A senior official of FBI on Wednesday said that children playing in Amboy discovered an old tattered parachute. The Parachute is white & conical shaped, dirty & deteriorated. At the urging of the children, their Dad contacted the FBI.
FBI overlaid the family’s address onto a map made in the early days of the investigation & learned they lived right in Cooper’s most probable landing zone, between Green & Bald mountains.
The FBI is hoping someone with expertise in parachutes will come forward & inspect the remnants they have to determine if it is the type of parachute used by Cooper in 1971, a Navy Backpack 6 with a 26-foot canopy, before beginning to excavate the property.
In 1980, a family on a picnic found $5,880 of Cooper’s money in a bag on a Columbia River beach, near Vancouver. Some investigators believed it might have been washed down to the beach by the Washougal River. But if Cooper landed near Amboy & stashed the money bag there, there’s no way it could have naturally reached the Washougal.
The official said, “If this is D.B. Cooper’s parachute, the money could not have arrived at its discovery location by natural means. That whole theory is out the window”.
A man identifying himself as Dan Cooper hijacked a Northwest Orient flight from Portland, Ore., to Seattle in November 1971, claiming he had a bomb. When the plane landed at Seattle, he released passengers in exchange for $200,000 and asked to be flown to Mexico. He parachuted out near the Oregon border. Few signs of his fate have been found.
