Chilluminati Podcast - Episode 278 - D.B. Cooper w/Norm Caruso

Episode Date: December 15, 2024

Alex tackles D.B. Cooper this week with Mike and Jesse, along with the Gaming Historian himself, Norm Caruso, who's taking a break from his own history podcast, An Old Timey Podcast, to do some mysterious guesting with us. A classic mystery with a wide range of possibilities.... MERCH - http://www.theyetee.com/collections/chilluminati Zocdoc - http://www.zocdoc.com/chill Miracle Made - http://www.trymiracle.com/chill Promo Code: Chill HelloFresh - http://www.hellofresh.com/freechill HeroForge - http://www.heroforge.com All you lovely people at Patreon! HTTP://PATREON.COM/CHILLUMINATIPOD Jesse Cox - http://www.youtube.com/jessecox Alex Faciane - http://www.youtube.com/user/superbeardbros Editor - DeanCutty http://www.twitter.com/deancutty Show art by - https://twitter.com/JetpackBraggin http://www.instagram.com/studio_melectro

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the Chuluminati podcast. Episode 278, as always, in one of your hosts, Mike Martin, joined today by the three amigos of L.A., Jesse, Alex, and special guest, Norm. Of many things, but Alex usually has something written, so I don't want to, like, jump into any introductions to the guests. You know what, fine. Yes. Hello, my friends. Welcome to yet another installment of our Say It With Me, Star, studded, Chaluminati, non-denominational, winter gas. As I'm the host today.

That hardworking guy, everybody loves to trigger, but also asks to order their wine for them at restaurants. Alex Fasiani, joining us on the show today is an old professional acquaintance of mine, whom over the years I've become extremely lucky to call my friend. His high-quality YouTube content, the gaming historian, has set the tone for documentaries about video game history. For 15 years, he's a huge, unabashed fan of the author, content creator and toy historian Pixel Dan Erdly.

And these days, when he's not getting lost in this, the extended tanks world universe online. He co-hosts a hilariously inappropriate history podcast with his wife and long-time collaborator, Kristen Caruso, an old-timey podcast, which started rocking earlier this year a couple months ago. And if I had to describe it, I'd say it's a podcast for intellectuals who make fart jokes. Norman Caruso, welcome to the show. Thank you for that very classy introduction. I appreciate it, Alex.

I must stress for you, Mr. Fasciani breaks out. out the big introductions for friends. You can tell when he likes someone versus like, it's a guy. Because when he likes someone, it's like the most elaborate, beautiful intro. And anyone else is like, yeah, this is a dude. When I write the episode, there's going to be a good intro in it. That's all it is. I'm here. I'm a raconteur. I know how to frame context. You know, Norm comes on the show. I could just say, yeah, I've been going to conventions with this guy for fucking 10 years and I know him pretty well because we eat it cheddards a lot, you know? Yeah.

But that's not tight. Yeah, that's not tight. The audience might appreciate that authenticity even more, actually. Yeah. It's, there's, it's, it's, it's, it's a respect there. Like, an earned intro. Like, you know. Alex, can I tell a fun story from a convention we went to?

Of course. Of course. My favorite, my favorite memory of conventions is when we went to Norway. Uh-huh. And we wanted to try, I think it's called snooze. Oh my God. Where it's like, um, in your mouth.

under your tongue, like dip or whatever. Kind of like dip. It's like a mix between a tea bag and dip. Yeah. That's a great way to describe it. Yeah. And so we went down to this convenience store and we asked the clerk, we want to try snooze. Like, can you give us something easy?

And he was like, he's like, yes. And he was like, this is what all the teenage girls use. And it was like a menthol snooze. And we were like, great. And we took it and we walked back to the hotel. And we both were like, oh, I don't feel so good. We both were like struggling. Is it a food?

What is this thing? No, it's like, Oh. Yeah. It's like you did put it in under your lip and then it like goes in your bloodstream. Oh. Like kind of feels like you smoked a cigarette, but like, never smoked one.

So yeah, it is. It was the accidental blunt at your house. Yeah. It also felt like it was 6 p.m. But it was like 12. 45 a.m. like,

yes. It was a fucked up. We just like met like David Wise for the first time in our lives or something. Yep. Like two seconds before that? I don't know what the vibe is currently overseas. But there was a time period. I'd say 2012,

2013, 2015, we'll say up until COVID started ravaging the world. Every convention I went to overseas, everyone I met from Norway or Sweden was rocking the snooose. They were like, you want some of this? It's like,

no, I don't know what that is. And last time you guys gave me stuff, It was like weird, extra Like salty licorice And you guys were like, here, eat this, it's delicious I'm like, no, it's not I flew too close to the sign. We had whale, I think the same trip.

I don't know if that was the same trip, but there was. We did try whale. Yeah, it was, it was responsibly sustained farm-raised whale. It was we didn't, we didn't go out and harpoon a live whale, but like, yeah, it tasted like steak and smelled like fish. Yeah, it was kind of weird. So it's, Norway's an interesting place is the,

that's the takeaway. And they're hard people. Like, that was the teenage girl brand snooos like that. Exactly. That didn't do you do too much or like, no, it was just,

we just weren't built for that. Yeah. It's like, imagine no one can see and if you can see, yo, my camera was working just fine until about two seconds ago. And I don't know what's going on.

It's too late now. I'm being watched by the CIA. It's fine. But like, it's this big. They're little power. They aren't huge. I don't know if it was like you just pinched, like, however much you wanted.

It's a little sashay, let's call it. Yeah. And then you stick it. Like Alex had tea bags is the perfect way to describe it. Oh, yeah. You didn't say that. You teabagg it in your mouth as one does. As one does.

Yeah. And then you, I guess, are like, yeah, nicotine. But you know, don't put, don't put tobacco in your mouth, kids. There's a lesson to be learned there. Even if you are a teenage girl, you know, and you are strong enough to handle snooze, you No, take five. Not me. I'm not even,

I'm not even tempted. But if they smoked the amount of weed that you smoke, they would also have similar problems. I bet they do, my dude. I'm going to let you know a secret. I feel like Norway's doing just fine in that department. Is weed legal in Norway?

I imagine it is. I feel like nobody's going to bother you no matter what, because everywhere in Norway is just like a beautiful. Yeah. It is like paradise. It's gorgeous. Yeah. Absolutely insane.

So, so Norm, one thing we always start off by doing here on the show when we have a guest. is explain to them that the reason that we think Chulubanati works is because Jesse is like the all the time skeptic guy. No, I'm not. So that's like one energy. Right.

That's why I know the drone thing is weird when Jesse's even like, something's weird about this. Mathis, Mathis is like the true believer guy, right? And I'm like high or something. I don't know. But it's the perfect trifective host for a show like ours. And so we just have to ask, like if you had to pick one of us that you are

when it comes to this type of stuff that we do on the show, like, where do you think you land on the spectrum? I, to be honest, I'm probably more of a Jesse kind of guy. They always are, baby. Hello, come on, join the crowd. Every story I've ever heard starts with, I'm more of a Jesse, but. I saw a goblin in my grandma's house. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I jump straight to goblin, not even a ghost. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I kind of expected that. Like you're very like rationally minded guy. Like your energy in this world is very like, I would say down to earth and rational. Like you're a funny guy, but you know, even your content that you make is very much like the factiest facts. Yeah. I mean, me trying to snooose in Norway was really outside of my comfort zone.

I really went out there doing that. You're almost positioning himself as like his podcast is intellectual, intellectualism with fart jokes. It's like the yin to our yang. We're like pretend intellectualism about UFOs. with intellectualism sprinkled on top. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you know what? That works really well.

You know how I know we're not intellectual is because we absolutely think we are. We're like, we're very smart. We are incorrect. I think this show is a metaphysical masterpiece. But other than, yeah. Well, okay, well, then let me be even more cheeky then. The other thing that we like to ask is if you are anyone in your like friend circle, your family, if you've ever had anything in your life that you have seen that you can't

explain or like. I had this one famous family dinner where, like, all my relatives, like, admitted that they saw ghosts at the same time. Or Pat came on last time, Pat Contra, our mutual friend. He told me that he always felt he was a little bit psychic and often predicted small disasters before they occurred. So whatever, whatever, yeah. Sounds like something Pat would say. Absolutely. Is that true?

Did I black out for that? That was a while ago. That was in the dreams. That was in the dreams episode. I remember the dreams. And I remember all the Pat episodes. I don't remember Pat being like, I predict the future through the power. I don't remember that.

He says a lot of different things. Sometimes stuff sneaks right through. Well, okay, this is, this is interesting. You're asking me this because I did grow up in a house that was like kind of a famous haunted house in my small town. I love that aspect of this. Okay. So tell me whatever you're comfortable telling me. Okay.

So. I thought you'd be like, no, nothing happened. Just everybody thought it was haunted. Okay, well, so I'll start from the beginning. It was a house that was built in like the 1880s, and it was originally built for the guy that invented Vicks Vapo Rub. That's amazing. That's the most American thing I've ever heard in my life. Yeah, and it was going to be like his summer home.

But he never lived in it. And then at the turn of the century, this family from New York moved into it. And the story goes that she fell in love with a local man. man, one of the daughters, fell in love with a local man. And they dated for a while. They broke up. And then the night they broke up, she was seen crying on the porch. And then she was never seen again. And they found her body in the river like 30 days later. That's like a Red Dead redemption, like environmental storytelling side quest right there. Yeah. So it was this like big mystery about who killed her because the guy they at first sought killed her, her boyfriend. He was acquitted.

and then he ended up killing himself. What? Yeah, it's a wild story. I don't want to go too much into the weeds, but basically the house has always been known to be haunted by her spirit. And my mom and dad decided, I guess, when I was a kid, hey, we want to live in this haunted house. Great.

And so we moved in. I personally never really experienced anything that crazy living there. Occasionally, like, I would wonder, hmm, I'm pretty sure I turned that light off, but it was on. Oh. You know, mundane stuff that, you know, sometimes I guess ghosts do mundane stuff like that, like, change the thermostat or unlock the door or something like that.

My brother, though, said he, my brother said he experienced, like, wild stuff. Like, he... Where does your brother fall on the Chulimani spectrum, by the way? Oh, Mathis, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. You need one of me in your life at all times. He, so I remember one night, he woke up, like, screaming, sweating.

And, like, we all rushed into his room and he was, like, she was at my window. She, like, floated through the window and, like, descended onto my bed and, like, put her hand on me. And he was just, like, screaming. Like, he thought it was real. So, that's what my brother went through. I never experienced anything like that, but. Pretty good, though. Like, I like the entire Vix Vapo rub.

Yeah, like baron. Like, that's, that's a good element. Vick's actual home. And this is crazy because this is only a sample size of people who have come to be a guest on the Chiluminati podcast. But, like, I have not yet been let down by just asking, like, is there like a crazy ghost story in your family? Like, that's, that's an amazingly textured, unique ghost story. That's pretty good. You know, I like that.

Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, it was fun. I honestly, living in that house, like, made me appreciate old houses. and stuff. So like, it was cool living there. And like, it was always cool to like, I would, I made a lot of friends by being like, yeah, I live in the haunted house. And everyone was like, whoa, can we come over and check it out? You know, but that would have been me. That would have been me. I would have forced myself into friendship with you and been like, can I sleep over tonight

and tomorrow and the next day? Is it? Can I sleep naked? Can I sleep naked? I'll beg for the ghost. I would be like really creepy about it. Like, I would be the friend that you would not want to have around as a friend is what I'm saying. So I also, I also briefly mentioned, that you and your wife Kristen have a hilarious history podcast together last I listened to it was like a couple days ago it was like three episodes deep into like the true Pocahontas story which is like

Pocahontas yeah just just like somebody just getting mixed up in a world beyond their understanding and getting chewed up and you know just an interesting crazy story of like I don't know really really interesting character Pocahontas so she didn't learn the name of the wind and like befriend she knew that shit before she left

but you're not going to believe this but the Disney Pocahontas film I think they made some stuff up there was some when they wrote that movie I know

I'll have you know that raccoon is canonical to the story and more importantly talked in real life Miko he talked in real life not in the movie

not in the movie but in real life which I was mad about they silenced him they cut it because it's too many censorship this is the censorship

we're talking about Yeah, exactly. Anyway, the episodes were interesting as shit. Show is called an old-timey podcast. I like it because it's funny. I also like to like fake hang out with my friends by listening to their things sometimes as a creator. Maybe we can...

Does that count as a parisional relationship? I think it's like... I think it's like quasi-paras. Yeah. And then like see, like you guys just like really seem to like care about the stuff that you're talking about, which is like always fun. But I thought I would ask,

like have you ever in your travels as a history buff encountered something that you are like, yeah, this is actually unexplained. This is like one of the weirdest things that I have ever heard of in my life in history. Like, is there ever, like, Jesse did an episode recently, not that recently, but like, fairly recently about this red man that like Napoleon like went into a castle and supposedly did a deal with. And by all accounts, it's true. Is there anything like that that, like a myth or a something that's just part of the historical record that you don't, that you, that you, uh,

that sticks out to you like the missing people of roanoke's another good one when people ever just kind of like oh that's it thank you mad this that's a great example yeah the lost colony of roanoke which i talked about in my pocahontas series where there's we just have no idea what happened to those the colonists do you think they were absorbed that's what we were talking about when we did an episode like jesse did an episode on roanoke long as time four years ago yeah we're talking about they got absorbed absorbed absorbed into the local tribes or the local tribe that's right. That's right. Yeah. My, my best guess is, yeah, that's probably what happened. They were either sold as slaves into the local tribes or they were just assimilated into the local tribes in the

area. That's got to be the wildest. There was a recent study I read and boys got to be crazy because I cannot give credit. It was just like a couple weeks ago and I do not remember. But it was along the lines of they were doing research into native ancestry. And there was one tribe that was like, everyone in it had a certain percentage of German blood. And they were like, oh, a long time ago, someone must have like ingratiated themselves with these people. But like, we don't know when that was. And I really think that's interesting too, that we probably, the more tests you do of people

from around the world, you discover weird things like, oh, no, something happened here. And we just don't know what that is. I think it's very interesting. Yeah. It's funny how the little pieces of information that you take away from things, like, the less that you know about something, the infinite possible. to make it seem really interesting, which is kind of, you know, true of the topic that we're going to be getting into today, which I'm going to just take the reins and dive into right

now if you don't mind. Yeah. And honestly, this topic is, is another great example of an anomaly in history where just like, we have no idea. We don't know. No one has any fucking idea. And it's something just come out about what we're going to talk about. Absolutely. And, uh, yeah, I promise I will touch on it briefly in this story. Thank you so much to Zoc Doc for sponsoring today's episode. We're going to play MadLibs real quick, but like not the kind that ends an alien abduction like usual. All right. Ready? You need a blank specialist who takes your blank insurance, who is within blank miles of you, who doesn't have a blank month wait to get in for an appointment, who doesn't keep you in the waiting room for blank hours, who spends more than blank minutes with you in

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It takes a lot of the stress out of everything. And so we just stop putting off those doctor appointments and go to Zocdoc.com slash chill and find an instantly book a top-rated doctor today. at ZocdoC.com slash chill. Zocdoc.com slash chill. But anyway, Norm, this is probably going to be news to you, but though this is only the first part of our thrice yearly or so new D.B. Cooper miniseries that we're doing, it also happens to be the final step in a meta sequence of eight seemingly

unrelated episodes that nevertheless were all this time related, building up to an absolutely huge reveal today at the end of this episode. And if you don't know exactly what I mean when I say it's going to be a literal festival of exciting little mysteries like you've come to love and expect from your three fuzzy little enigmatic ear boyfriends, look at you why. I don't want to be an ear boyfriend. I, I, I, I, I, I, I want to be an ear paramour. Look, a periorm, if you will. Up here, a more. Anyway, Norm, the reason I addressed you at the beginning of the previous paragraph was that I wanted to give you proper context before I go over the sequence in full.

For the very last time. The very last time, because I'm very intrigued. I just want to time out really quick. Norm, please. Open your mind, open your heart, and embrace what Alex is about to tell you. And then when he is done, please, if you could just try to explain to us what you think it is Alex just said, I would love to know. I would love to know what you think. As I've said before, as I've said before, there is a through line to all these subjects that I've chosen for these eight episodes.

So after we do this right now, I will actually, officially, I will officially ask you guys what you think the thread connecting them all is at the end of this. And Norm, if you have a guess after hearing them, I'll feel free to chime in as well. And at the end of the episode, I'll tell all you guys if you're right. And I'll reveal what new type of episode I'll be revealing next time. The very next episode is the reveal with the return of another beloved and completely expected special guest. Anyway, also, wait, hold on. Time out. I want to change my, I'm going to change my. order here. Okay. Norm, whatever you get lost, will you please just raise your hand? Great. Okay.

Okay. I'm actually going to get an index card out with a pen so I can. Yeah. This is for the patrons. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, each episode had a word attached to it that began with the letter H, starting with the word hidden,

which was connected to the crazy UFO yelling episode with Mathis and Centelle and me in a world without Jesse, where I actually began to believe half of all UFO news was just to sigh up to prove the truth. That's the issue with putting yourselves, even for I will even admit, putting yourself in Santel's orbit, there is a whole lot that man I love him to death

just thinks is true. Then the next word was heavyweets, which was a clue that the episode was going to be about WWE related mysteries and murders, which are you know, double hard to believe because everyone thinks wrestling is completely fake. Then came

horse, which was a clever reference to the big scary blue horse out in front of the Denver airport, which isn't an Illuminati genocide bunker after all, no matter how much they pretend it is. Beautiful statue. Yeah, really, really, really severe, I would say. Yeah, it is intense. I don't like a horse.

Yeah. It's intense. Yeah. After that was head, which is where dreams happen, right, in your head. And where we talked about Pat Contry's dream journal, which he kept without me asking, by the way, and about that this man hoax, uh, ever dream this man, this man.

that inspired the movie with Nicholas Cage, as well as a way weirder Japanese horror movie that was way closer to the source material, at least as far as the eyebrows were concerned. After that was hello, which is what the zodiac would say when he introduced himself, though a lot of people were pretending to be the zodiac, so who knows what he said really. Next comes huge, which was a reference to our second episode about the often faked, never proven Bigs Feet species, but nobody caught that it was also a reference to a 2010 TV show that our guest for that episode, Jacob Wysaki was on for an entire season with Nikki Blonsky on ABC Family. So how about that? Last week was him again where we found out why special

agent George Hickey ended up suing George Donahue for libel for saying he accidentally shot JFK in the head while covering him during the shooting with an AR-15 from the car following behind the president. He says Donahue made it all up himself. I think it's one of the better theories I've heard. And then lastly, today, one of the only notorious criminals in modern American history, who's mostly viewed as a hero, until very recently, and the hero clue turned out to be about the great D.B. Cooper all this time. So there is the full H-8 sequence, and hidden within it, is a clue, H-8, to what the very next episode is about. So real quick, take one second and under 10 seconds. Tell me what you think the next episode of the show is going to be about. I'm tired. Well, eight, A-H-8 would spell out hate. Yeah, that's true.

So that's, that's all I got. It's like a clever thing you put on a license plate. Yeah. It's like a cheap wigom-esque. Excellent. Yes. I don't know. Okay, what do you guys think? So you guys have been hanging around for this whole thing. What do you guys think? Eight episodes that's been over a year. The more you talk about it, the less I understand. Oh, yeah. I am, I've never been more confused in my entire life. They're a body part related in some way? Body part related? What do you think, Jesse? On big toes, JFK's

head gets blown off. Okay. I'm a zodiac. Is the next thing going to have an H in front of it? Maybe. Maybe we'll find out at the end. I honestly don't know where your brain is at. I don't know what we're going to do. All right. All right. All right. I have no clue. I can't help at all with this.

Yes. What is the running theme between each one. What is like... We'll get there. We'll get there today. Don't worry. Talking about back to D.B. Cooper. Like JFK, there's lots of completely different, fully conflicting ideas about what happened to D.B. Cooper and who exactly he was. And also, like

JFK, each one of them is supported with tons of convincing and well co-obulated empirical evidence. Well-corroborated empirical evidence, which is why if you didn't catch it before, I'm saying that while today's episode is a great standalone story, you'll be very satisfied.

by the end of this episode. It's also the beginning of a sequel series to JFK, at least in shape and form, all about the true identity of the unknown subject popularly known as DB Cooper. Right. So today, before diving into the deep lore

of any one suspect, we're going to be doing it just like we did with JFK, where I start by covering the basics of what happened on the day, on a timeline, why is people still care, so you can find out why people still care about D.B. Cooper now in 2024, what's so amazing about this case. And exactly what it is that,

so intriguing about the only unsolved case of air piracy in American history. And if you're like, hang on, haven't you talked about D.B. Cooper before? Yes, in a minisode only a long time ago. We never actually did a full episode on this guy. Yeah. And then, you know, in a few months, depending on what happens with some extremely recent new developments in the case, there'll be another part to the story that hopefully is able to look at the first of several very convincing suspects before it's finally just solved by doing a DNA test or whatever on an old parachute. Though, as you'll see at the end of the episode today, I'm not really sure. exactly how worried I need to be. This episode was written with a heavy debt to the book,

DB Cooper and Flight 305 by Robert H. Edwards, PhD. It's over there. I'm not going to grab it, but it's a nice red hardcover book. He's very shrewd sort of focus in researching this case. I found it really admirable. It's very data-based. Not to mention extremely rigorous, detailed, filled with primary sources, very specific, accurate data across many unrelated fields of study and expertise. So please, if you can, if you enjoyed this, purchase a nice, beautiful copy of this book. There's no e-book version of it. You got to buy a physical version of it.

