Perpetrator of the only unsolved commercial aircraft hijacking in United States history. On the night before Thanksgiving in 1971, Dan (D.B.) Cooper, a man in his mid-40s wearing dark glasses, boarded a Northwest Orient Airlines plane in Portland, Oregon. After takeoff, he handed the flight attendant a hijack note and showed her the contents of a black briefcase, which contained a couple of red cylinders, wires, and a battery. He demanded $200,000 in cash and four parachutes. The plane landed at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport and authorities met his demands. After all of the passengers were released, Cooper ordered the plane back into the air and demanded that it fly towards Mexico. Alone in the passenger cabin forty minutes after takeoff, D.B. Cooper took the money, bomb, parachutes, and bailed out of the plane through its tail stairway. He dove into a freezing rainstorm at 10,000 feet, wearing only a business suit and loafers. The temperature was 7 below zero, not counting a wind chill factor estimated at minus 70 because of the plane's speed of 200 mph. He was parachuting into dense forest at night, at the onset of winter, with no food or survival gear. Authorities are 98% certain that Cooper was dead either before or shortly after reaching the ground. A gigantic manhunt was mounted over the Pacific Northwest to try and find Cooper's body. In the spring, the U.S. Army sent out 300 men to comb the area for three weeks. They found nothing. To this day, D.B. Cooper's body is still missing somewhere in the Cascade Mountains, and the crime remains unsolved. There can be no doubt that Cooper had the odds stacked against him when he parachuted from the aircraft under such excruciating conditions of sub-zero weather and slim chance of survival in a dense forest. The name D.B. Cooper is forever enshrined in folklore in the Pacific Northwest.