by Albert Jack
The FBI circulated a wanted poster throughout the States, with an artist's impression of Cooper based upon eyewitness accounts, but it could have been a picture of just about any average American on the street, and as many as ten thousand false sightings were reported. As it was, the FBI interviewed more than fourteen hundred people, but to no avail. The story held the popular imagination for a long time, the news papers ridiculing the unsuccessful FBI investigation in the process. Eventually the hijacker, named as “John Doe, a.k.a. Dan B. Cooper,” was charged, in his absence, with air piracy at a federal court in 1976.
The American public, on the other hand, was in the process of elevating D. B. Cooper to the status of a legend as the mystery around him continued to grow. Bars in the area of Ariel and Lake Merwin set up D. B. Cooper shrines, which remain to this day, and hold D. B. Cooper “days,” with local parachute clubs even reenacting the jump on the day before Thanksgiving every year.
That is what we all like most about this sort of history. Nobody was hurt, it involved extra ordinary courage, and nothing has been found since. Not even Cooper's hat, coat, or briefcase. And that is why we all want Cooper to still be alive, and not to have been lying at the bottom of Lake Merwin all these years. We like the idea of Cooper jumping out of a passenger jet with the loot, landing and then dusting himself off, picking up his briefcase, putting on his hat, pausing only to straighten its brim, and being back in the office by nine.
But the FBI does not share our warmth toward the mystery man. Agent Ralph Himmelsbach spent eight years at the head of the investigation and was unable to hide his bitterness, calling Cooper a “dirty rotten crook,” a “rodent,” and nothing more than a “sleazy, rotten criminal who threatened the lives of more than forty people for money,” oh—and “a bastard.”
Himmelsbach once snapped at a journalist who inquired about Cooper's growing status as a hero. “That's not heroic,” he shouted. “It is selfish, dangerous, and antisocial. I have no admiration for him at all. He is not admirable. He is just stupid and greedy.” Himmelsbach retired from the FBI in 1980, his work incomplete, to run his own charm school in the Deep South. In his subsequent book, Norjak: The Investigation of D. B. Cooper, Himmelsbach tried to promote what is known as the “splatter” theory, meaning Cooper had been killed as he hit the ground. This is dismissed by most, as the body, highlighted by its bright red and yellow parachute, would have turned up sooner or later. When pressed by reporters about why the body had not been found despite a legion of police, the Army Reserve, volunteers, and Boy Scouts all searching, Himmelsbach surprised everybody, including, I imagine, the FBI, when he insisted they had all been looking in the wrong area all the time, despite the Feds’ re enacting the jump in an effort to pinpoint Cooper's drop zone.
In 1980, an eight-year-old boy was playing by the river and discovered a bag of cash totaling $5,800, all in twenty-dollar bills. His father, aware of the D. B. Cooper mystery, immediately took the cash to the police, who checked the serial numbers and confirmed this was part of the missing money. Hopes of a conclusion faltered on discovering the cash was found nearly forty miles upstream of where the police now believed Cooper to have landed. This was compounded by the geologists who claimed, having studied the notes and assessed their rate of deterioration, that the money must have been placed in the water in about 1974, three years after the hijacking. Despite these discrepancies, Himmelsbach considered this evidence proof of his splatter theory. He claimed Cooper must have landed in the lake on that dark night and drowned. But the resulting search by scuba divers with modern sonar equipment failed to find any further clues.
Few people outside the FBI believe this theory. Instead, many believe Cooper's careful plan included dropping a few bags of money at a later date to serve as a red herring. It would appear that Cooper had thought of everything, which is why he is probably still at large. The hijacker had a further stroke of luck when on May 18, 1980, the volcano near the site of his purported landing, Mount St. Helens, erupted with such force that the landscape was changed forever, no doubt concealing many undiscovered clues. But there is, however, one more important piece of evidence for us to consider.
In 1972, an embarrassed FBI produced a thirty-four-page booklet detailing the crime and, more important, including photographs of the money and listing every single serial number of the ten thousand bills. The booklet was sent to every bank and financial institution in America, with copies to the national media. However, despite rewards on offer of up to $150,000 for the production of even one solitary bill, none have ever turned up in the American system (with the exception, that is, of the $5,800 discovered in the water). Like Cooper, they have simply vanished.
But this fact alone does not mean Cooper is dead, as most countries around the world, especially developing nations, trade in dollars, and so the money could have turned up anywhere. Even so, the police expected at least one bill to have been found over the years, and that leaves investigators even more baffled. For nothing to have been seen or heard of Cooper, dead or alive, nor for a single banknote to have reappeared, is hard to imagine. And yet this quite literal vanishing into thin air is exactly what did happen.