It's really, really amazing. This man did much of the hard work here, not me that made it possible if you to write up this episode. And the book is so much more than just the skeleton of a story I'm telling. The book does tell you the story of the hijacking itself, which I'm going to do with augmented by some outside sources,

of course. But to me, the true value of reading it is all the extra analysis I didn't put in here that fleshes out. Like a lot of the areas, you probably have tons of questions about by the end of the story today. plus the pages are really glossy

so they're really nice to touch and I know that because I've touched them very much also I use like Wikipedia lots of primary sources from the FBI were used to verify things from the book that I was inferring from the way that he wrote them but anything beyond Edwards book that I like quote ideas from

I'm going to mention it by name as I go for example here is a quote from the beginning of the first episode of the extremely famous true crime podcast serial for Jesse to read by writer and presenter Sarah Kainick I just want to point out something I never really thought about before I started working on this story. And that is, it's really hard to account for your time in a detailed way.

I mean, how'd you get to work last Wednesday, for instance? Drive, walk, bike. Was it raining? Are you sure? Did you go to any stores that day? If so, what did you buy? Who did you talk to? The entire day, name every person you talk to.

It's hard. Now, imagine you have. have to account for a day that happened six weeks back because that's the situation in the story I'm working on in which a bunch of teenagers had to recall a day six weeks earlier. And it was 1999. So they had to do it without the benefit of texts or Facebook or Instagram. Yeah. So now that you have that, and obviously this is that, that podcast is about a guy who's probably

wrongfully accused sitting in prison trying to get acquitted. And I don't even remember what happened. That's a great intro. Yeah. do we are we a bad podcast like that's very good that's well put together we're internet clowns yeah we're internet clowns we're in net clowns who read books yeah that was like really well i was like i want to know more yeah so now think about the last time you think she would have done an eight h eight parter with four parts for three and no well ask ask ask yourself that's why

they're more successful ask yourself this is serial a meditextual masterpiece like the chluminati podcast? A metafictional, meta-textual... Of course not. No. Obviously not. In our meta-textual masterpieces only recognize

after the artists are passed away. Alex, we'll have to be dead for 100, 200 years, yeah. Then I'll be like the Emily Dickinson of podcasting. It's really useful right now. When they make the Tulumani movie starring whatever the 2035 version

or 2335 version of like... It's going to be like a clone of Philip Seymour Hoffman that was born. All right. So think about the last time you were on a plane, right? How long ago was that? What do you remember about being on the plane? I don't know about you. For me, it's always the small details on a plane because I'm like hyper-focused because I'm in like a tunnel. The shape of the tray table latch, the smell of the weird spicy pickles. I can't see that somebody's eating somewhere behind me. The angry way I have to sit when I'm in coach because I'm too tall to fit comfortably in the chair. Right. So when it comes to people, I'm extremely specific based on very little information. right i'll see a stewardess with neat nails and i'll say oh she probably has a nintendo switch in her bag or i'll see this weird all blonde all sandals family with the backpacks and the orange t-shirts and i'll think they're probably dutch i don't know why it's just occurs the sandals it's the sandals

we need to test we need to put this this intuition to a test to see if you're maybe like you don't the point is that it's bad intuition the point my point is that it's dumb intuition do you know that your brain just like does a little thought process you're like oh this guy's like an old Chinese grandpa and you're like, you have no idea if that guy's like even a grandpa, right? The old man with one too many open buttons, right? Drives around on his giant rich people compound in a golf cart and his pool boys named Hidalgo, right? You just give everybody a story without thinking about it.

You're just like, yeah, look at this guy. So that's kind of the point of this, right? That's easier to do than just to actually remember things, right? So D.B. Cooper is not only a man on a plane, right? He's one of the most notorious myths in American culture. Everybody can picture his ass. but you can see the picture of that, like, weird rat face dude with the glasses on and the little, like, mod suit on, right? Yeah, the composite sketch, right?

Yeah, the composite sketch. And I just also want to point out, too, America, I don't know if it's uniquely American, but it's certainly big in America. We have a fascination with, like, Robin Hood-esque criminals. Like, even Billy the kid back then, like, there's this fascination with these vigilante criminals who are, like, putting it to the man and all this other stuff. and just like America just loves. I don't know. There's no modern evidence for that. I didn't mean to do a DB Cooper episode.

There's no modern evidence of that shit. There's no modern evidence for that. That sounds far fetched to me. I didn't mean. Yeah. I did not mean to do that, but it is pretty. No, but you had this episode planned well before the modern stuff happened. Pretty interesting that there's like a guy right now that everybody's like, it's cool what he did.

We like what he did. But yeah, it's kind of wild. Yeah, because how many people did the CEO murder? But that's, but that's just what I'm saying is like, D.B. Cooper kind of fits that same kind of mold where everybody's like, what a, what a, that's why to talk about the monos. This is why it's weird to watch the media be, like, surprised that the public is like, yeah, go fuck, go fuck yourself.

Like, yeah, this is what you, this is what America is fed in entertainment in like what we've loved forever. Of course. Yeah, always the little guy beats the big guy who's in control, right? And also, D.B. Cooper is not from last Wednesday, like they were trying to remember in serial. He's from over 50 years ago, right? So it's really hard not to make up your own version of the DB Cooper story, add your own politics to the DB Cooper story, whatever you want to do.

So for today, as Robert Edwards does in his book and like the FBI have done on occasion, we too will be referring to this figure throughout the episode not as DB Cooper, because that implies too much stuff 50 years down the line. But as the unknown subject or the unsub, we're going to call him the unsub, to try and diffuse some of that legendary status when picturing him as we move through the timeline today. and I'm going only off stuff that I can actually prove occurred based on multiple sources, right? So there are key parts of this that you might expect to hear about that are not in here. So just get ready for that. And oh, well, I just realized this copy of my notes, which I definitely completely write by myself and aren't sent to me from some faceless entity. Always, always, always. Also just somehow weirdly included a note from some guy who calls himself Phil U.

Manati. Anyway, I'll probably just have Mathis read this one. Yeah, yeah, no problem. Greetings, Initiate, Alex. Thank you for allowing yourself to have written the first entry in the DP Cooper miniseries for you. We realize that time is a factor in your higher calling and everything we can do to help mitigate that. We will do.

As a token of good faith, we have manipulated a podcaster. you know, into an appearance on your show today to serve as a life model decoy for the real DB Cooper, who we believe he looks and sounds exactly like. He will be employed as such throughout. Oh, we're paying him. Trust us, his regular speaking voice sounds identical to the real DB Cooper, presented as funny. Do not be alarmed if you thought it was your own idea to invite him on. In fact, it was.

Good luck with your mission. It is very important to you. Weird. Okay. Well, I probably shouldn't have read that on the air now that I think about it, but that doesn't matter. I didn't really understand it anyway. Probably intended for somebody else.

But anyway, first things first, just to test it out. Who wants to hear Norm show us exactly what it would sound like if our own unknown subject did an ad for this show. Here you go, Norm. Just go ahead. And we're just going to make sure our reading mechanism is working here. Patreon.com slash Chiluminaughty pod. Great. Anyway, D.B. Cooper American Air Pirate begins right now.

Also, apologies. Names from mid-century America are their own type of hard-to-pronounce melange of European last names. So forgive me as I try my mind. very best with some of these people. The date is November 24th, 1971. It is 2 o'clock p.m. at the Portland International Airport. The unsub approaches Dennis Lysney at the Northwest Orient Airline Sales Desk and asks for a one-way ticket to Seattle on the flight that leaves at 2.45 p.m. Flight 305, which again leaves in just 45 minutes and is set to arrive at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, aka C-Tacacacac. just 36 minutes later at 321 p.m.

So this is a quick flight. I've done this flight before, Portland to Seattle. It's a quickie. According to Lisney, the unsub is nervous, but the interaction was normal. Nothing particularly weird or suspicious about it. He thinks he remembers him paying with his right hand, but he's not sure.

Nobody's sure what hands the unsub uses. He seems to be ambidestrous. The unsub pays $20 cash for the ticket, gives the name, quote, Cooper, Dan Cooper, as the name of the passenger. according to the book while everyone else quoted in this story definitely saw the same man and even some like our man listening here had some significant time and like face time directly with him to look at him all the witnesses names appear on the manifest but somehow db cooper's does

not there is not a dan cooper on the passenger manifest for this airplane strangely even though we're very sure that the same man who bought the ticket was the same man on the plane also the ticket that we've all seen which i'll send you a picture of now to look at does not include a seat number kind of interesting. But I guess things were just loosey-goosey as shit back then. So there you go. That's D.B. Cooper's plane ticket, which is number 101-1-144-406-7730.

Check it out there. That's from the F.B. It is. There it is. Also, coincidentally, there is a Michael Cooper on the flight, but he is not D.B. Cooper, or at least there's no one out there who thinks that Michael Cooper from that flight is D.B. Cooper. Anyway, the unsub also had no check baggage for sure. But Lizzney isn't sure if there was a carry-on. Like I say, he was pretty unremarkable.

So nobody specifically remembers him boarding the plane. But another witness, the co-pilot, first officer Bill Radichek, remembers it was raining that afternoon. Which is funny, considering the quote from serial. From their time with him that day, even though things were moving pretty fast and most people involved probably had a lot on their minds, witnesses do remember, albeit vaguely, what the unsub looked like, somewhat in slightly conflicting accounts. Six people said he was a white guy, like a Caucasian American guy. But one of them, our pal Lizni, the sales desk, also added he seemed to be, quote, of Latin descent. And one of the passengers, a man called Robert B. Gregory said he was, quote, Caucasian, believed to be of Mexican-American descent or possibly some American Indian blood, which is weirdly specific. And it is weird that when people mention blood that, like, when they're talking about somebody else's race, it, like, makes my muscles tense.

Yeah, it's a little unnerving, yeah. It feels like eugenic-y. I don't know why. I don't like it. Anyway, he's also remembered to be between 5-10 and 6-1, medium-sized, slim, clean-shaven with, quote, olive skin and, quote, dark or swarthy features, and that his hair was wavy, dark, and combed close to the scalp with left part, and also with a, quote, marcelled, greasy, patent-leather sheen, slightly receding in front.

Alex, I have it. I have a question. And I can't remember if you mentioned this. Back then, did you have to show your ID when you bought a ticket at the airport? Literally, you did not. Like literally,

he didn't, he just said what his name was and they were like, sure. For a long time, you used to be able to just like disappear in America without having to like a second thought. It's literally, vanish.

It's literally so crazy because like, if you think about the bus, right, there's no question that you're going to, like you don't show your ID to buy bus ticket, right? Like, maybe today you do, I don't know, but if you're paying with a credit card or something, but like the notion of the plane, right? Like, if you think about what a plane is, it's like a bus, right? And it goes from like one thing to the next, like next stop, stop, stop.

