TL;DR: It was a hoax, yes, but there are a lot of hoaxes. What will be illuminating is our examination of the context surrounding it, which is never discussed in DB Cooper research circles. Of course you know that’s the hallmark of how these “enduring mysteries” endure.

Fair warning: This is super long but I’m trying to take a 50-year-old baffling cold case and stomp it into a mudhole in the ground so it never gets back up. I’ll try to be brief but it will still take a bit.

To begin, let me say that I was never interested in D. B. Cooper or anything else in the “true crime” genre. If you choose to punch out now for that reason, go ahead, but I think even Cooper-ologists will miss out on aspects not discussed elsewhere.

Coming into contact with the case is unavoidable, as I’m sure you will agree, and now every conspiracy/true crime podcast out there has to do an episode on it as if it’s required by state law. I think the reason They ran the hoax in the first place had something to do with tightening the police state’s noose on peasants flying through the air. However, I think history has proven it to be more impactful due to the time wasted by people doing research on DB Cooper that has not and will not ever get them anywhere. Really, the mind boggles at the sheer number of conspiracist-hours down the toilet.

So somewhere along the line I heard about the recovered ransom money, and we’ll pause here to discuss the crucial role of “anomalous” evidence. Scientists know that not only must they account for all evidence, they should pay special attention to evidence that doesn’t fit in with accepted theory. When properly investigated, it can truly point the way towards new science. But since scientists don’t get funding for, “This thing didn’t work out like I thought,” pretty much zero of them do it nowadays.

Well, that money was anomalous. You see, there was just no plausible explanation I could come up with—no matter how I stretched my imagination—as to precisely how the money could have come to be where it was. I’m not talking about proof for any particular thesis, I’m talking about dreaming up a thesis at all. Turns out it’s hard to get the hard details (surprise) but what I was trying to make sense of was this situation:

$5,800 of airplane hijacker D. B. Cooper’s ransom money is found near the Columbia River on February 10, 1980. (History Link 8/6/2024)

So I let it go, which brings up an even more important point than anomalous evidence. At the time, my “Overton Window” (so to speak) for how the world could possibly work did not include as an available thesis, “Ohhhhhh, this whole fucking thing was fake, wasn’t it?” It’s a limitation of consciousness, really, and you should always strive to be aware of what you’re subconsciously ruling out as impossible.

In any case, I lived and learned about the shenanigans of the Spook Elites. As I was researching fake UFO incidents, I happened to encounter one of those innumerable Norjak podcast episodes. That’s when I came to realize that the DB Cooper incident had taken place in the same area I have come to think of as the Puget Sound Stronghold. There is a lot more material on it, but what I wrote up so far is here:

The Puget Sound Flap: Or, How the boring Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting blows up in your face in terms of Salem Witches (conspiracies.win 5/1/2025)

BTW, who downvotes such content? Could there be enemy infowarriors among us? Perhaps. Anyway, this DB Cooper materials adds to the pile we’re building on Puget Sound.

Since I mentioned the infowar, I might mention that I have never once heard it suggested from any researcher, given all the work they have done collectively on the case, that it has occurred to any of them it might have been faked. So, witting shills or the promotion of dimwit “experts”, you can see how the information war is really waged.

I will credit one of those podcasts for casually mentioning that at one point, there were only six other people on the plane besides DB. You see, they’re all too busy talking about cigarette butts and clip-on ties and parachutes and so forth, all the shit that I’m now telling you will get you nowhere. It took dozens of documentaries and podcasts before the fact that only a very tiny group was involved stuck in my consciousness.

At last, with the idea in mind that it may all have been phony, I tried to think up various scenarios as to how it took place. Another piece of anomalous evidence—never discussed, surprise—was DB’s very strange choice of outfit. A plain dark suit and tie for jumping out of an airplane into the forest at night?

It was late November in the Pacific northwest coming into night, and gear pretty much as rugged as you like would not have seemed out of place. In fact, while others were worried about getting drenched while walking to the plane, it was noted by a witness that DB appeared to have no such worries. Anomalous, right?

My explanation is that DB was not worried about walking to the plane because DB was not going to walk to the plane. At least, not the DB making a show of himself in the departure lounge. Plot twist! It turns out that a fringe theory on the case is that DB Cooper was the co-pilot, First Officer Robert “Bob” Rataczak:

Could The DB Cooper highjacking have been an elaborate simulation for an old fashion Ransom? Could he have just been the co-Pilot in sunglasses? Shouldn’t we consider this? (r/dbcooper 5/23/2017)

The idea is not fleshed out there, but what’s important to note is the comments: the OP gets absolutely hammered for even bringing it up. Remember we were talking about the infowar? I think the whole subreddit exists just to “keep the mystery alive”. For comparison, the thesis came up again on our old familiar stomping grounds—as heavily controlled and infiltrated as they are--and got a very warm reception:

No one ever jumped out of the plane! Meet Dan Cooper! It was an inside job! (r/conspiracy 6/2/2025)

You may even see my tiny contribution there, that it was a form of a stage magic trick. Let me here expand on my suggestion: DB did not disappear from the plane, he was never on it. Everyone incorrectly believes he was where he never actually was. This short video demonstrates the principle:

Vanishing a Quarter Into Thin Air (Scam Nation 10/22/2018 YouTube 5:40)

That video was originally from the “Scam School” podcast, which proposed to teach you fairly simple tricks you could use at the bar or at parties. I watched the entire run, hundreds of episodes I think, and never learned one single trick. You see, I ended up studying the principles those tricks were based on, and how our perceptions are manipulated, and how easily our “knowledge” comes to be incorrect. Highly recommended on that basis.

