D.B. Cooper: Brushing Heaven’s Gate With a Landing Light

D.B. Cooper...or whatever...

Do not look for him

In brittle mountain streams

And do not examine the angry rivers

For shreds of his body

Or turn the shore stones for his blood

But in the warm salt ocean

He is descending through cliffs

Of slow green water

And hovering colored fish

Kiss his snow-bruised body

And build their secret nests

In his fluttering winding-sheet

-          Leonard Cohen

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He hails from 1971 but the vibe is sooo 60s. He’s Clyde Barrow with a parachute. He’s Randle McMurphy escaping into the midnight trees. Nobody really knows anything about D.B. Cooper, except that he hijacked a Boeing 727, got $200,000, and jumped out at 10,000 feet with a parachute over southwest Washington State. Pitch black. Raining. Never seen or heard from again. No body. No parachute. Nada.  The snake eats its tail.

The crime remains the only unsolved air piracy in commercial aviation history. It’s driven people crazy.  Thousands of books and articles have been written. There are a million theories. Why? Ask yourself why?

The FBI has given up. Exhausted after decades of futility... He’s gone baby gone, this black-feathered defrocked angel that ordered a bourbon and soda, stared out the plane’s window, then vanished forever into the night, as if he was never there; as if he never existed.  He is Camus’ Meursault, but more than an outsider—someone who has no need for terra firma; a fading phantom who cannot be traced through corporeal stigmata.

They could never find him because they were always looking down.  This narrative is clearly airborne. It has to do with winding jet streams and falling into the sky and holding onto the back of that silent condor as it sweeps up to the moon and brushes heaven’s gate with a landing light.

#dbcooper #hijack #cult #criminal #1971 #boeing #popculture