And then you get off and it's exactly like a bus. And that's how we were thinking about it. You smoked on the bus. You do whatever the hell you wanted to do. And then you get off the bus. There was no security factor, you know? And I was saying, you know, JFK, like was interesting because it was such a important case because it changed the world in a lot of ways, right? right, but this didn't, even though it's just as vexing to people, even though people have been studying D.B. Cooper just as much as JFK and there's so much literature out there around it, the only major effect that D.B. Cooper had on, like, culture at large was that like, right after D.B. Cooper happened, a bunch of other people tried to be D.B. Cooper got caught, and then

they were like, all right, fuck you. We need to do metal detectors on the fucking thing. And if you're going to buy a ticket on the day with cash, you need to show your fucking ID. So, copycat criminals. Yeah, exactly. So. Especially one where you just get away with money. Yeah, a lot of money. Yeah. A fair amount. Like, he only asked for, I think it's like $200,000.

We'll talk about it a minute. But today, I know for sure that today, the amount would translate to $1.5 million, which is a lot. Doesn't seem like a lot today, though. Yeah. You can almost buy a house with it. Exactly. In Los Angeles.

That's what DeB. Cooper want. You just wanted to buy a nice condo in Portland. And that's what I did. He just wanted to, he knew he was going to have to pay. $3 million eventually, so he wanted to get started on his futures. Okay. Also, all the witnesses seem to agree loosely that he was middle-aged, somewhere between 35 and 50. Though I will say in the 70s, due to numerous factors, everyone seemed slightly older looking for their age than they do now. Like, I always talk about this, but if you ever go look at the actor who played the Beatles

manager in Hard Days Night and realize that he was 38 years old when they shot that, he looks like he's about 64. It's a weird thing. even if you go back to the 1800s. Kids back then, literally like 10-year-olds who were working minds basically looked like they were 30-year-olds. It's wild.

I don't know what that footage is, but there's this famous footage of like somebody riding like with a camera on the back of a trolley or something like on a street car and there's like little boys following him that are like mugging for the camera but they're like smoking cigarettes. And they have like,

you know, they have like knives and shit. They're no joke. Stop it. Like what else? I mean, what else you can do back then? Yeah, it's absolutely insane.

But, you know, I don't know. Just the quality of life has improved tremendously. Yeah, the oldness of people has just changed our perception. Like, I am 36 years old, but I don't look at, even though I think by modern standards, I do. I think that if I went back then and I said, I'm 36 years old, people wouldn't buy it as much. For example, another passenger, William Mitchell described a quote, sagging chin on this person, but clarified that what he meant was that it wasn't that he had a double chin

like a fat person but rather a loose flap of skin under his neck that he called a quote turkey gobble and two of the stewardesses told FBI sketch artist Roy Rose that he had quote sort of a protruding lower lip so I don't know what this guy looked like but he kind of I feel like he had like a bird like

old like Don Knott's kind of look to him but like maybe like Mexican Don Knott's Like an underbite? Yeah, I guess. Pratuting lower lip. Oh, landy. I just want to still a plane. He was said to be wearing some kind of dark men's wear top layer item like a suit or a trench coat or a blazer or a jacket or a raincoat, all of which different witnesses referred to it as.

So the idea of him wearing like a stylish black suit, not real. He was wearing probably like a brown suit with like something over it, maybe. Whatever it was, it maybe had a vest underneath it. nobody knows for sure. He had a white shirt on or maybe like a light shirt. You couldn't really see it that well the way he was wearing it. He had a dark necktie, almost certainly black for a reason I'll tell you in a minute. Brown shoes. He didn't have a hat on. He didn't have gloves on. He didn't have jewelry or accessories besides one. Very average, normal looking cheap, dark colored briefcase. Weirdly, though, other than the things that I just mentioned, people didn't really have much to say

about his face or his voice other than that he looked normal and average and that he spoke accentless American English spoke very clearly he's very calm right that's that's like the impression like nothing memorable about the way he talked or how he looked which is so funny to me but other than this the Northwest Oriental sales agent Lizney said that he got quote an overall impression of a laboring type man as opposed to an office worker which the book I read speculates at possibly being him maybe sensing that all the clothes were just as cheap and throw away as the briefcase, like maybe he just bought everything to wear for this one thing. But it's just from the one guy, so I don't know.

Also, for a moment, let's address the sunglasses situation. I don't think that there was any moment at all, and this is the T. I don't think there's any moment at all where D.B. Cooper wore sunglasses at any point. zero. So you're telling me the Loki TV series when they did their version of it is lying to me? Do you mean like was Loki DB Cooper? Yeah, because he was wearing sunglasses

in that one when he jumped out of the plane. Yeah, I know. No, it was not Loki. Loki was wrong. I read a lot of sources connected to this case. I haven't found a single instance of somebody saying he had them on anywhere in actual testimony. Some people say that some of the flight attendants remembered him wearing glasses at some point. I don't know where that is. I wonder when the sunglasses entered the mythos.

Well, if I had to guess, it's probably something like the profilers, the FBI profilers, always draw people in sunglasses when they're fugitives because it's a very common way to hide your identity. So there's like, oh, if you look at any picture, and there was like a, there was like a Bing Crosby version of the sketch that was like the A version of the sketch that everybody thought was dumb. But then they, then they sort of redid it to look like the one that you all know of when you're thinking of Zodiac. and when they put them next to each other, even if you remember the Zodiac one, same thing. One of them, he's wearing glasses just because he would

if he was trying to hide his identity. So I think people just got caught up in the mystique of D.B. Cooper being like a debonair James Bond plane jumping guy and then like, just was like, of course he wears cool glasses and a black suit and just kind of like went that way. But my point is maybe he wore them,

maybe he didn't. Plenty of people certainly believe he did out there. But in looking at this case myself, I made the conscious decision to exclude the mention of sunglasses. And I will even go so far as to say, I think maybe you should consider doing so yourself when talking about D.B. Cooper.

Anyway, according to one of the flight attendants, whose name was Florence Schaffner, of the 36 passengers on the Boeing 727 that day, he was second to last to board of all of them, and he sat himself in the last of 18 rows, in the middle seat of an empty section. Like, it was a D.E.F in the back row, and he took seat E, right, the middle seat.

though Robert Gregory, the guy who was talking about his Indian blood earlier or whatever, said that he also saw him scoot over to the window seat at some point, but it doesn't really matter. They're basically touching, though probably in the 60s they were like full on chairs with like breathing room and elbow room next to you. Probably like lazy boys. Yeah, probably felt fucking great to fly. You could just hang out, chat.

Probably actually was nice and convenient. Anyway, he's back there. A bunch of people have memories of him being there for sure. We know he was there. And now that all the passengers are boarded, Florence the stewardess we just met, starts serving refreshments before the plane even starts taxing down the runway. So the unsub is in 18E. He's literally her first customer, which she especially remembers because he ordered a bourbon and seven up, which if you don't know what a seven up is, um, you listen to the show, it's like a

sugary lemon lime soda like a sprite or a starry seven up not exist anymore. It does exist. It's just a bourbon and seven up is a weird vibe. Yeah, that's a weird combo for sure. It's not unheard of. It has a name. I forget what it is. But it's just like people remember shit like that because it kind of is distracting in a way, but also like maybe it's just a tell of where he's from. Like maybe there's some area, you know, like how people always say Canada, they love the, the Bloody Caesar, right? So you can like, if somebody orders a Bloody Caesar in Los Angeles, you're going to imagine, oh, that's probably like a Canadian person or somebody who spent some time in Canada. So some, some attention has been paid to the odd Bourbon seven up order, but who knows.

Apparently it's called us, apparently it's called a seven and seven. Yeah. That's the name of the drink. I've heard that. Yeah, I've heard that. But that's specifically Seagrams, right? Yes. Yeah. Like this, bourbon and seven up is just a weird drink. Like,

if you can imagine what that would taste like, it's probably weird. But it's kind of like a whiskey sour, though, also. So I don't know. The drinks 1.25. He pays with another $20 bill that he had. He apologizes for not having smaller bills when asked. Florence says,

that's okay. She'll bring him changing a little bit once a few more people buy their drinks. And she heads off. Then a little while later, apparently he spills this drink, according to William Mitchell. And he talks to a stewardess about it.

who gives him a form to fill out. Though nobody else remembers this, or at least mentions it's in their accounts, it might be somebody misremembering the thing that happens very next. It's takeoff time. Florence checks all the passenger seat belts are fastened before taking a seat herself in the galley,

which is just behind seat 18E and a little bit to his left. And just like that, we're off to the races, though he'd probably already been running his own secret race alone for a while now. There's no way this could have went off this clean without some practice. A lot of people think he probably flew this route several times in prep for this.

One minute later, before the plane had even left the ground, 18E, Hans Florence, a plain white envelope. She doesn't open it because the plane is taking off and she thinks that this weirdo is probably trying to be like, do you like me? Yeah. Circle, yes. So she's like, I'll deal with that in a second. But he's like, she's sitting in the chair and he keeps like looking at her from like where he's sitting. He keeps like turning and looking at her. and being like kind of like you can open that you know like kind of looking at waiting for it so she

fucking opens it and though there's multiple accounts of the exact wording uh we'll have norm here read out my favorite version of what the note said for us miss i have a bomb here and i would like you to sit by me yeah so it'd be the worst thing to get ever yeah so florence reads that she's in like a surreal state she does a double take on the note she reads it again looks up at 18e asks him if he's kidding. And then I'll have Norm read out what he said back to her in a quote serious but calm manner. No, miss. This is for real. This is actually how I got my last date. I said, excuse me, miss, I've got an explosive package in my pants. And she's like, are you, is this serious? And I said, no, miss, this is for real. This is for real. And then you were like yin, then, then, then,

Dan, then, then, then, then. All right. At this point, uh, from the AFJump seat, another flight attendant doesn't know it yet, but she's about to get mixed up in a whole big situation starting to write the F now. Her name is Tina Mucklo. And she looks over just as Florence gets up to sit next to the man in 18E. And she immediately knows his the vibes are off. Tina is the C stewardess.

Florence is the, I believe the head stewardess. Uh, so she's seeing her head stewardess like, kind of like, give some like, unconfident vibes. It's not a good thing. She looks over at Florence. Florence mouths her name like Tina fucking help. And though they can't agree on whether Florence handed her the note or she picked it up off the ground after Florence dropped

it, Tina also ends up reading the note and heads straight towards the phone behind them both near the galley in the rear of the plane to try and intercom with the flight deck up front in the cockpit. So nevertheless, the plane lifts off at 258 p.m. And the flight crew who do not yet know about Florence and Tina's situation,

at the rear of the plane, send a teletype confirming liftoff and projecting a landing time of 3.36 p.m. It's a little later than they said, but that's all okay. It's all part of the program. Back in row 18, Schaefer asks again, are you joking around? Are you kidding? Here's No one with what he said. No, miss. Take this down. And then he reaches over to his briefcase, pulls it into his lap, shows Florence something which she is well enough convinced to be a homemade bomb. and here's Jesse with it a quote from the book describing what the bomb look like. The briefcase was described by witnesses as cheap looking and black or dark brown and measuring about 12 to 18 inches. The contents of the briefcase were a bundle of six or eight reddish-colored sticks with no labels or inscriptions each about six or eight inches long.

