Hijacked Planes and Brains

The Deep End #10

Growing up, one of my favorite hobbies was watching TV while sitting on the antique couch in my grandparent’s living room—a room better fit for a Sicilian-American Immigrant’s Museum than a place to watch TV with your eyes glazed over at the age of thirteen.

My favorite thing to watch would be the old true crime TV shows on the E! Network. Don’t worry, this isn’t a paid advertisement for E! (That doesn’t mean I’m not open to the idea. If you happen to be a member of the E! Network, hello!)

Stories of killer clowns, the Son of Sam, wives driven to kill, and unsolved murders were always fascinating to me. Typically, I seemed to gravitate to the unsolved crime facet of the genre.

The Zodiac Killer and Jack the Ripper are among my favorites and have always captured the hearts of true crime fanatics. But for me, one tale stood out from the rest. It’s one of those stories that spellbinds you, makes you wonder, sticks with you, pops up in your head from time to time, and has you thinking of what could have been had things ended differently. Most people wouldn’t necessarily agree with that last part. I’ll explain why in a bit.

I’m talking of course, about the mysterious case of D.B. Cooper.

On November 24th, 1971, a man boarded a plane from Portland to Seattle. The man looked to be in his mid-forties and wore a business suit, white shirt, black tie, black raincoat, and brown shoes. He carried a briefcase and a paper bag. The man sat in the last row of the plane and ordered a bourbon and 7-Up to get things rolling. This story may seem ordinary enough, but that’s because I haven’t gotten to the good part yet.

Shortly after takeoff, the aforementioned man (whose ticket read Dan Cooper) handed one of the flight attendants a note. Thinking it was another desperate middle-aged business man’s digits, the flight attendant left him on the 1971 version of read and dropped the note in her purse without reading it. Cooper, surely offended by her not accepting his advances, urged her to read the note.

The note read: Miss—I have a bomb in my briefcase and want you to sit by me.

Now that’s a pickup line worth trying. After the flight attendant read the note, she approached the man. The pickup line worked! Cooper calmly explained his plan; showing her the bomb in question and promptly demanding $200,000 (around $1.5 million in 2024) or else the plane would go bye-bye.

Our faithful stewardess brought this matter up to the cockpit. Suddenly the crew of Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 realized they had a hijacking on their hands. The captain contacted their flight operations on the ground to relay the demands Cooper was making in order to save the plane and its passengers from being all exploded over the runway.

The demands were:

⁃           $200,000 in 20s.

⁃           Four parachutes.

These demands were required to be met on the runway of the Seattle airport in order for the passengers to be safely released from the plane. Cooper’s requests for four parachutes meant he planned on taking hostages, forcing the authorities handling the situation to make sure all the parachutes actually worked…aw shucks.

The flight to Seattle continued without a hitch. Cooper was said to be “calm and rather nice.” When asked by flight attendant, Tina Mucklow, why he chose to hijack Northwest Airlines, he laughed and said it had nothing to do with the airlines. Cooper actually tried to give Mucklow some of the ransom money once it was received. He really did seem swell!

The plane landed, the ransom demands were met, and the passengers were released. However, Mucklow, the pilot, the co-pilot, and the engineer were to stay on the flight. He needed a few hostages, after all—oh yea, and someone to fly the damned thing.

Cooper ordered the plane be refueled before embarking on the destination of his choosing: Mexico City. To get there, he also demanded the plane’s landing gear to remain deployed, the wing flaps to be lowered fifteen degrees, and the cabin to remain unpressurized. To meet this new set of demands, the plane would need a stop in Reno, Nevada to refuel. This was fine with the man carrying a bomb in his briefcase, so they took off.

The plane was en route to Reno from Seattle with the crew gathered together in the cockpit. Cooper had remained in the rear of the plane by his lonesome. Somewhere along the way, he opened the plane’s exit door and lowered the stairs. Shortly thereafter, the plane’s tail section popped up. Dan Cooper had jumped out of the plane and parachuted somewhere in the wilderness between Oregon and Washington.

He was never seen again.

It’s a fantastic story and one of the most famous unsolved cases in the history of the FBI. To this day they haven’t been able to figure out who Dan Cooper was or what ended up happening to him. Nor were they ever able to track down where any of the money was spent (they had recorded the serial codes for all 10,000 20s he had been given).

