Reader’s Digest India – July 2019

62 july 2019

and four parachutes, Cooper released

the passengers and all but four of

the crew. He demanded to be flown

on to Mexico City, but first he had

one final instruction: He was to be left

alone in the cabin.

As the plane took off at about

7:40 p.m., the four-person crew hud-

dled in the cockpit. Per Cooper, the

plane flew below 10,000 feet at a

speed slower than 200 knots—too low

and slow for military jets to follow

closely. Just 20 minutes later, a warn-

ing light flashed, indi-

cating that the rear

door had been opened

and its staircase de-

ployed. When the

plane landed in Reno,

Nevada, for refuelling,

the cabin was empty.

Cooper had taken his

knapsack and parachuted off into the

night. Not a single witness saw him

jump. He was never seen again. The

ransom money, identifiable through

serial numbers, was never used.

Did Cooper plummet to his death?

Did he survive only to somehow lose

the knapsack? Or had the money

been merely an afterthought, more

of a means of spinning a story for the

newspapers—and for history?

The FBI spent the next nine years

trying to find the answers. Then,

in 1980, a boy camping in rural

Washington discovered three wads of

cash along the banks of the Columbia

River, which the FBI later identified as

a portion of the ransom. But the trail

remained cold until 2018, when a man

named Carl Laurin presented the FBI

with an audio tape of his deceased

friend Walter Reca confessing to

being D. B. Cooper. Around the same

time, a documentary film-maker

named Thomas Colbert was building

a case that Cooper was actually

74-year-old Robert Rackstraw.

Rackstraw, a former Special Forces

paratrooper with 22 different aliases,

had been a person of interest early on,

but he was cleared in

1979. Colbert based
      his claim in part
      on a letter Cooper
      allegedly sent to the
      Washington Post that
      included the number


1980. In Vietnam,
      Rackstraw was in the
      371st regiment—or three 71s.
      Neither of those stories was
      enough to convince the FBI, which
      is why the case of D. B. Cooper re-
      mains the only unsolved skyjacking
      in the history of American aviation.

suDDen extinction

The New World’s

Lost Colony

In March 1590, John White finally

left England on a rescue mission to

Roanoke Colony, the first permanent

English settlement in North America.

White was Roanoke’s governor, but

he had been away gathering food and

The only hint of

Roanoke’s fate: the

word CROATOAN

carved on a post.

Reader’s Digest