Speaker 1: The strangest part here is that there is no footage
Speaker 1: of him leaving the barlow. So he goes in and
Speaker 1: then that's it. He just never left. Get ready for
Speaker 1: a campfire story.
Speaker 2: I'm Edwin, I'm Michelle, and we'll share spooky stories with
Speaker 2: playful banter that'll keep you up at night.
Speaker 1: So throw some wood on the fire and put a
Speaker 1: wiener on a stick. We're telling you a campfire story tonight.
Speaker 2: All right, here, we are hiking into the woods. We
Speaker 2: got to get that energy back up and get back
Speaker 2: to what we really like is just telling each other's
Speaker 2: stories by the campfire.
Speaker 3: That's right. Disappearances.
Speaker 2: Did you watch Mad Men?
Speaker 3: I tried? It was too boring.
Speaker 2: You've seen an episode?
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: When I'm telling the story, I'm kind of imagining Don Draper,
Speaker 2: the lead in that show. You're getting on a plane.
Speaker 2: There's leg room, the cabin is full of cigarette smoke.
Speaker 2: It's nineteen seventy one. A mysterious man in a dark
Speaker 2: suit goes up to the counter and buys himself a
Speaker 2: ticket to Seattle from Portland, leaving at two point fifty
Speaker 2: pm that day, the day before Thanksgiving. There's no security
Speaker 2: check and no pat downs. And no metal detectors. He
Speaker 2: is carrying a briefcase. This mysterious man boards the plane
Speaker 2: and places his briefcase in his lap. Shortly after takeoff,
Speaker 2: the man slips the flight attendant, Florence Schaffner a folded note.
Speaker 2: She assumes he's hitting on her and it's his phone number,
Speaker 2: so she slips it into her bag without looking at it.
Speaker 2: The next time she walks by his seat, the man
Speaker 2: leans forward and whispers, miss you'd better look at that note.
Speaker 2: I have a bomb. He then quietly opens the briefcase
Speaker 2: and show Florence eight red cylinders attached to wires and
Speaker 2: a cylindrical battery. On his note, he listed his demands
Speaker 2: two hundred thousand dollars, which is around one million in
Speaker 2: today's money, four manually operated civilian parachutes, and an aircraft
Speaker 2: fuel truck standing by in Seattle for use. Upon their arrival,
Speaker 2: Florence immediately went to the cockpit and told the captain,
Speaker 2: William A. Scott's the situation. He calmly notified the thirty
Speaker 2: five other passengers on the plane that they would be
Speaker 2: delayed in flight due to a minor mechanical difficulty, So
Speaker 2: the plane circled around the airport in Puget Sound for
Speaker 2: two hours as emergency responders notified and gathered all of
Speaker 2: the ransom demands, including ten thousand unmarked twenty dollar bills.
Speaker 2: During this time, the man commented on the layout of
Speaker 2: the land below. Witnesses claim that he was calm, well spoken, polite,
Speaker 2: even going so far as to request meals for the
Speaker 2: flight crew ahead of their arrival in Seattle. The plane
Speaker 2: finally lands at the Seattle Tacoma Airport. And honestly, what
Speaker 2: still surprises me about this story is that he received
Speaker 2: all of his ransom demands. Isn't that nuts? I feel
Speaker 2: like people don't get their ransom demands anymore. Is that like?
Speaker 2: Am I like making that up in my brain?
Speaker 3: Or now?
Speaker 1: It's like they negotiate with you enough, so like they
Speaker 1: play this mental game where like, yeah, you don't.
Speaker 2: Win, you won't never you never win. But anyway, this
Speaker 2: guy wins, so he gets his ransom demands, he gets
Speaker 2: his money and his parachutes, and he's satisfied. So he
Speaker 2: releases all the passengers and the flight attendants off the plane.