Possibly taped together two or more wires attached to the bundle with red insulation and a cylindrical object about eight inches long and two and a half inches in diameter with terminals resembling those of a battery. I sleep sweaty. I've said that before many times. I'm a sweaty boy in the bedtime sometimes. Oh, thank you for Miracle Maid, by the way, for sponsoring today's episode. I can't help the man. I am a sweaty sleeper. It's just how I am.

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because it's not something that's been recovered. But it was enough for this dude to, like, get everything popping on this plane. So that's the best we got. She gets out of paper and a pen from her purse. Here's Norm with the note that he dictated to her. I want $200,000 by 5 p.m. in cash. Put it in a knapsack. I want two back parachutes and two front parachutes.

When we land, I want a fuel truck ready to refuel. no funny stuff or I'll do the job. No fuss. He said no fuss because she seemed worried when he said that he would blow up the plane, but she wrote it down anyway because she thought it was part of the note. So he just like the note says no fuss at the end, even though he didn't mean to say it, he didn't mean for her to write it,

which is a weird detail. He asked for two parachutes to discourage sabotage because it implies he'll have a hostage. So they can't like make one of the parachutes not work and then he just dies because he's going to have a hostage with him. So then she's all done writing and says, okay. And then he says a little more, which Norm will read right now, a little more ominous language from the fucking DB Cooper guy on sub. After this, we'll take a little trip.

Yeah. She offers to take the note to the talk, the cockpit. He says, go ahead. So she gets up to do it, runs into Tina in the back of the plane who's already on the intercom with the cockpit, grabs the first note from her, heads to the cockpit. Tina looks down, asks 18E if she wants him to stay there. and here's Norm with what he said. Yes.

Great. So even though Florence has just headed up front with the note, our friend the co-pilot, Bill Radichick, has already been talking to Tina for a while, who first signaled something was wrong with the prearranged signal of bells at a time that was most likely about one minute after takeoff, then picks up the phone herself and says this,

which Jesse will read for you now. We're being hijacked. He's got a bomb, and this is no joke. This is exactly what I hope would happen when he read that. So shortly after that, Florence shows up with the notes, hands him to the pilot, Captain William Scott, who tells her not to leave the cockpit again.

She doesn't. We don't hear any more testimony from Florence ever again. So back in row 18, Tina has now taken Florence's seat and she's like lit the dude's cigarette. She's like, hey, we're all your homie. We're going to cooperate. Don't even worry about it. He shows her the bomb as well. Tells her it has a remote detonator.

He says, listen, the crew better not use the radio too much because I don't know if any of the signals from the radio is going to blow up the bomb. I don't think it will, but be careful, keep it to a minimum. He's just, he's being scary. She calls the flight deck again, tells him about the bomb and stuff. And then from now on, she becomes kind of like, his trusted go-between, like a little gopher person that he uses to do things for the rest of the ordeal. And then just a little while later at 3.13 p.m., the flight crew sends this message to Northwest Oriental operations, which Mathis will read for us now. By the way, Northwest Oriental is just the

name of an airline that's still around. I'm sorry that the word. Oriental is in there. I have no intention besides just saying the name of this company when I say it. Dude, nothing will beat the 18 fucking 60s news article we read. So you're fine. Oh, my. I can't even imagine. There's an English muffin brand at my diner called Power White English muffins.

You like never. I don't want that. Yeah, I'm good. Here we go. Passenger advises he is hijacking us en route to Seattle. Stewardess has been handed note requesting 200,000 and knapsack by 5 p.m. at Seattle this afternoon. wants two backpack parachutes wants money and negotiable american currency denomination of bills

not important has bomb in briefcase and will use it if anything is done to block his request en route to seattle yeah so this ends off a crazy chain of messages back and forth they decide they're going to enter a holding pattern over seattle in the airplane until the demands could be fulfilled they're trying to just like i think the the parachutes come from like a flight school and some other place they're just getting whatever they can they arrange the money situation so They're just like, literally flying in the air over, over the airport. And meanwhile, Tina's just like chatting with this guy. The passengers have no idea they're being hijacked.

She's trying to fill dead air, keep it light. She asks where he's from. She asks if they're going to Cuba. He's like laughing at her because, of course, he's not going to say where he's from. And of course, they're not going to Cuba. And then he tells her she's going to like where they're going, which is fun. And then he gives her one of his cigarettes, even though she quit and gets her to tell him that she's from Pennsylvania, but that she moved to Minnesota. And he calls Minnesota, he goes, oh, nice country, which some consider interesting, like, as a turn of phrase for an American, but I don't really.

I feel like plenty of people refer to areas as country in America. Yeah, it's talking with the land, not the. Yeah. The Minnesota, nice country, good trees, right? Like when you're primed to look for a conspiracy, you're going to interpret that something else. Yeah, I don't know. It feels very American to me. I don't know.

Yeah, I think, I think you're right. Meanwhile, they're slowly building a picture of this guy for the people on the ground. Here's Mathis with another message to Northwest Oriental from the flight crew. Name of man unknown. About 6.1 high. Black hair. Age about 50. Weight, 175 pounds, bordered at Portland. Yeah. Tina, Mucklow asks him why he chose Northwest Oriental Airlines.

And he gives a badass response, which Norm will read for us now. I think it's pretty cool. It's not because I have a grudge against your airlines. It's just because I have a grudge. Pretty tight. anyway, sometime after the announcement goes out about the mechanical difficulties that they decide. They're trying to say like, hi, we're having mechanical difficulties. So we're going to go into a holding pattern.

So you understand. Cha, chat, chat, to keep everybody calm, right? So the unsub starts getting a little jumpy about things at this point because now he's just like, in his mind,

he's probably thinking like, oh, the FBI's going to like snipe me or some shit when I get down there or whatever. And he becomes very adamant that he will indeed blow up the plane if there's any funny business. Everybody's in a foul mood about it. First Officer Radichick specifically is worried about a group of passengers. He didn't want to get worked up if word got out what was happening.

Here's Jesse with a quote from First Officer Radichick. I know we picked up some good old Montana Mountain boys and they're pretty good size and they're sitting up in first class. And they were on their second or third martinis. We don't need them to look at each other and say, hey, let's go back and get a hijacker. Right. So it's like... I want to be beat up, man. It's a valid concern, right?

when there's like drunk cowboys on your plane and you know if they find out there's somebody with a bomb they're going to be like let's get them yeah yeah yeah living in texas yeah yeah actually it wasn't until 2016 uh that we found out how spot on he was with that concern apparently according to one of the other passengers george la bisonnier who was headed back to his seat from the bathroom at one point uh while they were in a holding pattern tina got up from row 18 to intercept a man in a cowboy hat who was headed towards them and seemed heated about being stuck in the air for the mechanical difficulties. So he's like mad because he's late or whatever, right? At first, the unsub seemed kind of excited about what was going on. Like he was like, like, getting hype because it was all

his fault. But eventually he started like winging out and he got involved with a cowboy man and like got up and like started yelling at the dude and tell him to get the fuck out of there. Um, so actually lebesenier, Lebesonnierre had to like step in and like diffuse it. it. Tina gave the guy a copy of the New Yorker to like go read at his seat, whatever. That'll help. Go read the newspaper. But here's a, here's a quote about him from the book for Mathis to read, which I think is kind of interesting. A news reel on K-I-R-O-TV dated November 25th, 1971, records some of the passengers of Flight 305, apparently leaving Seattle Airport. Among them is a cowboy. He looks young, maybe under 30, average height, clean cut, square-jawed.

He is chewing gum. His hat is a dark color, and so is his shirt. He does not look at all phased by this experience. The cowboy has never been identified. And if you want to see him, go to about 30 seconds in this clip. And you can actually see this cowboy in his shirt leave the plane, which I think is really fun. And just get an idea of, I don't know, it just places you in the moment. There goes. Yep, that's a cowboy.

So is that the guy? That's almost certainly the cowboy that confronted the D.B. Cooper in the air, which is so fun. Yeah, I guess how many people were wearing. Cowboy hats on the plane. Just this guy. Yeah. Just him. Just that one guy.

I don't know why, but I get that weird vibe of like, if he was a Star Wars character, he'd have a very deep, complicated background. There were only, it's a six row plane, or six seats in a row plane. And there's 18 rows, but there are only 36 people on the plane. Just in case you're wondering. And then after that. Yeah. After that happened after, it's a, this flight is not always packed. It's a very short flight.

here's norm with the unsubs response to Tina after the altercation. If that is a sky marshal, I don't want any more of that. Yeah, so it like, it fucking wigged him out, even though it was just a fight with some cowboy dude. The hijacker confirms the pilot that he doesn't want to tell the passengers they've been hijacked. He starts to get really grabby with things like cigarette boxes and matchbooks, which he doesn't want left behind. He even asked Tina to get his notes back from the cockpit that he left for the stewardesses. At 515, the unsub starts to get restless. And at 522, the crew sends more messages to Northwest Oriental, which Mathis will read for us now.

The hijacker has inquired three times now about the shoots. He is not accepting the fact that they are not available locally. He is fully aware that McCord Field is 20 miles away. McCord Field is a military airfield that he believes should have parachutes at it, right? You would think they would, right? He's like, what, like, you tell me you can't just get some or whatever? So shortly after that, the unsub also looks out the window. clocks that they're over Tacoma, Washington, even though nobody's mentioned that they're over

Tacoma, he just goes, oh, I'm, oh, look, it's Tacoma, which is like, this and the McCord thing, like people take to mean that maybe he knows this area by air, you know, so that's worth thinking about. At 537 p.m., flight 305 messages that they're on final approach, and Northwest Oriental radio's back. Everything's ready for them. 547, 10 minutes later, the plane is finally on the ground in Seattle, almost three hours after leaving Portland for a 36-minute flight.

Following instructions from the man, Tina goes out, gets the bag of money, gives it back to the guy who hits the bathroom for a second to rearrange the money into needer bundles. Then he comes out and allows everyone off the plane besides Tina, the pilot, the co-pilot, and the flight engineers. Basically the flight crew, Tina, and that's it.

Tina goes down to grab the parachutes and stuff. She does three trips fully. He assures her the parachutes won't be too heavy to carry, demonstrating that he knows how heavy parachutes are, brings them aboard and the first leg of this crazy night is over. Isn't that nice? But also consider this. When a commercial pilot deals with a hijacking,

there is a transponder in the cockpit that you can turn on, which transmits a signal colloquially known as a squawk, which will change your code on the radar and alerts air traffic controllers to like whatever's going on. So in the case of a hijacking, there's lots of codes you can use for this. But at the time, I think right now it's 7,500 is the squawk code for a hijacking, but at the time was 3,100.

