Marco V Dieci X: DB Cooper (w/Ryan Burns)

Yeah, a lot of folks know, it's an interesting, I mean, if you look up any, if you look up any Google, you know, top 10 mysteries, I mean, Cooper's always on there. He's on there with Jimmy Hoffa and Amelia Earhart. I call them the holy trinity of missing people. Welcome to Nice Ashes. Join hosts Mike and Nate for cigars and culture. Let's go beyond the smoke. What are we smoking today, Mike? We are smoking the Marco 5 Dici 10. And this is the prettiest cigar I think I've ever

seen. I don't know if you can see that. It is very nice looking. This is one of Nate's impulse buys because I don't normally supply the cigars for our show. And I was getting, I don't remember why I was in the, I don't know why I was in a cigar shop, Mike. I have no idea. It's almost like I'm co -host on a cigar podcast. And this one just leapt off the shelf at me because I thought, wow, this is really cool. It was $7 .99. So it's a little bit more expensive than

the cigars we normally smoke on air. But I'm excited to give it a go. It's got a real cool X crisscross pattern. We have a very, very special guest on with us today. Ryan Burns, the Cooper sleuth. He's the top 1 % contributor to the DB Cooper subreddit. He's been on, I don't know how many podcasts and stuff. Many. Videos, done a lot of videos about DB Cooper. And we're going to talk with him. Say hi, Ryan. Hello. Hi, everybody. About DB Cooper and all things DB Cooper related.

All things Cooper, yes. I'll Cooper all the time in my world. That is a beautiful cigar, I'll say, for those who can't see it. So first notes on the cigar. Oh, before we go on, I'm not sure, Ryan, what you're consuming, but I have a little bit of honor brand because it's a special day today. We're recording on Nathan's birthday. Oh. I'm assuming that we're going to have some libations. And then once my first glass goes down, I'm going to switch over to Crown Royal

as usual. But there we go. I do have a vodka -based drink, so I'll say that. There you go. I have the Fulton Hop Kingdom Hazy IPA. I have to say, I'm not an IPA fan. You know, some people love IPAs and some people hate them. It really is like an either -or. I don't think you can be halfway on IPAs. Yeah, I tend to like the Hazys a little bit better because they're not quite as varnish, you know, peel the enamel off your teeth. With the hops or the New England

style. I don't know, the hazy or the cloudy, you know, you can't really see through them. So a little bit like that. I'm hoping your vodka -based drink is kind of like moonshine, but we'll leave that to the imagination. Well, it's, yes, it's actually, I'm a weird guy. This is actually, and this is bizarre. Your audience might think this is funny, but like, I don't know if this is a Southern thing or just me being a weirdo thing. But yeah, I'm drinking a mellow yellow

and vodka mixed together, so. Oh, sure. Yes. I mean, vodka mixes with anything. So why not? Yeah. Mellow yellow. So, yeah. Anything mixes with anything. I remember when I was in, I spent time in London. Nice. Penal time. No, I was there for a film internship and I was sharing a house and renting a room. And one of the other rooms was being rented by a New Yorker. And we went down to one of the pubs and we're like, let's just, they didn't have any beer. And they had,

I think like vodka. And so we're like, let's just get Vodka Cokes. And we were just doing Vodka Cokes because we were American and who there could stop us. We already beat them once. Yeah, I beat them twice. Vodka Diet Coke is pretty good. It's not too bad. Vodka Coke. I've never had that. Interesting. Yeah. It's, you know, when you're in college, you do what you do. So how was y 'all's cigars? So far, what are your thoughts, Mike? So far, it's a little light for

what I was expecting. But overall, the flavor profile is good. A little airy, too, for how large a diameter it is. It's a big gauge and a little longer than we normally smoke. A little surprised at that. But that's not a bad thing, necessarily. Well, it could get darker as we go, Mike. Sometimes they do. The Cooper story will get darker as it goes. Trust me. Yes, yes. Yeah, so I've been, so my father -in -law was the first one, I think, that I heard about the

Cooper story from. Okay. And I'd never heard about it before, and I looked it up, and then I like to read a lot of books, so I ended up getting a few books. Nice. We can talk about books later. I've got more that I'll probably order, but we'll get into books later and kind of like, I mean, however you want to take it, Ryan. Yeah, my book is actually, my book has been written. It is, I have several, I have three currently literary agents who are looking at

it, who are interested. So I'm not sure which one of those I'm going to go with, but I've got offers. And so I have a 140 ,000 word book. that I've written on this case. And I think it's like, I'll just say, in all humility, I think it is the best Cooper book ever written. And there are reasons for that, not just because I'm being vain, but mainly because we know a lot more about the Cooper case now than we did years ago. For example, those books you held up, those are outdated

books. And not through any fault of the, not through any fault of the authors. I actually know all those people. I mean, I know them, like I have their, I text message all those people, all those authors. I mean, they're all friends of mine, but like the, this case has really, The FBI officially closed this case in 2016 because they were tired of, you know, there had been really no movement in this case forever. I mean, ever. I mean, they've never had a viable real

suspect or anything like that. You know, nobody was ever charged with this crime. There were never any arrests made at all. So they closed it in 2016, but they didn't actually close it. They had a TV show called DB Cooper Case Closed on the History Channel. And they're like, we're closing the case. Well, that was a lie. They didn't actually close the case. The case is still open. I mean, I know the case agent who was on it as recently as 2022. He just retired, Larry

Carr, the FBI agent. Yeah, so it's not closed. But what happened was when they at least said that they closed it, you see, you know, for your listeners, we have a thing called FOIA, right? You FOIA documents. That means the Freedom of Information Act. So government documents can be requested by anybody. Any citizen can request anything. Now, there are exceptions, right? And that's the big... That's the big booger bear

is the exceptions. And one of the exceptions has always been active investigation, right? So like, if anything is an active investigation, we can't give you the files because that's our discovery files. Well, when they closed this case, quote closed it, or at least they said they closed it. Thomas Colbert, who's the brother of Stephen Colbert, who actually wrote the book, one of those books you've got there is the... Robert Rackstraw book, The Last Master Outlaw.