Speaker 2: But then once the plane is refueled, they took off
Speaker 2: again and the remaining crew are told to head for
Speaker 2: the Reno Tahoe Airport. It's raining. Around eight pm, the
Speaker 2: captain and the remaining crew noticed a sudden change in
Speaker 2: the air pressure on the plane, indicating that a door
Speaker 2: had been opened. As the plane was flying over a
Speaker 2: heavily wooded area of southern Washington, the Washugo Valley, there
Speaker 2: was a sudden movement against the airplane's tail section. The
Speaker 2: man had jumped from the plane wearing a parachute with
Speaker 2: his stolen money, and he parachuted straight into our hearts.
Speaker 2: Because the mysterious man was never seen again, this mysterious
Speaker 2: man became known as D. B. Cooper, which is a
Speaker 2: slight variation of the alias he used to buy the
Speaker 2: plane ticket, Dan Cooper aka Don Draper.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 1: Wait, so they never found him, like they never chased
Speaker 1: They never chased them nothing.
Speaker 2: They chased him. He was actually on the most FBI
Speaker 2: most wanted list to like I think twenty sixteen when
Speaker 2: they just suspended the case. At this point, who's alive?
Speaker 3: They already spent all the money, but like.
Speaker 2: This disappearance and crime have never been so.
Speaker 3: Wow, imagine pulling that off.
Speaker 2: Evidence suggested that he did not survive the fall, but
Speaker 2: nobody was ever found, and investigators quickly did composite sketches,
Speaker 2: eyewitness reports, physical evidence. Following the hijacking all that jazz
Speaker 2: aerial searches countless leads with no luck. There was no
Speaker 2: trace of him. But then on February tenth, nineteen eighty,
Speaker 2: an eight year old boy named Brian Ingram discovered three
Speaker 2: packs of the ransom cash totaling about fifty eight hundred dollars,
Speaker 2: as he dug in a sandy river bank on the
Speaker 2: Columbia River at a beachfront known as Tina Bar. Police
Speaker 2: analyzed this later and confirmed that ten bills were missing
Speaker 2: from the packs of heavily deteriorated ransom cash, and that
Speaker 2: the money had been buried in the river bank several
Speaker 2: months after the hijacking, and no additional bills from Cooper's
Speaker 2: ransom have ever been discovered.
Speaker 3: So they were buried.
Speaker 2: So someone found some of his cash that was buried
Speaker 2: in a river bank and.
Speaker 1: They never found a parachute, never found nothing, like. It's
Speaker 1: just I think he made it to the ground.
Speaker 2: That's the thing is that we'll never really know if
Speaker 2: he did or didn't, you know, Like, isn't that fascinating.
Speaker 2: I mean there are theories, of course, do you want
Speaker 2: to hear the theories?
Speaker 3: Yeah, let's do it.
Speaker 2: Common theories. If he died jumping, you know, he would
Speaker 2: have jumped in a remote area. Honestly, it's not that remote.
Speaker 2: It's kind of your Mount Saint Helens. So if he
Speaker 2: jumped in the park, yes, obviously that's kind of remote.
Speaker 2: But if he jumped it was nighttime, it was rainy,
Speaker 2: he could have landed in a river and then just
Speaker 2: been swept right out to see. And also that would
Speaker 2: make sense that the money was found in a river bank. Okay, okay,
Speaker 2: the money was also never spent. And besides the kid
Speaker 2: finding that money in the river bank, it's never turned
Speaker 2: up in circulation because they were least the serial numbers
Speaker 2: of the bills, so everyone had that information. This inspired
Speaker 2: six copycat hijackings in nineteen seventy two, of course, and
Speaker 2: so every single one of those guys who jumped out
Speaker 2: of a commercial plane with a parachute lived. So the
Speaker 2: FBI decided they need to reevaluate this whole theory that
Speaker 2: he had just died and like jumped into a river.
Speaker 1: I mean, it could have just given him a faulty parachute,
Speaker 1: and that would have been that, Like.
