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D.B. Cooper, are you out there?
Saturday, November 24, 2007 5:09 AM PST
By Barbara LaBoe
Printable version
E-mail this articleARIEL --- If D.B. Cooper's willing --- and still alive --- organizers of the annual festival here would love to have the famed hijacker stop by for a beer.
Today, starting at 1 p.m., the Ariel Store and Tavern will host its annual D.B. Cooper Day party. The event celebrates the legend of a hijacker who vanished out of a Boeing 727 somewhere above Southwest Washington on Nov. 24, 1971 --- taking $200,000 in ransom money with him.
It's been 36 years since Cooper's daredevil stunt but his legend is still alive and well at the Ariel tavern, which has dedicated an entire corner to newspaper articles and wanted posters for the man. Part of the ceiling is even draped with a parachute -- the same make and model that Cooper was given as part of his demands, said Jack Elliott, whose mother, Dona, owns the bar.
"He's somebody who got something over on the government," explained Elliott of Cooper's appeal. "And if they haven't found him by now, there's not a shot in hell they will."
The party has taken place since 1974 and drawn people from as far away as Australia and Japan, Elliott said. These days it averages between 200 and 300 people and lots of beer.
No one knows if D.B. Cooper is the man's real name and several people --- including the FBI --- believe he died while trying to parachute from the moving plane into the frigid November night.
A Dan Cooper boarded a Seattle-bound plan in Portland, showed a stewardess a bomb and demanded $200,000 in $20 bills, several parachutes and a plane ride to Mexico. After making the flight attendants stay in the cockpit with the pilots after take-off in Seattle, Cooper is believed to have bailed out before a scheduled refueling stop in Reno.
His body has never been found and the case remains the nation's only unsolved airplane hijacking case.
Some of the money --- $5,800 --- was found in 1980 along the Columbia River by an 8-year-old Vancouver boy. The rest has never turned up, though, and some believe the money was planted to either throw investigators off track or to keep the legend alive.
Tina Nolan, a friend of the Elliott family who has attended several D.B. Cooper Day parties, said she hopes he survived.
"I think he was a very skilled skydiver," she said "You've got to root for the underdog."
The case gained renewed interest this past year after New York Magazine wrote an article in October in which a man claimed his late brother, of Pierce County Washington, was the famed Cooper. The FBI dismissed the claim, saying the man didn't have the same color eyes as Cooper and adding that several other suspects also have been investigated and eliminated through the years.
According to a Seattle Post-Intellingencer article Friday, Ron Forman plans to attends today's event to make the case that Cooper was a friend of his --- and a woman who had the state's first sex-change operation in the late 1960s.
He won't be alone with his "explanation" to the Cooper mystery.
One of the annual events is a contest to see who can tell the best story of what happened to Cooper. There also is a look-a-like and a special prize for anyone who can correctly identify the undercover FBI agents to attend just in case, Elliott said. For those who don't win the contests, the bar sells D.B. Cooper T-shirts with a different design each year. The 2007 model is selling for $15.
Elliott, by the way, thinks the debate about whether Cooper could have survived parachuting into the cold windy night is moot. He believes Cooper stowed away on the plane, changed his appearance and "walked off with the cash." As for the recovered money, Elliott believes "he just planted that to throw off the trail --- just like a good cowboy."
As for whether Cooper would ever stop by the annual event, Elliott isn't sure, adding "he'd be kind of old by now." Cooper was estimated to be in his mid-40s in 1971.
"We had a lot of people here who look like him through the years, though," Elliott added. "I might have met him already."
If you go:
The annual D.B. Cooper Day celebration at the Ariel Store and Tavern, 288 Merwin Village Road, starts at 1 p.m. today and runs until midnight. Ariel is located about 10 miles east of Woodland off of State Route 503.
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