He and Mark Zaid. Mark Zaid is kind of a famous civil rights attorney. Trump actually, I think, blackballed him recently, which is funny. But on Facebook, Mark is proud of that. But Mark is a civil rights attorney. But anyway, Mark sued the government for all of the Cooper files. Anyway, so he sued them for all the files because no longer could they say this is an active investigation because they told the whole country that it's not. So there's that. So the federal judge agreed

with them. And a federal judge said, hey, we're going to release the federal judge said that the FBI has to release all of these files, all of them. Now, there's about 85 ,000 documents that the government produced on D .B. Cooper, 85 ,000. OK, and they've released them so far. Ever since 2017, they've released about 500 a month. On the FBI, it's called the Vault website, which is where they have all their files. And

it's like an Easter egg. At the start of every month, the first or the second day, a PDF drops of 500 new case documents. So for the first time, starting in 2017, we actually got real. data on Cooper because it was an active investigation and because the witnesses had been told, hey, don't talk to the media much because this is an active investigation. Basically, we could have a trial one day on this, hypothetically. So don't go run your mouth to the media too much.

And so the witnesses weren't talking much. And honestly, there weren't many witnesses to begin with. And we get into that in a second, in a little bit. And because it was an active investigation, the only thing that these authors had to go on were... media reports from the time of the hijacking, which are, as we know, media reports, especially back then, were going to be highly inaccurate. In fact, the name D .B. Cooper is an error. D .B. Cooper, when he bought his ticket, his alias

was Dan Cooper, right? Not D .B. Cooper. What happened was during the hijacking, the Portland FBI and the Seattle FBI were communicating with each other and somebody, a sheriff's deputy down in Portland said, hey, there's a... There's a Dan Cooper. We call him D .B. Cooper. He's a Vietnam veteran. And he was a young guy, and he had been in trouble with the law a bunch. He had come back all kind of messed up from Vietnam. His name was Daniel Barry Cooper, and they called

him D .B. Cooper. So just offhand, the sheriff's deputy was like, hey, send somebody over to go check on D .B. Cooper, because he was kind of known to law enforcement, right? And they went there, and he was at his home. But some journalist was overhearing this, had intercepted, was eavesdropping, and thought they had a scoop. And so they wrote down D .B. Cooper and it went out in the not the Associated Press, the UPI, the UPI article, I believe, for on the Cooper case on the night

of the hijacking said D .B. Cooper, not Dan Cooper. So and thankfully so, because Dan D .B. Cooper is a lot cooler than Dan Cooper. Right. So kind of a happy accident there. But yes, the misinformation was out there. So early, early authors on the Cooper case didn't have. Real evidence. And now we do. It's highly redacted. Some, you know. Some of the stuff's redacted. But for example, we know what kind of parachutes he had now, you

know, officially. We know, we can see what the witnesses were saying, you know, instead of relying on, especially the problem is too, some of the witnesses have like the pilots and the stewardesses who interacted with him. They have come out lately now that they're older and done, you know, TV show interviews and things. But sadly, a lot of the things they say, we can kind of cross -check with what they said the night of the hijacking

to the FBI. And they have misremembered things, you know, because again, 50 years is a long time. ago. A prime example that I tell people all the time is the college kid. So there was a college kid who sat across from DB Cooper. His name was Bill Mitchell. Real sweet guy. Good friend of mine. We text back and forth about football. He loves the Seahawks. And he's an older guy now. He's retired. But Bill was a college student who sat across from Cooper. Bill, I was at CooperCon.

We have a thing called a CooperCon. It's a Cooper convention every year. And Bill comes every year. And I was talking about DB Cooper having a mystery bag with him. He had this bag with him. It wasn't his bomb. He had a briefcase bomb, and then he had another bag with him. And I said, I was telling the audience, I said, you know, Bill saw this bag with Cooper. And out in the audience, Bill shaved his head going, I didn't say that. Like,

I didn't see a bag. And so I get off the stage, and Bill goes, hey, Ryan, I never saw Cooper with a bag. And I said, wow. I hated to be the, well, actually guy, but I had to be the, well, actually, you told the FBI that night, you know, that Cooper had a mystery bag with him, had a bag with him. And the stewardesses saw this bag too, so we know it's real. But he had totally forgotten that, you know, about the incident because it was 50 years ago. So information is

really impressive now. So what has it told us? For your audience, I will start from the beginning. OK, with Cooper, if that's what you want. Yeah, sounds good. I think it's a fair bet to say that people maybe my age. I don't know how old you are. I don't know how old Mike is. I know I'm one year older. Can't remember things anymore. But yeah, I don't know. I don't know how many people I don't know exactly our age demographic out there. I don't know how many people are familiar

with this story. I know quite a few people that I've talked to that I know our listeners are familiar with the D .B. Cooper story. But I think a brief overview. Yeah. Or however in -depth you want to go. Yeah, a lot of folks know. It's an interesting, I mean, if you look up any Google, you know, top 10 mysteries, I mean, Cooper's always on there. He's on there with Jimmy Hoffa and Amelia Earhart. I call them the holy trinity of missing people, right? Amelia Earhart, Jimmy

Hoffa, and D .B. Cooper. But what's fascinating about Cooper, the reason why it's more fascinating than Amelia Earhart and Jimmy Hoffa is we don't even know who the guy was. He's a missing person who's unknown. So that makes it even more dramatic. I mean, we know who Amelia Earhart was, and we know who Jimmy Hoffa was, but Cooper existed for five hours. This is a man who literally came into the world and went, went, and that's it.

There's a famous quote from an FBI agent who said, scratching his head, said, we don't know who he was, where he came from, or where he went. So it's November 24th, 1971. It's the day before Thanksgiving, and a... Middle -aged man walks into Portland International Airport, and he goes up to the Northwest Orient, which is Northwest Airlines now. He goes up to Northwest Orient, ticket at ticket, and says, hey, I want a flight to Seattle. Can I get on your next flight to

Seattle? They said, yep. And he dropped down a $20 bill, which is what his flight cost, including tax. They were nice enough to make it to where with tax, it was $20 on the nose. And he gives his name as Dan Cooper. Now, back then, something that I think especially younger people would be shocked at is that There was no airline security. It did not exist, essentially. I mean, there was a little bit, but you did not need to show

ID to buy a plane ticket. In fact, some airlines, you could buy the plane ticket on the plane. Okay, so no ID. There was no metal detectors. The only security they had at the time was some gate agents had been trained at profiling. So it's just like, you know, if somebody looks suspicious, you can pull them out and interrogate them, whatever. But Cooper was dressed as a businessman. He was wearing a tie, a suit, a trench coat, and carrying a briefcase and just looked like everybody else.