The problem about carrying out the perfect crime is that then everyone else wants to try it too. The following year produced no fewer than four copycat jumps, and although one, the first effort, did end in a splatter landing, the following three hijackers all landed safely but were arrested at the scene or soon afterward. But then there was a new and interesting development. On April 7, 1972, four months after the Cooper hijack, a man checked in as James Johnson on United Flight 855 traveling from Denver to Los Angeles. Just after takeoff, Johnson put on a wig, fake mustache, and sunglasses and gave the stewardess a note. This read:
Land at San Francisco International Airport and taxi to Runway 19 Left [a remote part of the airport].
Send for a refueling truck, but no other vehicles must approach without permission.
Direct United Airlines to provide four parachutes and a ransom of $500,000 in cash.
The captain carefully followed the instructions and the aircraft was soon back in the air again, this time heading for Provo, Utah. After an hour and a half, Johnson instructed the captain to reduce altitude and speed and depressurize the cabin, in a carbon copy of Cooper's plan. Except that a co-pilot glanced around the cockpit door just in time to see Johnson expertly slip on the parachute, open the rear door and jump.
The FBI started their investigation the minute the aircraft landed at Provo. This time they had a cast-iron clue. Johnson had left a single clear fingerprint on an in-flight magazine. They were initially baffled, as Johnson had no criminal record and no match was found for the print. But then they had a breakthrough. In a telephone call to the FBI in Salt Lake City, a young man gave the police the plan of the hijacking, including details not yet made public.
He claimed his friend Richard McCoy, Jr., had boasted about the plan to him, and the preparatory details he described were in fact identical in every way to those of the hijacking of Flight 855. McCoy was twenty-nine years old, married with two young children and studying police science at Brigham Young University. He was also a Vietnam veteran, former Green Beret helicopter pilot, and specialist paratrooper. The FBI checked his service fingerprint record and found an exact match to the print found on the plane. The handwriting on the ransom note also matched McCoy's samples in his military file. This time they had their man.
Two days later, McCoy was arrested at his home, where police found a parachute suit and a bag of cash containing $499,970. The FBI asked the trial judge to make an example of McCoy to deter further copycat hijackings, and the young man received a sentence of forty-five years without parole. But within months he had escaped from prison. He was eventually tracked to a house in Virginia Beach, where he was shot dead during the ensuing gun battle to rearrest him.
The similarities between the two crimes, in particular the evident flying expertise in each case, led to specula
tion that McCoy himself was in fact D. B. Cooper, and certainly the tie left behind by Cooper was similar to McCoy's Brigham Young University tie. It seems pretty unlikely, though: How would the D. B. Cooper money get into the river two years after McCoy's death, for instance? Although it might explain why no money ever reentered the system, as McCoy may have stashed it away for the future, and it has remained hidden ever since.
The truth is that the identity of D. B. Cooper remains a mystery, and each year the American media remind the public by way of anniversary articles and features, although to this day nobody has ever produced a credible theory, backed up with indisputable evidence, as to the identity or whereabouts of either Cooper or the money.
Strange formations in fields of wheat and other crops
have been appearing since the 1970s. Are they made by
aliens parking their spaceships, or is the explanation
rather more down-to-earth?
Of all the subjects I've explored for this book, the one I was most looking forward to finding out more about was crop circles. For years I had been hoping there would be an extraordinary paranormal explanation for crop-circle appearances or, better still, that we were being visited by aliens from other worlds. Then, when it became clear that most of the circles were in fact hoaxes, I relished the thought that I would finally have the chance to dismiss all the crop-circle fanatics I have heard on the radio over the years talking with great passion about the temporary parking of invisible spacecraft in a field, leaving behind an imprint in the flattened wheat when they zoom back into outer space. The only extra bit of evidence offered for this startling conclusion appears to be that witnesses claim flocks of birds veer around crop-circle sites as if avoiding or circumnavigating something the rest of us cannot see.
I was looking forward to poking fun at the gaping holes left in the arguments of these so-called experts expounding their elabor ate theories on the six o'clock news. Indeed, I wish I had phoned in once, just once, and asked that sanctimonious old fellow on the BBC, who appeared to be contradicting himself every five minutes, a couple of simple questions: How, then, do you explain the crop circles that have appeared directly underneath power lines—how could a spaceship have landed there? And why choose that spot when there was plenty of field in which to land without being so inconvenienced? In fact, I would pose these questions to him now if I hadn't switched the radio off through sheer boredom, not bothering to find out his name.
At the same time I hoped that the circles weren't all hoaxes and that I could also expose the hoaxers, who seemed to be making a real nuisance of themselves. But having studied the evidence and looked at the extreme lengths to which the hoaxers have been prepared to go, I am no longer so sure I can.
The very first recorded example of a crop circle is a woodcut dated 1678 and entitled “The Mowing-Devil: or, Strange News out of Hartford-shire” [sic], and it shows a devil cutting out a pattern in a field of wheat using a scythe. The text explains that the greedy farmer had refused to pay a reasonable fee to the workers for the harvest that year and announced he would rather have the devil do the work instead. The following morning he woke to find Old Nick had done just that and the farmer became too scared to enter the field ever again, and so the harvest, and his occupation, were lost.