The D.B. Cooper story is a fun one. The initials “D.B.” came into the equation after a questioning of a Dan B. Cooper by the FBI. Dan B. Cooper had nothing to do with the incident, but for whatever reason his initials have stuck with the case ever since.

The alleged Dan Cooper who hijacked the plan had the entire plot extremely well thought out. He had advanced knowledge on exactly the right circumstances needed to jump out of an aircraft, and almost certainly survived.

Which brings me to my point.

I’m sure you all have heard of the Mandela Effect by now. In case you haven’t here’s a little rundown: The Mandela Effect is a strange phenomenon which happens when large groups of people misremember things or have memories of events which seemingly never occurred. Although they are “wrong” in their memory of the events, many people seem to share the same false memories.

The term was coined by the paranormal researcher Fiona Broome. Broome claimed that thousands of people, herself included, had distinct memories of South African anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s, which makes absolutely no sense since Mandela was President of South Africa from 1994 to 1999 and died in 2013.

A few other famous Mandela Effects are:

⁃           The Fruit of the Loom logo, which millions of people remember as a tantalizing display of fruits with a cornucopia behind it. (Look it up. There’s no cornucopia.)

⁃           The Monopoly Man having a monocle. (He doesn’t.)

⁃           The Berenstain Bears being remembered as The Berenstein Bears.

⁃           Darth Vader telling Luke Skywalker, “Luke, I am your father.” (He actually said, “No, I am your father.)

Left: an artist’s recreation of the Fruit of the Loom cornucopia that allegedly never existed. Right: the current logo, which has allegedly always been the same. 

Explanations for the Mandela Effect range from false memories to parallel universes accidentally colliding with our own. It’s a fun theory that can get really weird the further you dive into it. Just ask anyone what the Fruit of the Loom logo looks like. There’s literally images on the Internet of the exact logo I believe my underwear adorned in my youth.

Nevertheless, I bring this up because I had a serious case of the Mandela Effect for the first time. And by first time, I mean without reading an article about it, which would then influence me to believe whatever the article is saying I was supposed to believe. Just like I have done to you in the examples above.

My Mandela Effect is of the story of D.B. Cooper that I have just recounted to you. As I said before, the story has fascinated me since I was a kid. But there’s one problem. The story that I remember isn’t the one I told you at all.

Out sick from work one day, I clicked on the ol’ YouTube and was hunting for some mind-numbing videos to get me through the day. There I stumbled upon another D.B. Cooper video. There’s nothing like watching a video about a story you’ve already heard of a thousand times. I was in.

My memory was immediately filled with the mythical tale of D.B. Cooper—or, at least, the one that I had remembered. I was ready to hear the story of everyone’s favorite unidentified plane hijacker, who demanded $50,000 in ransom money and eventually parachuted out of a plane somewhere over the Amazon in a dark and stormy night, plunging almost certainly to his death…

That was the story of D.B. Cooper I thought I knew. Imagine my shock when the story was told just as I told it earlier in the article. Dan Cooper jumped out of the plane over Washington or Oregon—not the Amazon. He requested $200,000 in ransom money—not $50,000 like I was sure he had. He most likely survived—when it had always disappointed me that the mysterious man had surely died.

I felt like my head was going to explode.

Snapping out my phone, I began Googling. To my horror, I found not a single shred of information regarding the story I grew up hearing. How was that possible? I had just been thinking about the story a few months back, particularly the balls on him to jump during the storm into the unknown Amazon.

That was always the gist of the videos and articles I swear I’ve read about the case—the fact that Cooper’s hijacking amounted to pretty much nothing since he definitely died of either starvation or via cannibal Amazonian. It was sad and disappointing.

But no. The story I was sure I knew is not real. Allegedly.

I’m still not totally sure if my own reality accidentally merged with one where Dan Cooper made it out alive, or if my memory is just that bad.

But that’s a story, and a Deep End for another day.

Until then, I’m John Mistretta. This is The Deep End. Enjoy your day.

If you have any of your own Mandela Effect stories please share below! I would love to hear if anything crazy like this has ever happened to you. Oh, and if you are on the same page about D.B. Cooper jumping out into the Amazon on a rainy evening to his death, please tell me I’m not crazy!