Very bland. Cooper's superpower, really, as I say, was his blandness. This guy looked like everybody. He was... If a bank robber wears a mask as their disguise, Cooper's disguise was being able to blend in. He drew no attention. So yeah, yeah. So Cooper, that was his disguise. So Cooper buys a ticket. He boards the plane. Now this is a 727, all right? This is important to remember is that 727s was the aircraft he chose. They have stairs that lowered, okay? Most

airplanes, in fact, only... Two aircraft, commercial airliners, had these rear stairs. That would be a DC -9 and a Boeing 727. And the utility of it was that they could land at smaller airports. They could land at airports that didn't have a jetway to pull up to. And that was kind of their thing. And so these stairs could lower from the rear, from inside. In fact, that day, there was construction going on at the airport

there in PDX. The plane, they boarded from those stairs because there was construction and they couldn't use the jetway. So the passengers boarded from the rear. So Cooper walked up the same stairs that he would eventually jump off of to board the plane. But this was only a 30 minute flight. And remarkably, the 727 could hold over 100 people. But there were only 36 passengers on the plane, including Cooper. So you would think there'd be more the day before Thanksgiving. I've often

wondered about that. Like maybe it wasn't as busy as it was back then because people were more localized in those days. You know, we're so spread out. I think people lived closer to where they were from back then. So maybe visiting family, you would drive instead of flying. So maybe it wasn't as busy. But there were only 36 passengers on this plane. But it was a milk

run, 30 minutes to Seattle. So Cooper, interestingly enough, because it was such a short flight, they served them their drinks before they took off. So they did drink service before they even left. So Cooper, he's the first person served by the stewardess, Florence Schaffner. And he orders a bourbon and seven up. And he gives her, it was only a dollar. The drink costs a dollar. And he gives her a $20 bill. So I often joke that he's already inconveniencing poor Florence

Schaffner before he even hijacks her. Because she's like, look, I just, she tells him, she goes, look, I don't have any change with me right now. You know, I mean, basically the calculations, if you want to in your head, everything was five times. I guess, less expensive than it is now. So for example, a $20 bill is the equivalent of a $100 bill now. So you're buying a drink that costs $5 and you're giving the woman a $100 bill is what he was doing. It's like, oh, come

on, really? But that's what he had. So she gives him his bourbon and seven up. He spills it, okay? He actually spills his one drink. I don't know if he's nervous or whatever, but he spills it. It's not replaced. Right before they take off, he sits in the very back row on the right side of the plane as you're looking forward. So if you're into the Navy, that would be the starboard side of the plane. On the middle seat on the back row. And behind him is the stewardess in

her jump seat. You know, they get in their jump seat to take off. Well, as she's walking to her jump seat, he hands her a note. And she, remember, this is the time of the sexy stews, right? This is the swinging 60s and 70s, right? The stewardesses are wearing go -go boots and everything. And they're used to getting hit on by businessmen. So she thinks this is like his phone number or something. And so she puts this note in her bag

and goes and sits down. And she says that he's kind of looking at her and he turns around, you know, he turns to look back, you know, where she's sitting and stares at her. And she says she returned his gaze. And they had a brief staring contest. And finally, she's like, well, what do you want? And he's like, Miss, I think you need to read that note. And the note said, Miss, I have a bomb in my briefcase and I want you to sit by me. So, oh, my God. Now I will take

a brief. break here to point out that hijackings, your audience will be amazed to know this, that I believe it's between 1963 and 72, there were about 150 hijackings of American airliners, okay, in a 10 -year period. 150 hijackings. Now, so it was almost like a, it was almost expected in a weird way. It became like a fad. And most of it, what it was, is it was Cubans who were Because if you recall your history, when Castro took over from Batista in Cuba, a lot of the

Cubans fled to America, okay? And a lot of the Cubans who were born in Cuba, who were now teenagers or in their 20s in 71, they were enamored by Castro's socialist paradise, right? So, and remember, there's a travel ban. You can't fly to Cuba. So, well, one way you can fly to Cuba is to hijack a plane and say, fly me to Cuba. So it was a real thing. I mean, I would probably say 90 % of all the hijackers were Cubans who were going

home. And it was almost like it was fun. Passengers were like, hey, we can go get some rum and cigars. Castro was like, hello. You know, he wanted to put on a good image. So whenever a hijacked plane would land there, and they did negotiate with terrorists, I guess, back then. That was their thing was, hey, look, if, you know, what is the risk assessment here is, okay, we're going to

fly some. teenage Cuban to Cuba. And instead of him killing people, maybe, if he does, or blowing a plane up or whatever, they're just not going to risk that, right? So you cooperated with hijackers back then. So it wasn't a shock that they were hijacked, honestly. I mean, they were surprised, but what really surprised them was that when she sits down next to him and says, what do you want? You know, what are your demands, sir? He says, I want $200 ,000 and four parachutes

before we land in Seattle. What? Okay, now extortion hijackings. There had been one previously, just one. A couple of years earlier, a mailman who had, he went postal apparently, a mailman in Arizona was upset that he had been charged about $300 extra on his taxes by the IRS. And so he hijacked a plane and asked for $100 million. Yeah. So the first extortion hijacking was a guy asking for $100 million. And back then that's

a billion dollars or whatever. So they eventually shot off, they shot off the tires of this airliner. They captured this guy. But anyway, so Cooper says, I want $20 ,000 and $400 ,000. parachutes. Well, the pilots go, okay, well, they call their bosses at Northwest Airlines in Minneapolis and they say, you know, what do you want to do? And back then, the FBI actually gave you an option. They don't do it anymore, but they gave you the option in those days if you were being extorted

in a kidnapping situation. or something like this, they gave you the option to play ball with the bad guys or to let the FBI intervene. You know, go ahead and pay the ransom. You know, we'll catch the guy later. So if you want to pay the ransom, you can. So Northwest Airlines didn't want the guy with a bomb to blow their plane up, even if it was a fake bomb. You know, don't take that risk. So they said, sure, whatever.

And they told the FBI to stand down. So the FBI really... and this surprises people, had nothing to do at all with the Cooper hijacking as it's going on. Like everything that they did was afterwards. So this was essentially a transaction between an angry customer and the airliners. That was literally how they handled it. The FBI didn't get the money. They didn't get the parachutes. This was all Northwest Airlines employees running these errands. Okay, so it takes a while to get

