Why We'll Never See Another D.B. Cooper

Once the plane reached 10,000 feet, Dan jumped...

He was never seen again.

The day before Thanksgiving in 1971, a man walked up to the ticket counter at the Portland, Oregon, airport and paid $20 cash for a ticket to nearby Seattle.

The man signed for the ticket as "Dan Cooper." He looked pretty ordinary... clad in a standard black suit and dress shoes and holding a briefcase. Anybody who saw him at the airport would've assumed he was traveling home for the holiday.

Cooper boarded the plane and sat down in the last row... ordered a bourbon and soda... and waited for the flight to take off like everybody else.

And after takeoff, he got to work...

Cooper wrote a note asking a flight attendant to sit next to him...

He wasn't hitting on her, though. He was taking her hostage.

The note read...

Miss I have a bomb here and I would like you to sit by me.

He then demanded that the pilots contact ground control, arrange for him to receive $200,000 cash and four parachutes in Seattle, and then fly him to Mexico.

When the flight attendant took his demands to the cockpit, her colleague, Tina Mucklow, took her place. Cooper showed her that his briefcase contained all kinds of wires, batteries, and what looked like dynamite.

Mucklow kept her wits about her by treating the hijacking like any other part of her job. She prayed for the passengers, for herself, and even for Cooper while they flew into Seattle.

After they landed and everyone else deplaned, Mucklow made several trips hauling cash and parachutes back to Cooper. All the while, she told herself it was all part of the job.

The pilots agreed to fly Cooper to Mexico with a refueling stop in Nevada...

He requested they fly the plane at just 10,000 feet. But they didn't make it very far...

About 30 minutes after takeoff, as they were flying over the border of Washington and Oregon, Cooper demanded Mucklow help him open up the stairs in the rear of the plane.

Then, he jumped... and took the cash, briefcase, and parachutes with him. The only thing he left was his clip-on tie.

Nobody ever heard from Cooper again. And nobody recovered any evidence of his landing. So it's unclear if he survived or not.

The case of "D.B. Cooper," as he came to be known, has gone down in history as the world's only unsolved airplane hijacking.

Nearly a decade later, a child found about $5,800 of Cooper's stolen bills north of Portland. But since then, the case has gone completely cold. The FBI dropped it in 2016.

Part of the reason it's the only unsolved hijacking is because global security has gotten a lot better...

After Cooper's heist, airports got a lot stricter with security... and since the September 11 terrorist attacks, pulling off a mysterious hijacking would be just about impossible.

The companies elevating airport security are reaping the benefits of this trend. You may have seen Clear Secure's (YOU) lanes popping up at airport terminals around the country. It's at the forefront of what it calls "secure identity" services.

Similar to the TSA PreCheck program, Clear Secure verifies your identity and makes the process of getting through security much faster.

Better yet, its technology is being used outside of airports. It's installing lanes that make getting into sports stadiums faster and more secure, too.

Companies like this are making identity verification much easier and safer... and they're making a fortune in the process. Shares of Clear Secure are up more than 30% so far this year.

And as it rolls out features in more places and gains customers, the stock could soar even further.

Security is a completely different industry from the time of D.B. Cooper. The technology is way better... and it's changing every day.

The companies rolling out new, innovative features are bound to be some of the biggest winners.

Regards,

Joel Litman
September 9, 2025