Speaker 2: Apparently they did give it, since they give him four,
Speaker 2: I guess they did give him a faulty one. But
Speaker 2: then he like emptied two and put the money in them,
Speaker 2: like so they were backpacks, and then he jumped out
Speaker 2: with another one. So they searched the woods that he
Speaker 2: allegedly jumped in for years and no discoveries of the parachute,
Speaker 2: nothing like that. There's been no discoveries of him, and
Speaker 2: some investigators speculate because in nineteen eighty the eruption abount
Speaker 2: Saint Helen's was in that area, it could have also
Speaker 2: obliterated any remaining physical clues. So if he's dead, no
Speaker 2: one's ever gonna.
Speaker 3: Find anything, you know, or find the money.
Speaker 2: Or find the money because it's under tons of lava.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 3: I don't think that could happen today.
Speaker 2: No, I don't think it would work today, just in
Speaker 2: the way. This must have been a different type of
Speaker 2: plane too, at a lower altitude. I'm just assuming that's
Speaker 2: I just don't think if you'd jumped out of a
Speaker 2: plane today, like a modern plane, you'd live. But here's
Speaker 2: some theories. If he lived, he executed his plan on
Speaker 2: Thanksgiving Eve, ensuring four days to complete the operation. There
Speaker 2: are no missing persons reports that match his profile, so
Speaker 2: he had a clip on his tie that they found
Speaker 2: on the plane. There was one hundred percent pure titanium
Speaker 2: traces found, and only someone with the aerospace industry would
Speaker 2: be exposed to such rare materials, and pure titanium was
Speaker 2: used for the Boeing supersonic program that was active at
Speaker 2: the time.
Speaker 1: And plus he knew how to parachute, so that tells
Speaker 1: you like he's into that kind of thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, hmmm hmmm.
Speaker 2: Also because some of the money turned up. What's strange
Speaker 2: about the money being found is that in that location
Speaker 2: is too far off the flight path to have gotten
Speaker 2: there without human intervention. It's also suspiciously suggestive that it
Speaker 2: appears along the edge of a river, suggesting he must
Speaker 2: have drowned. It feels like the money was planted to
Speaker 2: throw the FBI off his trail. This is the single
Speaker 2: most telling bit of evidence that seems to show that
Speaker 2: he survived.
Speaker 1: He wants to fake his own death, but the r
Speaker 1: there it'll be found eventually.
Speaker 2: People speculate he was an experienced jumper because when he
Speaker 2: was on the plane. He was remarking that like they
Speaker 2: were over Tacoma, like he recognized stuff on the ground
Speaker 2: from the sky. Yeah, And he was very calm and
Speaker 2: used technology terms that suggested he'd been around aircraft, like
Speaker 2: he told the flight crew to fly dirty, which means
Speaker 2: wheels down. And then another theory is that he was
Speaker 2: Canadian or had strong cultural ties a knowledge of Canada,
Speaker 2: because he used the name Dan Cooper as his alias,
Speaker 2: which is a French comic book hero that was published
Speaker 2: in Canada. And so people are like, ohh, he just
Speaker 2: simply returned to Canada or laundered the money up there.
Speaker 2: And you know, there's been suspects throughout time, right, Like,
Speaker 2: there's so many suspects. I didn't even want to like
Speaker 2: list them because they all seem like, Oh, my strange
Speaker 2: uncle that just died as dB Cooper. There's also another
Speaker 2: theory that I found really funny, that the flight crew
Speaker 2: made the whole thing up to get the money.
Speaker 3: Wow, Okay, I like that theory.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah, I kind of did too. For some reason.
Speaker 2: It feels right to me where I was just like,
Speaker 2: oh yeah. And then like there's another theory that he
Speaker 2: never even got off the plane. Which kind of feels
Speaker 2: like the same type of thing where it's like everybody's
Speaker 2: in cahoots, which I kind of like.
Speaker 1: Did anybody on the ground ever hear him, like his
Speaker 1: demands direct?
Speaker 2: See That's what I don't know. You can see why
Speaker 2: this has become like a legend that people, yeah, constantly revisit.