$200 ,000 back then and four parachutes. The parachutes were the problem, really. It wasn't the money because Northwest Airlines used... C -First Bank in Seattle. And interestingly enough, C -First Bank had a ransom pack ready to go. They had $250 ,000 of pre -recorded bills. Okay, so the serial numbers were already recorded. And what it was is their idea was, hey, if we're ever robbed, give them this money as well as

whatever they asked for, right? Because that way we can track them with the serial numbers. So they had a pre -recorded ransom pack of $250 ,000. So they gave $200 ,000 in a bag and they drove it to the airport and they got the parachutes from a couple of different places. It took a while. So they had to circle. Remember, this is only a 30 -minute flight. So they had to circle for about two hours or so over Seattle. Now,

the brilliant part about Cooper. is that none of the passengers were ever aware they were being hijacked. Like, this is remarkable. Not a single passenger knew they were being hijacked until they landed in Seattle, and they asked some guy, like, what the hell's going on? Oh, y 'all were hijacked. Oh, we didn't know. Because the pilots were like, oh, we have a mechanical difficulty. We're going to circle and burn off some fuel, you know, whatever. Because Cooper, remember,

he's in the back row. Very smart on his part. You sit in the very back. You're inconspicuous. The only thing that drew some attention was that the stewardess sat with him the whole time. One of the stewardesses sat with this guy. And so a couple of passengers after the hijacking was over with, they were like, yeah, I thought maybe

they knew each other. Or maybe another guy thought that he was an airline executive who was like doing a secret shopper sort of thing, you know, just assessing the airline, you know, things like this. I mentioned earlier the college kid who sat across from Cooper. He's our best passenger witness is this college kid. Now, the only reason he paid attention to D .B. Cooper at all was

because. He was a strapping 21 -year -old college student, and this hot babe stewardess was paying all of his attention to, quote, this geeky old guy. That's what he said. So he was jealous. He didn't understand. And so he wanted to pick on the guy. He had two hours to do nothing. He just looked over at this guy whispering to the stewardess and picked on him. Picked on him as far as, like, for example, Cooper had a turkey neck. Interesting detail that D .B. Cooper had

a turkey gobble when he talked. He had a gobble. He had loose skin is what he called it. He told the FBI after the hijacking, he said it looked like he had been fat and lost a lot of weight in his face. He had like sagging neck. That, you know, and which is interesting because, but that's a detail that a guy who's sitting across from you would see. He would see your side profile, see your neck, you know. But he was picking on him and he said his socks were oddly colored.

His socks or something didn't match his shoes. And he was just really like that. So just, he was wondering why this girl was talking to this guy, but the passengers didn't know. So they land and they bring the money on board. And when they bring, when the stewardess, he tells the girl, go get the money. And she goes and brings it on board and he lets the passengers go. Then they bring the parachutes on and they refuel. And they go, okay, where do you want us to go?

Because they said, okay, now you have your ransom. Where do you want us to fly you to? He goes, fly me to Mexico City. And they go, okay. But he says, but wait, don't just fly to Mexico City. When you fly to Mexico City, I want you to fly with the flaps at 15 degrees, with the gear down, and with the rear stairs lowered. And they're like, what in the hell? And we actually have the audio transcripts of the pilots talking.

And one of them is like, I don't know where this guy is coming up with this stuff, but he seems to know a little bit about an airplane. So he was a, I think Cooper was a pilot of some sort, not a commercial airline pilot, but he knew some things about airliners or knew some things about aviation that made them. Actually, Northwest Airlines, after the hijacking was over, contacted the FBI saying, hey, look, we've been talking to the pilots, and there are some words and phrases

that are used that only pilots would use. For example, before they took off from Seattle, they were talking about having to file a flight plan. Now, you can file a flight plan in the air, and pilot lingo, they have this terminology called pick it up in the air. And when the stewardess, he's going, why the hell haven't we left yet? Stewardess says, hey, she's on the phone with

the pilots the whole time. Remember, they're in the back of the plane and the stewardess is on the phone, on the interphone at the back of the plane the whole time with the pilots up front. And she's relaying this and she goes, the pilots are saying that they have to file a flight plan first. He goes, no, no, no. They can do that in the air. He says, they can pick it up in the air, which is that pilot term. And the pilots. That went in their brain like, hey, he sounds

like one of us, you know? So that's one of those weird clues about Cooper. But anyway, so they take off. Well, the problem is you can't fly to Mexico City on a single tank of gas flying in that configuration. The Boeing 727 could fly from Seattle to Mexico City on a single tank of gas flying without all that drag, right? Flying with the gear down, flaps down, that's just going to kill your fuel efficiency. So they said, we have to stop in Reno to refuel. He goes, that's

fine. Because again, Cooper didn't care. He was never going to be on the plane anyway. So they take off heading south toward Reno for their refueling stop. And he still has the girl back. He keeps the girl. He lets the stewardesses go except for one. He keeps one stewardess back there with him. Then there's three crew members in the cockpit, okay? So there's four hostages at this point. And about five minutes after takeoff, he asks the stewardess, he says, look, I need

you to demonstrate how to... Or he was going to have her lower the stairs, but she was freaked out. She goes, I'm going to be sucked out of the plane. Now, the plane was flying depressurized. So you can open a door and you're not going to be sucked out. But still, I'd be scared too. So she goes, I'm going to be sucked out. And she's panicking. He goes, fine, just show me how to lower the stairs. And she does. And he bids her adieu. He says goodbye. He even waves

goodbye at her and says, OK, see you. And she goes to the front. And about five minutes later, the cockpit gets a indicator light that says that the aft stairs are open. Okay, so Cooper had opened the stairs. And roughly about 8 .13 p .m., as they're about 10 miles north of Portland, the pilots feel what they call a pressure bump. And what they mean is that their ears popped. One of the pilots said it was like a cork going

off out of a bottle. Another said it was like lowering or raising the window when you're speeding down the interstate. That kind of woof you feel, right? They felt that. And what that was is those stairs. So if you can imagine the wind. was pushing, the wind was keeping, those stairs were lowered by gravity only, okay? So the stairs really weren't lowering a lot because the wind was pushing up against the stairs. But his body weight, as he went down the stairs, kind of pushed, made some

resistance against the wind. So when he leaves, when he jumps off, all that wind resistance, I liken it to how, the best way to describe it to people is, it's kind of like a diving board, but think about if you're driving down the road. when you're a kid or whatever, and you stick your hand out the window and you have to like put some resistance in your arm to keep it from flying backwards, right? And just imagine you suddenly like, you know, loosen your arm muscles.