The “vanishing DB into thin air” effect goes basically like this: DB Cooper walks into the airport, buys a ticket, and makes sure he is seen at the departure lounge. As everyone is getting their shit together and boarding, DB just dips out. Who would notice such a thing? No one. There’s the trick: you know “for a fact” that everyone who buys a ticket gets aboard the plane (barring some mundane problem). But can we find any record of anyone testifying they saw him climb into the plane? Nope. No one even asks the question, you see.

Back to DB’s anomalous choice of outfit. As necessary, the co-pilot takes the flair off his uniform and suddenly he’s DB. Would people recognize him? Of course not. Could you describe the pilot and co-pilot of any jet you’ve been on? Also, you’ll find in the original witness statements that the “DB on the ground” was about 5’9” and the “DB in the air” was about 6’1”. Another anomaly never discussed.

At the end of the big caper, the flight crew walks off the plane with the money in their carry-ons. Who would check? The cash dropped away into the night, didn’t it? Years later, the money on the riverbank was planted to—again—“keep the mystery alive”. Dumb, but it has worked perfectly.

Perhaps that’s already enough to convince you of the fakery, but if you need that extra push over the cliff, then once again we find the Salem Witches at work. You’ll need your list of people of the Salem witch trials.

First things first: is a relative of Dan/DB Cooper on there? Well, we have every reason to believe he would and could and did give a fake name. He even said it was “Dan” but it got munged to “DB”. So what a coinkydink it is to find Elizabeth Cooper, born November 12, 1676 in Salem, Massachusetts. Yes, it seems there were Coopers in the tiny town of Salem at the time of the fake trials.

Were any Coopers—or anyone whose name doesn’t appear in the list—directly involved? It becomes hard to say because we know people (eg Robert Moulton III) have been left off the wiki list. Also, women’s maiden names are not frequently noted. I could do all the very tedious research, but I’m going more with, “Try to make yourself believe this is all mere happenstance.”

Moving on, the flight's pilot was Captain William Scott. You may be interested to know that one of the last group of witches of Salem to be fake hanged by the neck until not dead was Margaret Scott.

As far as my description of the magic trick, one person that would have definitely noted that DB Cooper did not board the plane would have been the gate agent, making little pen marks on his manifest or whatever they did in 1971. His name is rarely mentioned and hard to find (surprise) but it was Hal Williams. Perhaps we should hold a seance and ask Abigail Williams, “among the first of the children to falsely accuse their neighbors of witchcraft in 1692”, what she knows about all this. But whoa, I guess that would be witchcraft.

BTW, as far as the members of the crew who identified as female, good luck finding out if their last names were their maiden names or if they were married or what their mother’s maiden names were or anything else about them. So who knows. Tina Mucklow, the one that sat next to DB, apparently joined a nunnery later in life. Guilt? Again, who knows.

You’d think the FBI would have to be in on it. They seem to be in on a lot, and I think they were in on this too. Take a look at this Big List of FBI agents Associated with Norjak (Martin Andrade 9/22/2016). The second to last was Larry Carr, and I refer you to the supposedly witchery-afflicted “Ann Carr-Putnam Sr., age 31 and living in Salem Village/Danvers”.

As for the agents who handled the case for the first two decades, Charlie Farrell and Ron Nichols, there is a deeper connection and I’ll have to refer you to a longer writeup to find out what that’s all about. If you concur, though, that gives us three hits out of six FBI agents:

Dr. Joseph P. Farrell: a disinformation agent with unlikely connections to the Montauk Project, DB Cooper, and the Salem Witch Trials (conspiracies.win 5/29/2025)

Maybe we’ll call this the bonus: The final connection I located is the most unexpected and most mysterious, and therefore the most interesting. There was an enormous manhunt for DB, of course, taking tremendous resources and led by the Clark County Sheriff. Do you know what his name was? Try finding it, because it has very nearly been stricken from the record. It was tangentially mentioned in this old article about the retirement of his undersheriff:

Career of doing what ‘needed to be done’ comes to a close: After 47 years of EMS, fire district service, Tom McDowell's retirement well earned (The Columbian 7/27/2018)

Why the hell is Eugene Cotton so low-profile? Disturbing, isn’t it? Sort of indicates he was in on it too, right? Anyway, remember that cash that was found on the riverbank in Washington? Just some local yokel wandering the woods, right? Nope:

Mena man to sell D.B. Cooper cash (Arkansas Times 1/26/2006)

Mena? Hmm, where have I heard that tiny ville (pop ~5k) half a continent away mentioned before? Anyway, did you read the article about that lucky hick? You should have. The very last paragraph says:

Interestingly, there is another Arkansas connection to the D.B. Cooper episode. The county sheriff who led the manhunt in Washington state retired to Montgomery County years ago and his widow still lives in Norman.

Where is the absolutely miniscule (pop ~500) Norman? About 37 miles along Highway 8, leaving east out of Mena. It’s the next stop so you can’t miss it. Small world.

Final note: His surname is Cotton, which is not common at all, but my guess about the Shadowy Sheriff is that he somehow bears a relation to the guy I take as the Special-Agent-in-Charge of the whole Salem Witch Psyop, Cotton Mather. Hey, even if that was just a weird coincidence it would still be worth knowing.

Thanks for reading this very long one!