This week we learned that the FBI is investigating an unnamed "object," and is working to get fingerprints and possibly DNA evidence from it. What is the object? Where is it from? Who does it incriminate? We don't know. So far, facts are maddeningly being held back.
What we do know is that the provenance of the object is said to be pretty solid. A law enforcement agent learned of someone directly connected to the case. Said law enforcement agent is the one who passed along the tip. Hopefully this means that it is a solid lead, unlike the hundreds (thousands?) of crackpot leads which have been submitted to the FBI over the years.
We also have been told that the person being implicated as D.B. Cooper is a new suspect, not someone who has been identified or interviewed before.
Beyond that, we know nothing. How frustrating!
On the day before Thanksgiving, 1971, a man who identified himself as "Dan Cooper" bought a plane ticket with cash at Portland International Airport. He bought a one-way ticket to Seattle. He wore a black raincoat, a dark suit, "a neatly pressed white shirt," a black tie, and a mother of pearl tie pin. Once on board the plane, "He lit a cigarette and ordered a bourbon and water." (It's all so very "Mad Men"!)
Mid-flight, Cooper quietly announced to a stewardess that he had a bomb in his briefcase, and that he was taking the plane hostage. When the plane landed in Seattle, police handed over his requested $200,000 cash and parachutes. After releasing the passengers, Cooper demanded that the plane fly him to Mexico. However, he jumped from the plane mid-flight, while it was over southern Washington.
Unfortunately for those hoping that Cooper successfully landed and went on the lam, in 2007 the FBI revealed that Cooper apparently selected a non-functioning parachute from the group that was supplied to him. It had been marked with an X, meaning that it was an instructional pack only.