Your arm flies backwards really quickly. That's what happened. So whenever Cooper's weight was released, the stairs rebounded like a diving board and they slammed it and they slammed up against the top of the plane and that forced all this wind down and it popped their ears. So that's how we know where Cooper jumped essentially. But the pilots weren't too sure. So they flew all the way to Reno. And they landed and he wasn't there. But they looked back and they said, hey,

we think he jumped out around this point. So about 10 miles north of Portland, about 8 .13 p .m. And that's it. I mean, literally, when he had jumped out with one of the parachutes and the money was gone and all he left on the plane was eight cigarette butts that he had smoked and his clip -on tie. famously. I think that was a brain fart on his part. He was very studious about taking things with him. In fact, so Cooper kept his right hand at most of the time inside

this briefcase bomb. And it was a pretty convincing looking bomb. I mean, we can say, we're still debating it to this day, whether it was real or fake. Normally, we would say, of course, it's a fake bomb. But basically, the stewardess who got the best look at it and saw it several times, she was the daughter of an electrician. So her mind, she grew up around gadgets. And she was able to describe it really well, which wires

went where, which things went where. And some Marines, I believe, have actually replicated that bomb and it would have gone off. If it was dynamite bombs with a, I think it was like a nine volt or a dry cell battery, kind of a big battery, it would have blown up if it had been real dynamite. We don't know if it was real dynamite, but it seemed overkill because back then... Lots of hijackers would say, I have a bomb. And no one's going to call their bluff on it and say,

let me see it. You know, they could just say, I have a bomb. And usually it was because these guys were all captured. Usually it was like rags in a shoebox. It was nothing. But his bomb looked convincing. And actually, the way he designed it was good enough. to actually explode if it was real. So we don't know if it was real or not. It would have been a bad day if it had been real and he didn't get his way. But Cooper, not

a nice guy. I think a lot of people in the, a lot of people, your listeners maybe too, we have this image of Cooper as like Han Solo in a business suit. He's kind of this roguish air pirate, you know, but not a good guy, honestly. I mean, he was friendly to the crew enough, but he still looked at a 21 -year -old girl and said, I will kill you if you don't do this. And that's not nice. and did lose his temper a few times and repeatedly told the stewardess, I'm not going

to be taken alive. I will die here today. So that's kind of scary a little bit. So he scared her, you know, and inconvenienced a lot of people, too. I mean, there were thousands of people. They shut down airspace. This was a plane that had a bomb in it. You know, they shut down all the airspace around Seattle for hours the day before Thanksgiving. Real inconvenient. So, yeah, I've been babbling. What about your cigars, guys? It's a cigar show. Tell me about the cigars.

It's funny because I just messaged Mike and was like, hey, do you want to do a cigar check soon? And that was a great recap of everything. It totally matches everything I know from the Wikipedia page about D .B. Cooper. Which I wrote. Okay. Well, there you go. The current Wikipedia page is something that I, yeah, exactly. But yeah, it's very fascinating because all of the different things, like you were saying with the flaps and

the different terminology that he used. And I think the next bit will be very interesting where we maybe talk about. about suspects or favorite candidates to be him and stuff. But real quick about the cigars, I'm probably over halfway through, Mike. Oh, I'm about as far as you are. I took my wrappers off. I was babbling, so you guys got to smoke a lot faster than you normally do,

probably. Yeah, usually we were like, oh man, you know, if one of us is talking more than the other one's way ahead and then we got to try and catch up. But it's growing on me really drastically, I think. It's a very pleasant medium -bodied cigar. Yeah, it's yeah, it's very nice. The fact that it looks so cool makes me want to like it. So that might be part of it, too. You know, I'm getting the response I want because I want to like it. And it's not bad at all. Not bad at

all. I will say, Ryan, that you answered one of my questions because in one of the interviews I listened to you on, you see, he said he ordered a bourbon and soda and soda here in Minnesota. can mean pretty much any form of pop, including soda water. Like anything that's carbonated can be called soda. So 7 -Up is specific. And I was like, I wonder if it was like... Well, in down south, we call that a Coke. So yeah, like down south, if you go into a restaurant, they'll say,

what kind of Coke do you want? And I want a Sprite. So like, it's weird. Soda is Coke in our vernacular. So yeah, but soda is definitely, we would call that a Yankee thing or pop. Pop's the most Yankee -ish, as we would say. We're Pops. We're Pop here. Soda is club soda, specifically here. Okay, so Pop is like Coke to you guys. So, okay, gotcha.

Yes, yeah, Pop is like Coke. It was bourbon and 7 -Up, which, you know, apparently... I mean, look, we're so we're such nerds that we've tried to, like, figure out which bourbon was served on the plane on that on that day, trying to figure out, you know, and the FBI even like you can look in one of the things you find with these FBI files I was mentioning is them doing research on this. Cooper smoked Raleigh cigarettes, for

example. OK, so they can look and see what kind of person smoked Raleigh cigarettes and say who was the. Was this guy a middle class guy or upper class guy or lower class? And Raleigh actually has a bad reputation. Actually, my own research showed that Raleigh cigarettes were for basically, of all the main cigarette brands at the time, they had the lowest education rate for people. So they had like the lowest education rate for

smokers. The lowest amount of college degrees, I think, of like 20 tobacco companies was Raleigh. So I don't know what that means for Cooper, but the FBI looked into that. The FBI looked into like, what kind of person drank a bourbon and seven up, right? Who would do that? Trying to figure out, narrow it down who this guy might be. But as I said, we don't know a daggum thing about this guy because he didn't say much. He was seen by, I mean, we've got 10, we have 10

eyewitnesses, okay? And only, I would say, two of them had any sort of real conversation with this guy, okay? It was the two stewardesses, two of the three stewardesses. But that's it.

And then he's gone. left nothing and he looked like you know if people people remember that skit from mad tv of the asian lady saying uh he looked like a man you know there's a skit where the he looked like a man everything she says you know just describe the guy who robbed you he looked like a man well that's like every time i read db cooper's physical description and i just say he looked like a man because like that's all they could say he had a part his his

hair was black his nose was small but the only physical feature that he really had that is notable was his lower lip he had a what they called a protruding lower lip. And something was unique, something was unique enough about his lip to where several years later, the FBI were showing photos of a suspect to Tina Mucklow, who's the main stewardess was named Tina. They were showing

photos and she goes, hey, that guy's lip. looks very similar to cooper's lip so like years later she remembers what this guy's lip looked like so clearly it was distinctive but that's really the only feature he had his skin was dark too he had olive skin the only stewardess who saw him without his sunglasses on if you remember earlier i mentioned this first stewardess the one he handed the note to is not the one he sat with the whole time she freaked out a little

bit and ran to the cockpit with the note and never came back Because she was probably crying up there. And they kept her up there the whole time. Because they didn't want the passengers to see some stewardess crying. So the first stewardess's name was Flo. She describes him. Remember, she had a staring contest with the guy without his sunglasses on. So once he handed her the note, he put his sunglasses on. Once he became the

hijacker, he put his sunglasses on. But she looked in his eyes for a while, and she had many interactions with the guy. She mixed in his drink and brought his change back. And 15 minutes after getting off the plane, she tells the FBI he appeared to be of Latin descent. And we have another witness who says that Cooper appeared to be Mexican or perhaps Native American. And all of our witnesses, except for the college kid. Nine of the ten used the term dark complexion or olive complexion.

