On November 24, 1971, a man using the name Dan Cooper hijacked a Portland-to-Seattle flight, extorted $200,000 and four parachutes, and jumped out of the plane over the Pacific Northwest wilderness, never to be conclusively identified. The FBI worked the case for 45 years before formally closing its active investigation in July 2016 without an identification. In 2018, a California filmmaker’s investigative team said they had finally solved it anyway, using a decoded message they said pointed to a specific man: Robert Rackstraw, a former Army pilot who had spent decades denying it.
The Codebreaker’s Claim
Filmmaker Tom Colbert had spent years building a case that Rackstraw, who left the Army months before the hijacking with training in parachuting and demolitions, was Cooper. In 2018, Colbert brought in Rick Sherwood, an Indiana military veteran who had earned two Bronze Stars for code-breaking work during three tours in Vietnam, to examine letters purportedly sent by the hijacker to newspapers after the hijacking. Sherwood said he decoded a message embedded in the letters reading, in part, that Cooper was not the hijacker’s real name and identifying “Lt. Robert Rackstraw.” A retired FBI behavioral analyst consulted by Colbert’s team called the resulting circumstantial case “strong.”
What the FBI Actually Said
The FBI had already closed its active investigation two years before Colbert’s team announced the identification, redirecting any new physical evidence to field offices rather than continuing to actively pursue leads. The bureau did not confirm Rackstraw had ever been a formal suspect and stated publicly that none of the many identifications proposed over the decades, and there have been dozens, had produced a definitive identification of the hijacker. That statement applied as much to the Rackstraw claim as to every other name floated since 1971.
What Rackstraw Himself Said
Rackstraw had a documented history of confusing his own record: a fraud-linked faked death in 1978, multiple arrests, and, according to Colbert, private acknowledgments to the investigative team that he had previously claimed to be Cooper before recanting it as a stunt. He never gave an on-record, unambiguous confirmation or denial that held up consistently. He died on July 9, 2019, of a long-standing heart condition, without ever resolving the question himself.
What Remains Unresolved
The decoded letter claim and the FBI’s institutional silence are not the same kind of evidence. The letters and their proposed decoding are checkable in the sense that the text exists and the decoding methodology has been published; whether the code was actually embedded by the hijacker or found through a decoding process flexible enough to locate a name it was already looking for is a separate question the case’s proponents and skeptics have never resolved between them. The FBI’s underlying case file remains officially closed, unconfirmed, and, as of Rackstraw’s death, permanently unable to be settled by the person named in it. The pattern recurs elsewhere on this site: a credentialed claimant, a body of documents open to competing readings, and an institution that never issues a final word either way, as with Stanton Friedman’s defense of the Majestic-12 documents.
Sources & Further Reading
- Fox News — “Indiana man tells how cracked code pointed to D.B. Cooper suspect”
- CBS News — “D.B. Cooper: Army veteran in Indiana says he cracked code of infamous unsolved crime”
- History.com — “Who Was the Mysterious Hijacker D.B. Cooper?”
- All That’s Interesting — “Robert Rackstraw, The Paratrooper Who May Have Been D.B. Cooper”
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