Speaker 2: So at this point, I don't think we'll ever know
Speaker 2: what really happened, and who wants to know because that
Speaker 2: would ruin the story. But all the evidence is open
Speaker 2: to the public if you guys want to go investigate that.
Speaker 2: Citizen investigators are always all about this, but the crime
Speaker 2: remains the only unsolved case of air piracy in commercial
Speaker 2: aviation history.
Speaker 1: In two thousand and six, there was a story on
Speaker 1: Dateline NBC this story We're going to look at Brian Schaffer.
Speaker 1: He's a medical student from Ohio State University. It's two
Speaker 1: thousand and five and Brian's mom gets diagnosed with cancer. Sadly,
Speaker 1: she dies in March of two thousand and six.
Speaker 3: Gorse.
Speaker 1: The entire family is sad devastated, and Brian is having
Speaker 1: a particularly tough time with it.
Speaker 3: At one point he even asks his.
Speaker 1: Girlfriend, like, do you want to run away? He's just
Speaker 1: kind of getting these weird ideas right. They actually had
Speaker 1: a trip planned out a gift from Brian's mom actually
Speaker 1: before she passed away to Florida for spring break. During
Speaker 1: this break, Brian has dinner with his dad, and you
Speaker 1: know how it's with parents, sometimes you end up talking
Speaker 1: about things like money and tough topics. This one happened
Speaker 1: to be about the life insurance that the mother had.
Speaker 1: That same night, Like, Brian goes and meets up with
Speaker 1: his friend Clint. They go bar hopping. One of his
Speaker 1: other friends meets up with both of them, is this.
Speaker 3: Woman named it Meredith.
Speaker 1: They go from barbi Bar they end up at this
Speaker 1: place called Ugly Tuna Saluna in Ohio, which was the
Speaker 1: last place that Brian was ever seen.
Speaker 3: In the bar scene.
Speaker 1: You know how it is sometimes you go out with
Speaker 1: friends and people drift away. They come back, they meet others,
Speaker 1: they come back, they bring someone else. At one point,
Speaker 1: around two am, they realized that Brian isn't with him anymore.
Speaker 1: They look all around the bar, They go upstairs, downstairs,
Speaker 1: nothing's there.
Speaker 3: They go to the bathroom. Nothing. Brian just isn't there.
Speaker 1: So they thought that maybe he just walked home because
Speaker 1: the apartment wasn't that far six blocks or something like that.
Speaker 1: So it was the following Monday they had the trip
Speaker 1: that was scheduled.
Speaker 3: And Brian didn't show up.
Speaker 1: Now you're probably wondering, right, like, why did anybody sound
Speaker 1: the alarm?
Speaker 3: Like he's been missing.
Speaker 1: He had gone through something similar before where he kind
Speaker 1: of went away, didn't talk to anybody, so they thought
Speaker 1: that this is what he was doing.
Speaker 3: Plus it was April first, April Foles.
Speaker 1: The family didn't think it was that big of a concern,
Speaker 1: and he was an adult. The concern obviously grew. At
Speaker 1: the airport, They're like, h isn't he here? So they
Speaker 1: filed a report. They do all the things, they get
Speaker 1: it signed to a detective, and thankfully Columbus.
Speaker 3: Ohio has a ton on cameras.
Speaker 1: They look an alleys, shelters, dumpsters.
Speaker 3: Hospitals, Brian is it anywhere?
Speaker 1: The last footage when they go through everything, the last
Speaker 1: thing they see of him was at two am. He
Speaker 1: was outside of the Ugly Tuna Saluna. He was talking
Speaker 1: to two women who were these two women maybe he
Speaker 1: knew them, maybe they were just friends. I mean they're
Speaker 1: just like, oh, do you have a light, you know,
Speaker 1: that's how you meet a lot of people. The strangest
Speaker 1: part here is that there is no footage of him
Speaker 1: leaving the barlock. So he goes in and then that's it.