So his skin tone was dark. So he may have been Latin of some sort or Native American. He had high cheekbones as well, which is a Native American trait and could have been Native American, but or some kind of mixture. But he wasn't like your standard white guy. It may have been Italian or something, but he was, they used the term swarthy, which isn't a word we use much anymore, but like that was a term they used back then. So passengers called him swarthy. He was dark

skinned. And that wasn't just the low lights of the airplane. People say that. Maybe it was just the low lighting or bad lighting, but because the ticket agent who sold him the ticket. And the gate agent who took his ticket said, also described him as olive and dark complected. So there's that. Sure. And then I wanted to bring up, because again, I listened to some of your stuff. They threw away the cigarettes, famously. They destroyed them, yeah. And they supposedly

have some hair. Yeah, okay. Have they tested this hair against any of the databases? Because we've recently had murders solved in Minnesota. Don't start with the hair. Don't start with the hair. Yeah, the niece. Yeah, the niece. Well, my hair is rapidly leaving, as I'm sure everybody can see. Not that you two gentlemen have anything to brag about. But yeah, you know, like a niece or a distant relative of some kind, anything like that. So, OK, so the forensics. OK, so here's

what we have. All right. So there are three ways that we could could have traced Cooper, three ways that we could have. OK. First is the cigarettes. He smoked seven cigarettes. There were eight cigarettes in the ashtray because he offered the stewardess one, and she took it. He actually peer pressured her into a cigarette. I think I mentioned earlier, I didn't get to finish it, but he had his hand in the briefcase bomb the whole time, his right hand. So she lit his cigarettes

for him with matches and stuff. And at one point, he was like, are you a smoker? And she goes, no, I quit recently. He goes, well, but I bet you still want one. And she's like, yeah, sure. So one of those cigarettes is hers. But what happened was the only, this is before DNA, right? This is 1971. So all they had was, the only thing you would use cigarettes for is fingerprints,

okay? Which was the DNA of the time. And they sent, so the real villains, as you'll learn in this case, are the Las Vegas FBI office, okay? So the plane lands in Reno, which means that all the things on the plane are under the jurisdiction of the Vegas FBI office, because Reno's near Vegas, right? So all the physical things taken from the plane were in the custody of the FBI's

Vegas office. Now, the Vegas office sends these cigarette butts to the crime lab in Quantico and says, hey, do you see any fingerprints on this? And if you don't see any fingerprints on it, feel free to destroy them. Now, remember... We can read all of these files. We have all these files now. We have all these internal memos. That's the brilliant part about this. It's not a mystery what happened to the cigarettes. We

now know what happened to the cigarettes. They say you can destroy them if there was no fingerprints. Well, the crime lab is smart enough not to destroy evidence. So they send it back to Vegas. And Vegas, when Vegas gets it back, they throw them in the trash can. They literally throw them in the trash can. Because they're just nasty cigarettes and there's no fingerprints. Now, so the cigarettes

are gone forever. Number two, they found a hair, well, they found two hairs, but they found a arm hair and a head hair on the headrest, on the head cloth, okay? Back then, those planes had head cloths. And they found those and they preserved those and they put them on a microscope slide. Now, back then, there was a thing called hair microscopy. So before DNA. Hair microscopy was like you would look at somebody's hair under a microscope and compare it to a hair from a

crime scene. That's what they did. It's been proven to be quack science. And in the late 90s, the Supreme Court said you can't use it as evidence. And the FBI had to do a whole bunch of new trials and things for people who had been convicted of this hair microscopy. So anyway, so they had this hair slide with the hairs on them. Well, that's missing, okay? They have no idea where it is. It went missing in 1984. Now, again, another source of DNA is the hair slide, is the hair,

right? I mean... Easily. In fact, at CooperCon, you'll like this. So at CooperCon last year, one of our key speakers was a woman named Colleen Fitzpatrick. She solved the Somerton Man case. If you know that case, the Somerton Man, the guy who washed up on shore in Australia, you know, with no identification. There's a she solved the there's a case called the boy in the box in like Massachusetts or somewhere. So she's a DNA like wizard. And so she came to talk about

the DNA of the Cooper case. And really, the hair is the only. thing we could have now, but the hair is missing. So it's like, oh, great. And now the third source of DNA possibly would be from his tie that he kept. His tie that he wore and left on the plane on accident. Okay. Well, the FBI, when DNA, it's really fascinating to read these FBI files because we can see how frustrated these guys are, these FBI agents, because we can read their internal memos as they're typing

away. And in the late 90s, with OJ going on and all this other stuff, they're like, DNA, that's interesting. So the guy who was assigned to the Cooper case, he's like, what DNA do we have? There's the hair, the cigarettes. And he sends to the Vegas office. Remember, the Vegas office. So let me back up a little bit. The Seattle FBI office are who controls the Cooper case because the crime actually happened in Seattle. So it's their case. OK, well, Seattle. But remember,

Vegas kept the physical evidence. So Seattle in the late 90s sends a memo to Vegas saying, hey, send us all the Cooper physical stuff so we can have it checked for DNA. And Vegas kind of sheepishly is like, uh, uh. Well, we lost the hair slide and we threw the cigarettes in the trash. Oh, my God. So all they have to test for DNA is the tie. And when they test the tie, it has three partial DNA profiles on it. OK, so which one is Cooper's? In my opinion, none.

And the reason I say that is because this tie, they put this tie in the mail. The regular mail and send it to different FBI offices. For example, if there was a suspect in Minneapolis or somewhere, the Vegas office who had the tie, they would send it to the office in Minnesota and they would go show it to the ex -wife of this guy. Did your husband ever have a tie like this? That sort of thing. And this happened a bunch. This tie was passed around. like a joint at a frat party.

I mean, it was, and nobody's wearing gloves. Nobody's handling it with care. I mean, they're probably sitting in the car as they're going through Burger King. You know, it's just a tie. There's no DNA in their brain thinking like that, right? So this tie is highly contaminated. And in fact, the three profiles we have, the three DNA profiles we have are so partial that the crime lab estimated that something like 15 million people. could test hot as a match to one of these

profiles. So really useless because we don't know if it's Cooper's anyway. And, you know, just because you come up hot, that means you're one of 15 million people. who shares DNA with probably an FBI agent, not even Cooper. So there's no DNA on this case, except for the hair slide, if we ever find it. I mean, I don't think they would destroy a hair slide because it does have an exhibit sticker on it and everything. It's just missing. It's probably in the Vegas office

somewhere in a file. So yeah. It's probably at some FBI's agent's safe at home. I don't know. It's interesting. It's funny how a lot of people with the Cooper case, because they were so tight -lipped, if you remember me saying earlier that the witnesses weren't talking much and the FBI weren't talking much because it was an active case. So you've got 40 -something years of, why is no one saying anything? What's this mystery? And it just makes people think there's more mystery