However, crop circles didn't come to the public's attention until three centuries after this—in the late 1970s. Their relatively sudden appearance caused a sensation as the British press fought each other for the best photographs. Keen to get ahead of the trend, several of the newspapers began employing circle makers to create ever more elaborate patterns throughout the countryside and, in the process, obviously guaranteeing themselves the first and best pictures of this mysterious new phenomenon sweeping the land.
But while newspapers may have employed circle makers to create some of the circles they photographed, this wasn't known about at the time, and the circles appeared, for the most part, not to be man-made in origin. During the early 1980s, crop circles began to attract serious interest with the discovery of a formation at a place called Cheesefoot Head, a high point on the chalk downlands close to Winchester. Here, a circle fifty-two feet in diameter was flanked by two others exactly half the size symmetrically placed north and south of the larger circle. The perfect spiraling of the flattened straw and precision placement of the formation proved very difficult to explain at the time, scientifically or otherwise. Other formations soon began to appear in wheat, grass, rape, and many other crops. Researchers started to study the designs and began to believe that individually, or collectively, they amounted to coded messages or directions to something as yet unknown, by intelligent beings also as yet unknown. Other physical features were pointed out, such as the way a circle was aligned with the sun or moon, leading to the idea that supernatural forces were at work across the English countryside. It seemed that such mathematically precise formations—especially the increasingly complicated circles that were emerging by the late 1980s—were not, and could never be, the work of man himself.
Then in 1991 two elderly landscape artists, Dave Chorley and Doug Bower, fired an arrow directly into the heart of the evergrowing crop-circle fan club by admitting they had been making them by hand since the 1970s, after reading about the famous so-called “saucer nests” (impressions left in the crops by some disc-shaped object) that had appeared in Australia. By the time they retired from the “business,” Doug and Dave had successfully completed over 250 crop circles across southern England.
Doug and Dave's inspiration, the Australian saucer nests, were a collection of seven circles in the oat fields near Border-town, Australia. Predating these, and providing the original source of inspiration for all the modern-day crop circles that followed, was the Tully Saucer Nest, which appeared on January 19, 1966, on a piece of land at Horseshoe Lagoon near Tully, in northern Queensland.
After the fruits of Doug and Dave's labors in Hampshire and Wiltshire started to attract public attention, a veritable epidemic began to spread. Crop circles popped up everywhere. Each was immediately studied by experts, who either dismissed it as a hoax or accepted it as genuine—that is, not created by man. Artists competed to confound these so-called experts: having one of their circles “proved” genuine was the highest accolade— albeit hugely ironic that for a circle to be good enough to be considered genuine implied that no artist had been involved in its creation. And this was a form of art, after all, even if the medium was rather avant-garde: during the 1980s and 1990s, it was on a par with cutting a cow in half, preserving it in formaldehyde, and displaying it at the Tate Modern. But it's all art, isn't it?
Not according to the scientists and followers of the growing crop-circle community, it wasn't; it was deception, and it continually interrupted their serious research into what appeared to be a brand-new type of paranormal activity. As their resentment grew, so the work of the circle makers became increasingly elaborate. As soon as one design was considered too intricate for humans to create, another one would appear that was even more complicated. And the (probably cashing-in) stories from farmers about strange lights and howling animals deepened the mystery, as did reports of military helicopters apparently hovering around circle sites.
One crop circle appeared in a field close to Stonehenge, the spiritual home of the Druids, shortly before the summer solstice in 1996. Predictably enough, the summer solstice, falling on or around June 21, is Stonehenge's busiest day of the year, and in 1996 it was even busier. The great unwashed descended in force to appreciate the new mysterious formation and spent ages analyzing each bent stem of wheat, taking electromagnetic recordings of earth samples, and recording detailed cross-measurements of the circle.
The press arrived in their helicopters, and photographs of the circle appeared on television and in every newspaper. When crop-circle enthusiasts began to turn up in their anorak-clad droves, the farmer erected a shed and charged an entry fee to his field, to help “compensate for the damage.” By the end it is estim
ated he had collected over PS30,000, a good day's work when set against the PS150 of damaged wheat. “That will be treble gin and tonics all round, please, landlord, and keep an eye out for the tax man.”
Crop-circling has become big business: small companies offer gullible businessmen helicopter flights over crop-circle formations. Bus tours are provided, hotels are always full in the vicinity of new designs, and local tradespeople benefit from the arrival of enthusiasts. Then there are the films, books, television documentaries, and radio programs, not to mention the T-shirts and photograph collections on sale.
But there is a very good reason why those involved rarely own up to the deception, and that motive is not necessarily the tax man. The main reason is that, despite open hostility between the crop-circle believers and the circle makers, usually in the direction of the circle makers, the two opposing factions are completely dependent upon each other, because, as any artist will tell you, national publicity is hard to come by.