Speaker 1: He just never left. This is part of the theories
Speaker 1: that are out there. First one, some say that he
Speaker 1: wandered off into a construction site that was just outside
Speaker 1: of the back door, the one that wasn't monitored by
Speaker 1: a security camera. But they say that he stumbled out,
Speaker 1: maybe he was drunk and he hurt himself, but the
Speaker 1: search was cadaver dogs and nothing was found. How they
Speaker 1: say that if he managed to escape the construction site,
Speaker 1: he got robbed, murder, abducted, or killed himself. The other
Speaker 1: one is the jump cut. Now, there was a part
Speaker 1: of the video and the security footage of the exit
Speaker 1: where it just gets skipped like it's a certain time
Speaker 1: and then all of a sudden, it's.
Speaker 3: Like could be the camera was off.
Speaker 1: It could be like a bunch of things where like
Speaker 1: the recording stops and then you're like, oh, the recording.
Speaker 3: Stops, so you like press it again and starts recording.
Speaker 1: But there was an employee, a guard that was there
Speaker 1: the whole night and said that nobody used the exits
Speaker 1: like by the construction site. But it's like during that cut,
Speaker 1: could he have exited the other way?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: The other theory I think is a little interesting. It's
Speaker 1: a fight with Clint as friend. So it's like some
Speaker 1: people had mentioned it, but when he was questioned a
Speaker 1: Clint was questioned about it, he decided to get a lawyer.
Speaker 1: At first, he was like helping out. He's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: this happened, has happened. But then they started really pressuring
Speaker 1: him and he was like, no, I want a lawyer.
Speaker 1: He refused to take a light detector test. He just
Speaker 1: didn't want to talk. He was just like, Nope, you're
Speaker 1: gonna have to go through my lawyer, which is something
Speaker 1: that is within his rights, Like he doesn't have to
Speaker 1: Like this is kind of a rule here.
Speaker 3: I wouldn't talk either. I wouldn't say anything unless I
Speaker 3: get a lawyer.
Speaker 2: Media can't fire story cares, the police are not your friends.
Speaker 2: Get a lawyer immediately.
Speaker 3: Don't answer any questions, whether it's a crime involved.
Speaker 2: Ever ever ever, get a lawyer.
Speaker 3: The other theory a new life.
Speaker 1: Maybe he just decided to leave no trace and start fresh.
Speaker 2: Bring that up to his girlfriend.
Speaker 1: He said he wanted to leave, and he said to
Speaker 1: break up. So maybe it's just there's logic, like he
Speaker 1: might have had his reason again his mom had just died.
Speaker 1: But then again, if your mom had just died, why
Speaker 1: are you out bar hopping?
Speaker 2: Eh? I know a lot of people have done that.
Speaker 2: People just deal with grief in different ways, especially if
Speaker 2: you're an alcoholic.
Speaker 3: Dang.
Speaker 1: Yeah, No for me, I would be like, I don't
Speaker 1: feel like doing anything, Like it's.
Speaker 3: Hard to get me out of the house.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: Maybe also, this is a theory.
Speaker 1: What if you told Clint about like, oh, yeah, I
Speaker 1: want to leave and I want to disappear. I want
Speaker 1: to start a new life, but don't tell anybody.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And maybe Clint was like, Okay, well let's do this.
Speaker 2: You know, maybe he's been on the whole thing.
Speaker 1: There are also some clues though, like when they actually
Speaker 1: when it disappeared, they kept calling his phone. For a
Speaker 1: few months, they kept calling his phone and it wouldn't ring.
Speaker 1: It would just go straight to voicemail until one night
Speaker 1: it rang three times. Investigators got involved and they pinged.
Speaker 1: They were able to find where the phone pinged. By
Speaker 1: the way, this is when like the cell towers recognized
Speaker 1: like where you are kind of anyway, it turned out
Speaker 1: to be that the phone was in a place called Hilliard,
Speaker 1: fourty miles away from where he disappeared. Since then, there's
Speaker 1: no more like, there's no news, like he's just gone.