to it than not. Why can't the FBI? Why is this the only unsolved hijacking ever? You know, this sort of stuff. Why can't they solve this? So people either think that... The FBI are incompetent or they think they're covering something up. What's really funny is when people think they're incompetent and they're covering it up successfully. It's like, wait, that doesn't work. Either they're geniuses or they're not, you know. But it's not incompetence. We can read these files. I have

literally, I have a database. I collect, they're all OCR scans. I have about 46 ,000 files now. And I mean, I can type in cigarettes and see what happened to them, right? That's how. But you can read their frustration. I mean, they tried. I mean, you make 85 ,000 documents. You're trying to solve this case. You know what I'm

saying? Like it wasn't on the back burner. They were trying, but at a certain point, all they could do was sit and wait by the phone for somebody to call because there's no, there was, I mean, he left so little information about himself that there's really nothing to go off of because he said very little. One of the only things that I have come to the conclusion about is I really,

I don't think Cooper was American. And I've come to that conclusion on an opinion, I guess, mainly because when Cooper asked for his money, We're not exactly sure the terminology he used. He either said, I want negotiable American currency, or I want circulated U .S. currency. Now, we're Americans, all three of us. If we robbed a bank, we would never say, I want $200 ,000 in negotiable American currency. We'd say, I want $200 ,000. I want $200 ,000. There's only one currency to

us. It's our dollar, right? By God, we're in America. Why would we assume you? Yeah, and there's only one language, right? And that's English. Yeah, right. Exactly. But someone like a Canadian, for example, especially a Canadian who perhaps lives in Vancouver area. Vancouver, Canada is really close to the border. Big, huge, major city. And they do. They have to specify Canadian dollars or American dollars all the time because they go back and forth. So the fact that he said

something like that, American or U .S. currency, I'm not sure which one. The fact that he put a qualifier on it at all might be a clue that he's not American because... That's just a weird, who would say that? That's true. I say USD, but I've lived next to the Canadian border for a long time. And where I live and grew up, you can put Canadian money in a lot of the vending machines and it'll accept it. Okay, that's right. Yeah, where you live is close to the border.

So yeah, that makes sense that you would understand that. You understand that. Yeah. But as an American, you would never say, I want US currency. No, I would say. $200 ,000 for sure. Yeah, just $200 ,000. I mean, $200 bucks, cash, whatever. So there's that. But yeah, in the FBI, it's said that they have investigated over a thousand suspects. Not exactly true, but a lot. I mean, at least over 900 names. I have a spreadsheet that has about 500 of them now that they investigated.

Now, most of these suspects were just people who were like, hey. My cousin looks like this guy or my neighbor looks like this sketch or whatever. And the problem is the famous Cooper sketch that we all know and love, where he looks like a little alien sort of with the sunglasses on, right? That sketch was made with the three stewardesses there with the sketch artist two days after it happened. So that's really our

best sketch. I mean, and if you look at the one thing that's cool about the FBI files is one of the things that the FBI did is they would take photos of suspects to the witnesses. And they would say, hey, is this guy Cooper? Does this look familiar to you? And they would do them 10 at a time sometimes. And the FBI. If people don't know about the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, they document everything. I mean, they take a piss, they documented it. I mean, it is documenting

everything. So we have exactly what the witnesses said when viewing these photographs. So that can kind of give us a thing. They'll go, oh, that guy looks like, they can say, well, that guy doesn't look like Cooper, but his nose looks like Cooper's nose. Or they'll say his face shape. And so if I have this guy's name, I can go on Ancestry .com and go try to find a photo of this suspect. And you can kind of look in. They do usually look like that first alien looking sketch.

Very narrow head, small little nose. So that's kind of cool where you can read what the witnesses say about them. But a thousand suspects, roughly, you know, none of them. There are only a few who the FBI did not eliminate. And those are interesting guys. But in my opinion, we don't know who Cooper is. And we may never know because he could have been any of millions of people. But there are some decent suspects out there.

I've been reading the, and this is the one you were kind of talking about, The Last Master Outlaw. Yeah, garbage. By Thomas Colbert. Garbage, yeah. And Tom. Zoloski. Zoloski. I was going to say that name, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's about Robert Rackstraw. You know, I've been working through it. And the further I've gotten into it, the less convinced I am it's actually Rackstraw. Well, good. Because it's not. That's the whole

fun. Yeah, that's the whole fun of it. And the other one was, and, you know, some of the subreddit stuff was like, you should read where was Skip. Yeah. And so I'm going to read that one too. You know, and then I've got Skyjack, which I guess is a good introduction to it by Jeffrey Gray. Yep. And then I've got this one here, D .B. Cooper and the FBI Third Edition by Bruce A. Smith. Yes, that's the Bible. Which goes through a lot of FBI files and stuff from what I've kind

of flipped through. Yeah. But the Rackstraw thing is interesting because they're seemingly super convinced that not only is Rackstraw Cooper, but Rackstraw is also this Norman De Winter guy.

perusing about right in you know whatever whatever and um and and i think the biggest thing for me is not having the background that you have but the the all the stuff that i read that you wrote on the wikipedia about the cooper the whole the whole like five hour ordeal right was he was very calm collected knew exactly what he was doing and everything i'm reading about rock straws this guy's an asshole yes like he's flying by the seat of his pants he has no idea what's

going on Maybe he's got this little scheme here and that little scheme there. He's one of those minions in The Sopranos TV show, right? That's always fucking things up. And just somehow is charming enough to get out of a lot of situations, but not to get away with stuff. No, he got caught. I mean, he was caught. So that's kind of my thing. So it is very interesting because, of course, it's fun to read that kind of stuff. Right. Like,

oh, it could be this guy. But then they're kind of like, OK, so he was he was not convicted, but he was accused of killing his stepfather. But he got off on that. So, of course, he's a bad guy. So maybe also. Cooper. Maybe he's not. Maybe he's Norman De Winter. Maybe he's not. Maybe he's this other guy down here. Maybe he's stealing explosives here and stealing explosives there. But it's not terribly convincing to me. No, Rackstraw... Rackstraw's problem is his age,

for one thing. Rackstraw was 27. And if you look at... For people who are interested in this, my website is norjack .org. I mean, I'm D .B. Cooper Sleuth on YouTube. I have lots of videos on YouTube. So look up D .B. Cooper Sleuth. But my website is Norjack. NORJAK is the FBI code word for the Cooper hijacking. It means Northwest Hijack, NORJAK. So N -O -R -J -A -K dot org. And you go to the suspects page and I have a photograph on there of Robert Rackstraw in October

of 71. So a month before the hijacking. He's a good looking guy, full head of hair, you know, kind of big, big, burly guy. Whereas Cooper was. losing his hair, okay? Cooper had a receding hairline, may have had a bald spot. One of the witnesses, one of the stewardesses said he was partially or slightly balding, but he definitely had all the drawings. He's got receding hair, his temples were receding. He was an older guy

too. Cooper was, the very first description we have of Cooper was the woman who, the girl Flo, who we hand, remember, he hands a note to this girl. She takes down his ransom demands, goes up the cockpit, starts crying. They don't send her back, right? This girl. Well, we have her handwritten notes. to keep her mind occupied, stop crying, they hand her a notepad and say, take notes. And as Cooper is sitting 70 feet behind her in the plane, she writes down a description.