And the moment they knew about it, they should have squawked because it's easy to do discreetly from the flight deck. There's no way the unsub couldn't have known they did it from where they were. And yet they did not do it on this flight. Maybe the captain did this because

he didn't want a big scene when they landed on the ground at CTAC with like FBI guys and rifles and shit. But nobody knows why they didn't squawk. Nobody mentions it. Captain Scott himself died in 2001. He was very terse about the whole situation. I think he just liked to keep to himself.

there's not really anything suspicious about it, but he died in 2000. No, I can imagine just like the bad day that he never gets to forget. Right. And so he just didn't really talk about it very much. And he died in 2001. So yeah. But now that we're done with the first flight, what should we do with this short intermission? A secret code?

A mysterious phrase? A complicated number? No. H8 is over, gentlemen. And today, instead, in honor of our guest, Norm, I'm just going to read five pieces of interesting trivia that I collected about author, content creator, and toy historian, Pixel Dan Erdley. Number one.

Oh, very excited. Number one, did you know that we are currently in the midst of year 12 of Advent Calendar Madness over at YouTube.com slash Pixel Dan vlogs, his second channel just for Advent Calendar Madness? It's more of a question than a fact, but you get what I'm saying. Number two, Pixel Dan is older than me, but he looks younger than me. I guess that's an opinion thing. but you know what I mean.

He's healthier than me. You get it. You get what I'm saying. He's been working out lately, Alex. He's in wrestling shape. Yeah, he's got a good thing going on. Yeah. Fact number three about Pixel Dan.

For some reason, when I Google Pixel Dan, a version of his Patreon page that's been auto-translated into German comes up before his actual English Patreon page. Maybe that's just the thing on my computer, but I don't know. But I thought it might be worth sharing. Number four, on the official Penguin Random House Library website, In the description for his book, The Toys of He Man and the Masters of the Universe from Dark Course,

which you should buy. It calls Pixel Dan a YouTube influencer. If you think about it, I guess he is, but I just thought it was funny that he always calls himself an author, content creator and toy story. But they called him an influencer. Pixel Dan is a man of many talents. Exactly.

And finally, fact number five, this past Halloween, Pixel Dan dressed himself up as himself in fourth grade, dressed as Raphael the Ninja Turtle in 1988. He used the He Man sword as his Cy, and you can

see a picture of it right there if you guys want to see. What is happening? What is how? I'm so... What? Just want to check out Pixel Dan as Raphael. He's a YouTuber. You know, he's just toy YouTuber. Check him out. He's an author. Oh, look at Dan. But for what reason? He's just a bottle of pure joy. Norm's a big fan. That's all. I'm just, we're just,

we're just doing some service, you know? I'm so... I just like Pixel Dan. Anyway. You took like, I think. I feel like you took a hard turn off of, like, the highway, but I'm still on the highway gliding through. Is this connected at any way to D.B. Cooper, like, Pixel Dan. Is Pixel Dan, D.B. Cooper?

You think at the end, I'm going to say that Pigsledan's D. B. Cooper? I can tell you this. I don't know where we're going with this. I'll tell you this. Nothing's further from the truth. Pixel Dan is an angel and he should be protected. Anyway, back to that guy who hijacked a plane with the bomb in the 70s. He got $200,000 cash and some parachutes. So real quick, back on the ground where they were refueling, Tina now has a pencil. and she's taking down instructions for what comes next from the hijacker. So here's Jesse with a quote. He said, we're going to Mexico City.

Land a gear down, flaps down. You can trim the flaps to 15. You can stop anywhere in Mexico to refuel, but nowhere in the United States. The aft door must be open and the ventral stairs to be down. The altitude under 10,000 feet, they know they can't go over that. Cabin lights out and everyone is to be forward in the first close. curtain. Yeah, so nobody can go back to the back of the plane, basically. There are, of course, the types of details here that convince people this guy probably had

some kind of knowledge of jumping, probably also spent time on a flight deck, something like that. He was also a hero because he got all these people first class. Yeah, that's right. He said, don't you dare come out of first class. What do you think what first class is like? What do you think first class in 1970s was like? Oh, go look it up. There's photos of it. It looks incredible. Oh, really? Although I would hate it because you're in a tube and half the people are smoking. So, yeah. Yeah, true. I'd be like, it's like a private jet compared to now, though.

Anyway, yeah. Because flying was a luxury back then. Exactly. Yeah, true. We'll talk more about who the fuck this guy might have actually reasonably been in another episode. I don't want to get too far down into the details that he kind of gives away by being so specific with his demands on where the plane should go and how it should go. But there is something to that. And that's one of the many avenues to go down in this story.

But yeah, this causes a flurry of planning. between ground control, the flight crew about which routes they could possibly take to get him where he wants to go under the specific conditions he asked for. But rather than break that down, we'll leave that very juicy portion of the investigation again for after you've got the timeline down and your wide view is sorted. So the only thing you really need to know right now is that the configuration he asked for limited the plane's range to about a thousand miles, right? So that means it literally needed to refuel a second time before getting to Mexico. They talked to him about it. They came to the agreement. between them that he was going to stay on the plane and they were going to land in Reno at Reno Tahoe International refuel one more time and then finish the rest of the flight, right? So that's where they, that's where they landed on that. Back to row 18 on the plane. First things first, they soon realized they can't really take off with the air stairs down like he wants.

So here's Mathis with a quote from the FBI report about what happened next there. The hijacker also indicated that he wanted takeoff made with the rear door open and the stairs extended for takeoff. The crew informed the hijacker that takeoff in that aircraft with the door open and the stairs extended would be an impossibility. It was finally agreed that takeoff would be made with the door closed stairs retracted and Ms. Mucklow would remain on board to lower the door and stairs after the craft was airborne. As soon as this lowering of the door and stairs were accomplished in flight, she would be permitted to go to the pilot's compartment. After the plane was there was a conversation between Miss Mucklow and the hijacker regarding her opening the door

and extending the stairway. Shortly thereafter, he asked her to demonstrate to him the procedure for opening the rear door and extending the stairway. She did this and was under the impression that he understood how to do it. Yeah. But what probably ends up happening, though, since we're just comparing some conflicting accounts here, is that he really wanted them both open the whole time, so we wouldn't have to think about it. And like, the plane would already be ready for him to do whatever he wanted to do before it was even off the ground, which I think is, it makes sense. But they compromised in the end to where the door, the door was open because the plane wouldn't take off with the stairs down.

But the door was open leading to the stairs, which was like more than the flight crew wanted to do. But it was like a compromise with him that they would leave the door open and leave the stairs shut, right? So in that, in that way, they compromised. But also it meant that the actual cabin was going to be depressurized. the entire time because that's where the seal is for the cabin. So the whole time for this second flight that they're up in the air, which is for a while, they are not in a pressurized cabin. Maybe in the,

maybe in the flight deck, but I don't think so. Also, he decides not to have Tina do the stare bit. He just does it himself. And so that's, so that's nuts. He sends her to the flight deck just like Florence. Tina's testimony ends here. We don't need to hear from her anymore because she's safe in the cockpit now. On our way to the door, though, she sees him messing with the parachutes and she asked him to please take the bomb with him when he jumps. He promises to either take it with him or disarm it before he leaves. No worries. Um, so with everything all set, the unsub gets the four parachutes that he asked for. He gets the money, but he realizes that one small issue he has is that the money was delivered in a cloth bag instead of a knapsack like he asked. It's not exactly a

deal breaker, but it left him having to figure out a way to attach the money to his body where it'll survive a parachute jump without like flying everywhere. Um, and so to do that, he decides he has mutilate one of the parachute bags with a small jackknife that he has in his pocket. He chooses one of the front reserve shoots, messes with it for a while before deciding to just leave it behind. He puts on the front shoots, by the way, are reserve shoots, back shoots are real shoots. That's just how it works at this time. I don't know how it is now, but that was the vibe.

He puts on the other front reserve shoot. He sees the two big shoots for his back. He rejects one that's in like a fancy luxury bag. Goes for the military bag one, even though they're basically the same parachute on the inside. people speculate it's because he was like, this is not a real parachute. This is a good one over here. Or something like that displaying knowledge of jumping gear,

maybe, but again, who knows? Instead, he accepts the other military parachute in a military bag, presumably find some other way to attach the money to his body. And then that's it.

This is where we enter the sort of nexus of vagary, right? Because when does he get out of the airplane? I don't know. I'll tell you, It has something to do with the air stare, which, as you recall, supposedly down at this point, which he did by himself. But actually, first, let's recap what happens after takeoff now that we know where they're going, which is Mexico by way of Reno. They took off at 7.36 p.m. that night. At 7.40, they're logged by flight operations to be somewhere on an arc between Lakewood and Pulliallup, Washington. But no exact location was known. And at the same moment, the cockpit door is briefly open to allow Tina Mucklo inside. So that's just like sinking up everything.

that's happening. Somewhere in the next two minutes, there's a message to the flight deck from the hijacker via intercom. Now that the unsub has no more lines, let's get Norm into the reading rotation with the books easier to read interpretation of a transmission from the flight deck about that moment. Here we go. This is for Norm. We are outbound from Seattle at 14 miles DME on airway Victor 23 out of Seattle. The hijacker is trying to get the aft door down. The stewardess is with us. He cannot get the aft stairs down. They know this because the stair light is on, which means that the stairs are not locked in place, either open or closed. So that's what that light means.

They see it. They can tell that he's kind of like trying to figure it out. But they wouldn't go all the way down. So we're not exactly sure what happens next. It might have something to do with drag from the plane. Who knows? But something happens, which they do not fully report that seemingly suddenly convinces the flight crew that he's finally gotten the stairs down in the next few minutes. Probably just literally that the light turns off, but we don't know.

We don't know why they suddenly said, okay, he's got him down. The book suggests maybe he had some knowledge about 727s and that he might have known that this plane, you don't need to use the mechanism. If you just push the fucking stairs, you can get him to lock in place in a like sort of analog way that you'd have, like, you'd have to have knowledge to know. But they didn't know whether or not they had time to worry about it. So here's norm with another quote from the flight crew at around 7.5. 52 p.m. as to why. Stu Mucklow says he has knapsack on, planning to jump. Think he's going to leave any time.

We want to give him as much time as possible. Yeah. So, Stu Mucklo is the stewardess Mucklo, Tina. So she's like, okay, he's got everything on. He's, like, getting ready to jump back there right now. We just want to, like, leave him alone and let him do it. We don't want to, like, give him any funny ideas or make him freak out the last minute or anything. So we're just going to let him do it.