Speaker 1: The tragedy, though, still continued. Two years after that, two
Speaker 1: thousand and eight, in September, there's a windstorm and a
Speaker 1: tree fell on Brian's dad, Randy. It just killed him.
Speaker 2: Dang.
Speaker 1: And for the funeral they had this online guest book
Speaker 1: and that's where they found this message that said Dad,
Speaker 1: I love you, Love Brian, and in parentheses it said
Speaker 1: US Virgin Islands.
Speaker 2: Huh.
Speaker 1: But they looked it up and it turns out the
Speaker 1: post was written from a computer in Franklin County, which
Speaker 1: I don't know how far that is from where this happened.
Speaker 3: But that was the end of it. They're like, was
Speaker 3: this some cruel joke?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Was it Brian?
Speaker 2: Maybe? Oh? No, Fan corner and fan Corner, Oh, we
Speaker 2: have an update from Petrulli Drop. They have great chemistry,
Speaker 2: they're funny, they cover topics well. Also, I haven't heard
Speaker 2: any fake or forced laughter. I don't know what those
Speaker 2: reviews are about it was an early review. I remember
Speaker 2: that some people were commenting on yours truly speaking style. Anyway,
Speaker 2: Petully Drop updated this comment update, loving the new format.
Speaker 2: Hope y'all keep it up. Skull Fairy, Elf, Unicorn and
Speaker 2: ghost emoji.
Speaker 1: We did get a couple of new comments on some
Speaker 1: of the older episodes. Oh, for example, this one on
Speaker 1: the real origins of black Cat superstitions. There's one from
Speaker 1: Ben Duffy that says, bird guy here, I'm forever worried
Speaker 1: about how my parrot Boyo will meet his inevitable demise.
Speaker 1: He turned five yesterday.
Speaker 2: Birds always have a terrible end. I don't know.
Speaker 3: Why, and should live for another twenty five years. We
Speaker 3: shall see. Oh that is so sad. I don't know why.
Speaker 2: I just because they always die in a weird way.
Speaker 2: I don't know why that is with birds. It's like
Speaker 2: you'll dive bomb into boiling water or something like that.
Speaker 2: Like you'll be like, what the.
Speaker 3: Fuck You're twenty five more years of Boyo. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Casey Stockdale says, Hello, Edwin and Michelle. My name is Casey,
Speaker 1: and I just wanted to say how much I love
Speaker 1: your podcast. You guys are so funny and I always
Speaker 1: listen and wait for new podcasts. Edwin, I have listened
Speaker 1: to all of your other podcasts start to finish, Michelle,
Speaker 1: I am going to listen to your podcast next. Thank
Speaker 1: you guys for being so amazing and always making me laugh. Wow,
Speaker 1: so sweet do you think you?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I love it when people are sweet.
Speaker 3: On the Would you visit a ghost Town episode?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 1: Yoda is saying, I want to go to Chernobyl.
Speaker 2: All right, make sure you had your kids already.
Speaker 3: Cuz you know, bring me a key chain.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, do you want a key chain from Chernobyl Vibe?
Speaker 2: That's your choice. You do what you want to do
Speaker 2: and tell us all about it.
Speaker 1: Thanks all all for your comments and for following and
Speaker 1: leading reviews where you can.
Speaker 2: Definitely give us five stars. We're working on our algorithm
Speaker 2: correction and.
Speaker 1: We're still trying to beat that kid that left us
Speaker 1: two stars.
Speaker 2: So please that little cutie Patuti who left us two
Speaker 2: stars for some reason. We're not really mad, we just
Speaker 2: need some belts.
Speaker 3: I don't know, I'm mad. Should we put out the
Speaker 3: I guess so?
Speaker 2: I mean it never goes out, So bye, guys.
Speaker 3: Let's see yeah.
Speaker 2: Campfire Story is hosted by Michelle Newman.
Speaker 3: And Edwin Kovarubias. This podcast was.
Speaker 1: Edited and sound designed by Sarah Worhez Wendel, a VW
Speaker 1: Sound
Speaker 2: Make sure you follow us wherever you get your pod