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Because you’re a person in the world, these past couple weeks have deluged you with headlines that FINALLY the infamous DB Cooper hijacking case of 1971 has been solved by “new evidence” from an “investigator”. (Cooper, for the potential uninitiated, was the fake name of an airline passenger who threatened to have a bomb, compelled authorities to give him $200,000 in cash, took off again and jumped out the rear “air stair” of the Boeing 727 with a parachute. Neither he nor the cash were ever found. Here’s the Skeptoid episode if you want the full details of the event in all its glory.)
In 1972, a year after the Cooper hijacking, a copycat crime was attempted by a guy named Richard McCoy Jr. He failed, was caught and arrested, did time, and was shot in an escape attempt. Later, when claims surfaced that McCoy had also been DB Cooper, his family successfully sued for libel.
The FBI, of course, thoroughly investigated McCoy, since the crimes were so similar. They easily determined that his was merely a ham-handed copycat attempt, and plenty of other evidence excluded him as a suspect.
So this latest news is that some rando named Dan Gryder, referred to in the news as a YouTuber but actually a far-right conspiracy theorist and provocateur, and for whom there is a Blocked by Dan Gryder Facebook group where they discuss his many antics, tracked down McCoy’s family and claims to have found the exact model of parachute used by Cooper — a US Navy NB6 — in a shed. He claims this must be the actual chute DB Cooper himself used, and thus it proves McCoy and Cooper were the same person. Further, he claims this chute is modified — in the exact same “unique” way that Cooper’s was.
Here is everything that’s wrong with that. Gryder could not have made a weaker case if he had tried, and he successfully depended on the media’s and the general public’s ignorance about parachutes. I shall now illuminate.