Obviously, she hasn't seen whether he used the napsack. sack or not for the money, so she doesn't know that he may not be wearing a knapsack. So she just says he's got the knapsack on. At 753, one minute later, they level off at the 10,000 feet mark that he told him to stay at. By 759, they're passing over Toledo, Washington. At 805, there's another transmission confirming he seems to be busy with something in the back, which Norm will read for us now. He's like, yeah, here we go. We have attempted on two occasions to make contact with the individual. He did not reply. Then he came on the public address system and he said that everything is okay. Yeah. So he's like, they're trying to get a hold of him. He doesn't say anything. Finally,

he's like, yep, we're good. Suddenly though. He hon soloed them. Yeah. We're all fine here. How are you? However, at around 8, 10 p.m., things change in the cabin. The crew began reporting some, quote, oscillations, causing them to assume that he's doing something with the stairs. They said he was playing with the stairs or something at that point. Here's a quote for Jesse to read from 2014. An interview was done with the flight engineer at the flight deck, Harold Anderson, for a little more information of what was going on at that point. It wasn't smooth even before the oscillations started. We had noticed what we noticed was the pattern of the oscillations was continuing and there was a very minor disruption of the slipstream.

I saw at first, then alerted Captain Scott and Bill Radick-Zek. Scott said, at first, he wasn't feeling anything for sure. Then a little later, he thought there was more drag and the nose was deviating a little. More time passed, and then suddenly came that bump, a single pressure event we felt in our ears. And nothing following. Not even more fluctuations. After the final bump, which we felt in our ears. ears. We all discussed it for a while waiting for another bump and never repeated. I just don't

recall how much time lapsed between feeling the final bump and reporting it to NWA via radio. Yeah. So best guess for this is is the unsub testing out something with the air stare. Maybe bringing it up and down. Maybe that's why the oscillations were happening and he was like changing the air, change the airflow. Because like I say, the door is open. It's basically like having a hole in your fuselage. So if he's opening and closing this hole, it's like, changing the whole situation with the aerodynamics of the of the plane. There's even a moment while he's fucking around with it that it looks like it locks closed for a second, but then it unlocks again. So who knows what the fuck's going on?

You think he's just like, he's like, go. He's like, I'm going to do it this time. Yeah. I think I genuinely do. I genuinely do. I genuinely do think that's what he's doing. But then you hear this bump and then it's like done. Nothing else happens. So was the bump him getting on the stairs and jumping, you think? it's like the general accepted story, but nobody knows. And at this point, at 18-

stairs are sticking out of the plane, right? The ventral stairs. They're like underneath and in the back. Yeah. I'm saying wouldn't the minute he stepped, if he didn't jump, if he just stepped on the stairs,

he just immediately get fucking blown off of them, like sideways? Maybe he was like holding onto the sides. Like, like, like he didn't think about that. And then he was like, who gone.

I think he thought about it regardless because this was a, pretty complex op that he pulled off here. Sure. But the point is that 818 after this bump, even though there's a few minutes after the bump, they have no reason to believe he's not still on the plane. So the flight hits another beacon. It positions them south of Portland.

So now they're like all the way back to Portland near Tuolitan, Washington. 8.30, they try to communicate with him again. He doesn't answer. They don't know it yet, but like 25 minutes ago was the last time anybody ever talked to this guy. at 8.50, they were somewhere over Eugene, Oregon. At 9 o'clock, they decided not to try and contact him again until they got to Reno just in case they didn't want to mess with them. 920, the FBI asks them if they'll try to talk to him as much as possible, but they decide they don't want to. They emphasize that communication has not been going well with him and that he gets edgy and stressed out when they try to talk to him.

So they'll just ask him to raise the stairs when he gets to Reno. at 832, the FBI asked, or 932, the FBI asked them if they'll try and negotiate with him to allow the gear and flaps up out of Reno towards Mexico, like for the last leg of the flight. They do not do it. At 935, they're south of Medford, Oregon. At 940, the FBI's like, what if we just, like, cooled down the cabin until he, like, freezes a little bit and he can't think right? They don't do that either. 10 minutes later, they're headed over Red Bluff. California, they've passed the southern border of Oregon.

At 9.59, the FBI asks about the air stare. The air crew is, the flight crew does not respond again. At 10-11, they turn around and head towards Reno. This is crazy that, like, the FBI is like, hello, hello? And they're just like not responding to them. The ghost in them? Seriously, not right now. They know that the plane is there, but they just aren't talking.

Well, and the weird plan of, like, freezing him. I think that's bizarre. It's cruel. I love that idea, though. It's like outside the. the box like yeah some evil villain stuff I think putting

I think putting like a bad parachute is also like insane but just a guy like jumping out of a plane to his death and he doesn't know it it's like so crazy 1036 though at 10.11 is when they turn towards Reno at 1011

25 minutes later 25 minutes later is when they finally radio back to air traffic control so that so that was a huge amount of time without talking to radio traffic control. And here's Norm with the quote that they said.

Okay, we're trying to make contact with the back now, and we're going to get these steps up before we can make our landing. Yeah. So they decide they're going to try and call the hijacker. Perfect pilot voice. Yeah, thank you. Sounds just like the unsub. They decide they're going to try and call the hijacker on the intercom, get him to agree

to help them with the stairs, because otherwise they have no way of controlling them without violating his demands. Tina calls him one last time over the PA, giving him a final. a warning. Here's Jesse with the message Tina said. Sir, we are going to land now. Please put up the stairs. We are going to land anyway, but the aircraft may be structurally damaged, and we may not be able to take off after we've landed. But it plays to an empty room. There's no

reply. Here's Norm with the response from the flight crew to the tower. We haven't been able to get a hold of anybody yet, trying to contact him and they're still down. So we haven't decided yet and we might come in and land with them down. There'd be some sparks. Yeah.

So they just decide they have no way of putting this thing down. So rather than risk going out of the cockpit, they're just going to land with it down. It's totally fine to do that, just dangerous. And if he's like standing on it or something, it could be bad for him.

So that's why they're like kind of nervous about it. But they arrive on approach to Reno about 1048. After landing at 1102, with a few sparks, indeed, trailing on the way in at 1113. They radio, Reno Tower. Here is Norm with the message. Okay, sir, be advised that we apparently, our passenger took leave of us somewhere between here and Seattle.

We have made a rather cursory examination of the aircraft for the briefcase, and we are unable to do this. We're going to take leave of the aircraft. Yeah. And they do. and the same weird like literally that they're like don't like there's something wrong with the door don't come out and they're like no

we're leaving and they like actually walk out the like busted ass steps that like on the back of the plane to just they're like now we're good there's probably there might be a fucking plane in here we're fucking getting off of it um and all for all anyone knows at this point November 24th 1971 the day before Thanksgiving finally done um all we know is that somewhere between 8.05 p.m. and 11.0.m. this guy took the and left the plane before it landed at Reno Taho International Airport and something happened with the bomb as well.

We don't know what happened to it. This marks the end of the hijacking and the beginning of trying to figure out who did it. This time, as a second little mini break for us, I am not going to read five more facts about Pixel Dan. But I am going to show you, I am going to show you a picture just in case you haven't seen it yet of his very first Christmas ornament, which was a little white Avon Bear with a sash on it showing his birth year of 1972, which you. posted on blue sky so you can have a look at that

I don't am I missing something no there's nothing to miss pixel Dan is just a sweet guy who's nice and good we just we just stay in pixel Dan yeah I just I'm a pixel stand that's it pixel stand I hate that I got an internal server error

that's probably because it doesn't exist too this is some Fasiani trick it's an ARG I don't like this I don't like this Fasiani works for the government this is my ARG this is just love for pixel Dan do you think this is a Disclosure of Pixel Dan being some sort of anagram for alien.

No, that'd be fucking Dan. The worst soft disclos. I'd be so disappointed. Dan Dalyan. It doesn't matter. Dan Daly? So, yeah. It's just a cute, just a cute thing.

Just a cute thing that Pixel Dan person is old. Christmas ornament. It's good stuff. You know, I'm going to say about Hello Fresh already. They've been working with us for years at this point. We're going to keep working with them because I get to keep talking about how much I use them. And if you don't know, let me, let me get you in the know real quick. Ella Fresh is what's going to get you farm fresh, pre-ported ingredients.

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craving. And if you're traveling for the holidays or you're just too busy to cook at home or whatever, you can easily just skip a week's delivery when you're signed up with them. They're really just aren't, you've got commitments you've got to worry about. So if you want to try this, and you should, get 10 free meals at hellofresh.com slash free chill. Applied across seven boxes and new subscribers only and varies by plan. That's 10 free, HelloFresh meals, just go to hellofresh.com slash free chill. Thank you again to HelloFresh for sponsoring today's episode, America's number one meal kit. Strangely, when the FBI boarded the plane, after all this is over, they found out,

they found a black towncraft tie with a yellow gold tie class from JCPenney left behind on seat 18E. But even though it's probably the tie everyone saw him wearing, nobody can actually conclusively connect it to the unsub. no one can ascribe any significance to this tie. There's no meaningful leads generated by it, even though they did pull some DNA off of it and pollen off of it. It's never been matched to anyone or led to anywhere really intriguing. And there's no guarantee that the DNA is even the unsubs DNA because if he bought everything secondhand,

it's possible that that's just some hobo's tie that, like, he threw up on and then donated the goodwill and we'll never know. So, you know, there's really nothing to do with the tie. and I mean, nothing about the sunglasses either, by the way. Like, if you really think about it, how could there be a version of the sketch with his actual face under it if he wore glasses while he was on the plane when everybody was looking at him? And why would he put sunglasses on inside of a plane after he was already aboard the plane and literally every single person involved in the hijacking already saw his face and spoke to him? if you're thinking that somehow the sunglasses would help him parry jump out of an airplane at 8 p.m. at night, I don't think that you understand what it would be like to jump out of a plane at 8 p.m. at night.

Maybe he just wanted to be cool. Yeah, Seattle Wilders. He maybe did, but I just don't know when he would have put those glasses on or why he would have done so. It would be the weirdest thing ever for him to do that. Yeah, it doesn't make sense. I'm just imagining him about to jump and he puts on the sunglasses and he's like, let's do this. And then he jumps out. Yeah.

Here's the thing. Like, I want him to have the sunglasses, too. I want him to dress like a little mod rock star. I want him to be that. I want him to be Lupon the third. I want him to be that. But he's not. He's just a, he's just a,

he's like a guy who doesn't wear suits normally, probably leaping out of a plane. This is such a crazy story. It's pretty much along the short of it for a good long time. There was a placard from the outside fuselage of a Boeing 727 that is found in the remote woods 12 miles east of Castle Rock, Washington in 1978, which a couple years after. Nothing connects it directly to flight 305. Apparently, these things fall off of airplanes all the time.

So there's no even guarantee that any funny business had to occur for there to be one in the, in the woods. And it was, in the hilariously, he flew a Boeing airplane. So, you know, that shit's fucking falling apart. At the time, to be fair, at the time, Boeing was gold standard. The 70s, yeah, I forget when they merged with the other people. It was when they merged with McDonald-Douglas. went down.

