude. The test helped flight engineers and meteorologists to compute the probably drop zone to be a trapezoidal area covering about 25 square miles.
It has been searched and researched in vain.
What would it take to find Cooper's remains, assuming [they] are there?
[I]'d say it might take 5,000 [or] [guess: five] years. I mean, how [do you] search a blackberry [thicket] [guess: bigger] than your
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[guess: hikers] who work in the [guess: areas] that coyotes, [guess: or] lions or wild dogs [guess: make] quick work of a body. After five years, they [guess: say], you might find a scrap or two of bone, if that. Nevertheless, for a while Cooper was a folk hero of sorts. He was macho. He was daring. He didn't hurt anybody, but he ripped off a big corporation. And he beat the fuzz.
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DB Cooper-25471