1978, that occurs. The only thing that ever happens ever definitive in this case again, for sure. Two years later in 1980, where there's a big discovery on February 10th, 1980, the Ingram family was camping along the Columbia River in Washington at a beach called Tina Bar, Tenabar, in Clark County, Washington. When their eight-year-old son, Brian, finds three bundles of rotted $20 bills, an inch or two below the surface of the sand on this beach, still held together. by brittle little rubber bands that crumble away as he touches them,

that total of value about $5,800 in cash. Immediately, the FBI takes the money, checks to see if the serial numbers match up with the money from the D.B. Cooper case from nine years ago, every last number is a match, so it's definitely the money that was on the plane that day. This was money from the hijacking, and the only bills from it ever found anywhere, anywhere in circulation, like there wasn't any other D.B. Cooper bill that was,

found to be spent by somebody who lived, for example. We can't do much with this info, deposit anything about the unsub as a person or his course after leaving the plane, really, unless you want to really, really deep dive into the topography of Washington and the Riverlands there. And like, there was like a dredging that happened that probably didn't do anything, but there's like tributaries that it could have come from and tributaries that it couldn't have come from. And it's all this huge, complicated mess.

And that already is assuming a bunch of things. But it is a weird place to have found the money a little bit. I'll say that. And I also will say that in 2009 and in 2021, the area where this money was likely found was calculated to within about 257 feet to a spot that is 2.5 miles outside the Victor 23 corridor, which is a corridor of air currents that flight 305 used on their flight south from Seattle, Torino.

So here's a Google Maps link to the area where the money was found if you want to kind of look at it and zoom out and kind of see maybe where D.B. Cooper landed. You know, it's a Google Maps link. So you just got to kind of, you can zoom out. I think the best way to get a sense of it is to pull up the satellite image, if you can, in your browser.

It's like pretty far inland. Like, it's like north of Vancouver, Oregon, if you know where that is. Like north of Portland and Beaverton of Vancouver. Yeah, he definitely,

yeah, it's a weird little stretch. Yeah. It's in, it's in like the very, very, the very, very like northwest area part of Vancouver yeah very very very bordering uh Oregon in

Washington so I mean there's just fucking there's just fucking woods yeah it's just fucking woods uh like there's a beach there and I think there's been some landscaping done like since but it's it's just fucking woods uh beyond this there's tons of places to dig into the facts of this case that can overturn all sorts of crazy rocks with all kinds of crazy bugs underneath that lead you to tons of different theories that you will be totally sure about. But before we go, in lieu of trying to finger someone specific, which we will do plenty of later this year in further DB Cooper episodes, lots of figuring. What I wish the aliens would do to me? I know. Let's just have you guys take turns reading a list of improbabilities that our author Edwards identifies

from this book to get us on the right track for further thinking. I'm just going to, they all have your names written next to them. Just go ahead and read through them one after the other like a script. These are all things that don't make sense. I'm scrolling. These are all things that don't make sense. A mild-mannered middle-aged man armed with no more than a cheap briefcase containing six red cylinders and what looks like a battery holds the lives of 36 passengers and six crew to ransom. The hijacker knows that it is practicable and safe to parachute from a Boeing 727 at 10,000 feet. The crew do not transmit the hijacking code on the transponder from Portland to Seattle, even though they're asked to,

and due on the way from Seattle to Reno. The hijacker executes his leap to freedom, wearing a business suit and loafers in the dark above the clouds, and by all accounts, with densely timbered wilderness below. Having otherwise given every appearance of meticulous planning and the removal of evidence, the hijacker leaves a necktie on the airplane. The flight path of the airplane is never established. The crew never tell air traffic control where they are, and air traffic control never. asks, no civilian radar data are retained.

Military radar data disappear. The flight data and cockpit recordings disappear. Eight years later, some of the money is discovered on a riverbank upwind and upstream of where the hijacker could have lost or discarded it. Yeah. And these are just a few of the avenues you can take if you want to try and investigate this mystery yourself. I did a quick Google search.

One of the theories is that Captain, first officer, uh, Radichick took his uniform off, goes and sits in the back of the plane, pretends to be a hijacker, asks for $200,000, goes back into the flight deck and he's like, he's gone.

I don't know what happened to him. That's why he's not on the manifest. That's why he's not anywhere. Interesting thought. You know, demonstrates, demonstrates a knowledge of everything. Makes sense, right?

But, but what about the money? Like, he just probably just took it and walked somewhere else and then hid some in the woods one day. I don't know. He just needs to put it under his shirt in the cockpit, walk out of there. There's no reason to wand the victim of a hijacking as they get off the plane.

You know what I mean? Like, my point is there's a million sensational theories that you can get, like, instantly excited about in this. There's one that the book says about this guy who, like, is like a luggage handler and, like, box shipper type guy. And it, like, is the profile of somebody that they never investigated? Like, there are so many. ways that you can go about deducing who this guy is.

And obviously, now that you know the verified parts of D.B. Cooper's story and hopefully you have a better sense than you did when you started of the timeline of events and the characters involved that you're just sort of able to visualize why this guy's insane gamble play, even though nobody died and it didn't change the world in any meaningful way, other than what I said earlier about making there be metal detectors now, how something like that created a mystery so big and so deep that I chose it as the sequel. to the JFK mystery. So beyond this, the book does offer private citizens, historical societies, the FBI, Clark County Sheriff's

Department, along with several others in Oregon, a few leads worth tracking down locations worth searching based on conclusions they've drawn from the data that was crunched in the earlier chapters, lots of new insights on old theories, et cetera, which would possibly touch on later, but also may not. It truly does go deep beyond where a podcast version would be exciting in some places this book. but man seriously if you're interested in this mystery this is the book to buy really has the good facts in it and also on top of all this it's probably worth mentioning that this series the db cooper series will only really continue if circumstances outside my control don't make this mystery kind

of irrelevant right because this is because like i mentioned at the beginning like mathis mentioned there's been a very recent development in the past few weeks that threatens to finally solve this case so first of all let me just say that if it is solved there still will be one more episode But it will be only one more D.B. Cooper episode, right, where I say what happened. But either way, whether it's the end of the story or not, the next episode is going to be about a man called Richard McCoy, Jr. Because he's the prime suspecting this new D.B. Cooper development. Old Dick McCoy, dude. Yeah. And if you think that episode isn't going to be called, if you don't think that episode is going to be called D.B. Cooper, the real McCoy.

You're probably right, because I write episode titles for all these episodes. And it never gets title what I try to do. You never give me them. But I'm definitely going to write it on my notes. D.B. Give me the title of the episode. I'll use it. Apparently, according to an article in The Guardian from last month, the children of this man have recently come forward claiming that their father, who is long dead, by the way.

This guy, Richard McCoy, Jr. is the guy. And that they only waited this long in the first place because they weren't sure if their mom, who was McCoy's wife, was in on it. But she died in 2020. So now these guys are like, they reached out. There's a YouTube channel, but this guy, I forget what his name is. I think the name is Grider. The channel is called Probable Cause.

Did a couple of huge videos on the topic, 2021, 2022. Culminated in a third video that came out last month, three weeks ago, stating that the FBI actually contacted him and reopened their investigation, which closed in 2016. late last year on the strength of a parachute that they found in possession of the McCoys, right? So basically they said, after all this time, he made like a basically a three and a half hour

two part documentary. And then dug this parachute out, sent it to the FBI, and now he made another hour long documentary. I haven't watched all this because, like, I'll tell you right now, it's like not the best made content in the world. And it's to the point that it kind of makes me,

like, not trusted that much. but it's worth checking out. I don't know like how real this is. Of course this guy's going to say it's real because his like channel is staked on it. But apparently Richard McCoy Jr., this guy was arrested in 1972 two days after he hijacked a different plane.

Oh, the slides in between have comic sands. Yeah, I know, I know. This guy apparently hijacked a different plane a year after DB Cooper jumped out of the plane over Provo with $500,000 cash. escape from prison in 1974 and then was killed by an FBI agent three months later while he was on the run. So that's who they're saying did it. Is a guy who actually like it's not crazy they did

because he actually did do an air heist, this guy. He's already, he was one of the copycat Zodiac criminals. So yeah, we'll hear about him next either way. Maybe another suspect or two as well if things are still up in the air by that point, no pun intended. Or maybe we'll actually see this dude caught in our lifetimes and one of the great American mysteries will finally be closed. Who knows? Either way, pretty exciting stuff. Maybe this guy isn't so much the real McCoy as he is a big fake

hoaxing everyone for money. Which reminds me, it's time to say what the big reveal is. Okay. Do you guys want to try and hear this? Do you guys want to throw out a guess one last time? Try and keep it to 10 seconds or less. I'll still give you credit. Jesse said it starts with an H. Mathis said

body parts. Bodies. I don't fucking know. Jesse's partially correct. math is totally wrong. Norm comes out of this looking like a champ. This whole time, H8 has been leading to a brand new type of Chulminati episode all about hoaxes. That's right. Surprise. Next time on the show, it's the Chuluminaity Hoax Miss Top Eight Hoaxes special featuring our pal, Davis, H8, eight hoaxes. Fucking, right.

Can you even believe it? I was just hoaxed through everything. are you? I'm satisfied. Norm, thank you so much for coming on the show and for reliving history with us today. If people want to see more unhinged and immaculately researched episodes of immense historical value featuring Norm Caruso, where can they go to find that or anything else you'd like to share?

Oh, please check out Kristen and I's history podcast and old-timey podcast. You can learn more. Honestly, Patreon.com slash old-timey podcast is where you can learn everything. And by the way, Alex, I'm going to do a little callback to your intro because This whole mystery ties into historiography as well because one of my favorite quotes about history is history is the memory of things said and done. And so all we have to go by for D.B. Cooper is the memories, the memories of people. Yeah, exactly right. And when something insignificant happens to you, because these people weren't told the plane was being hijacked, it's very hard to remember things, right?

Right. They're not memorable anymore. They had no idea they needed to pay attention, right? Exactly. Which is, you know, kind of how I feel about these guys sometimes, you know, with my mysteries, with my great mysteries. Dude, I thought it was good. I just, I thought it would be more.

I don't know. Thanks again for coming. We'll see you guys next time for hoaxmas. Don't be a Grinch. H-8, get it? Hoaxes. What a reveal. That is it.

There is definitely nothing more to this. How fun. YouTube.com slash pixel Dan. Mathis, take us away. I have to do a Minnesota at patreon. com slash Jliminipod. We appreciate you. we love you. Thank you again, Norm. Goodbye. Porn.

Anyway, me and my wife were sitting outside indulging on our porch one night, enjoying ourselves. I needed to go to the bathroom, so I stepped back inside, and after a few moments, I hear my wife go, holy shit, get out here. So I quickly dashed back outside. She's looking up in the sky in the fall. I look up too, and there's a perfect line of dozen lights traveling across the sky.