She goes, 6 '1", 180 pounds, in his 50s, right? So she goes in his 50s. Now, the stewardess has eventually lowered that to, they thought, mid -40s. But the ticket, the gate agent thought he was 50. One of the other passengers thought he was 50. So he was older, for sure. And some of the descriptions about the turkey neck. Right. Or the the one witness said one witness said he had a wrinkled, older mouth. So he was an older guy. OK. Rackstraw was young. And as you

said, Rackstraw was an ass. And yeah, he was also a womanizer, too. And a good friend of mine who is well known in the Cooper community is a guy named Nicky Broughton. Nicky actually got into the Cooper case because he was Robert Rackstraw's weed man. He sold Robert Rackstraw's weed like. you know, back 10 years ago and was just watching TV one day and was like, oh my God, that's Bob from work who I sell weed to. So that's how he

got into it. But he says, you know, Ragstraw, because he knew the guy, he said this guy could not flirt with a girl. Like even in his 70s, he was a lech essentially. And he's like, there is no way that this guy could have like not made a move on these hot babes or, you know, and something psychologically, something that's kind of, there's a real sidebar, but. I've talked to a psychologist about this who discussed this, that the girls weren't really afraid of Cooper. So they weren't.

There are times where after the passengers are off the plane, the stewardesses are back there. They're shooting the shit with him. They're talking about, where are you going to take us? And what's that parachute there? I mean, they're just talking to him. If a guy has a dynamite bomb, I'm not anywhere near that guy. But they seem to like him, OK? And the psychologist said that he gave off dad vibes. Because he was their dad, he was in the mid -40s or 50, and they're 21 years old,

they're girls, right? This is their dad's age. Sure, yeah. And if he was a younger guy, there would have been more of a threat of a sexual assault or something like this that would have made them keep their distance a little bit more. Yeah, or an overly rash overreaction or something. That kind of, I don't know, confidence or slow patience a lot of times comes from age. Yes. He didn't seem rushed. He didn't seem, at least from, you know, from what I've read, you know,

he seemed to know what was going on. He maybe got frustrated, you know, like, why aren't we taking off yet? You know, final fight plan, blah,

blah, blah. But he wasn't overly... rash with things and we can look at the copycat so one of the things about cooper is he inspired a rash of copycat hijackings there were 16 about 16 guys in the next few months tried the exact same thing sure five of them five of them actually got out and jumped parachuted out with money tied to them they're all captured but those guys were all younger a lot well some of them are younger and some are older and we can look at

this and the younger guys were cussing and they were upset at times, and they were sweating. And the older hijackers were more chilled out because as we're all getting older, you know, I say that, the way I describe it is, your give a damn button, you know, isn't pushed as easily anymore, right? And also, Cooper was prepared to die very clearly. He told the stewardess, he said, I'll die here today, I don't care. He was very like... resigned to his fate almost.

Sure. And Rackstraw, as you said, was a young guy. But Rackstraw had the skill set. No doubt about it. I mean, Rackstraw could have done this. Yes. But there's, I mean... Rackstraw, interestingly enough, made himself a suspect. He was not a suspect until he was being extradited from Iran to go face trial for murdering his stepdad, which he probably did. Yeah, everybody seems to agree that he probably did. Yeah, he probably did. But when he was being extradited, he was on a

plane with the FBI. He's like, y 'all haven't solved that Cooper case. Well, I could have done that. And he started talking about the Cooper case. And we have this file in the FBI files. Remember, you get 500 a month or so, and you're scrolling through these every month. I'm just

scrolling through these. And then you see one about Rackstraw, like some FBI agent contacting the Seattle office saying, hey, I took a plane ride with a guy who knew a lot about the Cooper hijacking and was kind of insinuating that he was Cooper. Let's start investigating this guy. And they eliminated Rackstraw very quickly because his eyes are lightly colored. He's not Mexican looking at all. He had a full head of hair. OK. And again, they showed his pictures to the stewardesses

and they're like, hell no, it's not him. So, yeah. Well, and the crazy thing about this book, too, is is everything's in black and white, which, you know, is probably publishing whatever. But when I saw the colorized versions of these pictures of Rackstraw against the sketches, I was like, no, there's no way this doesn't even look. But the black and white. Could potentially look like him, you know. So it's kind of like. Well, if you squint, anybody can look at the Cooper sketch.

And there's multiple Cooper sketches. There's multiple sketches. Oh, yeah. And so, like, on my website, if you go to norject .org, you can see all the sketches. I mean, there's multiple sketches that they did. And that was really confusing to people. And the sketches look like different people. So it's like. Yeah. You know, it's frustrating. But Ragstraw, though, is not a serious suspect. Mainly because just his age is just like, this guy's not balding or receding hairline. And also

nothing to do, he's handsome. Okay. If you see that picture on my website, Ragstraw is a handsome guy. Okay. Cooper was ugly. Something that people don't realize about Cooper. One thing we've learned from the FBI files is that they've rejected a lot of suspects. Whenever they're shown, remember the witnesses were shown photos of Cooper or photos of suspects. They eliminate a lot of suspects simply by saying that guy's too good looking

to be Cooper. Like lots. Okay. And we have the stewardesses after the hijacking calling Cooper homely. which is a polite way to say ugly, right? So he was not attractive at all. In fact, we even have male passengers. There's a male passenger who says, who eliminated a suspect by saying, that guy's too good looking to be Cooper. So like, even the men were like, this guy's not attractive. He was weird looking. And Rackstraw's

not ugly. So there's that. But the other book you have, though, that's actually a more realistic suspect, in my opinion. Okay, the Skip one? Skip Hall, yeah. Now, I'll say this. Skip Hall is more likely to be the gunman on the grassy knoll than to be Cooper. But he's still a better suspect than Rackstraw. And I noticed that they try and conflate these guys with a lot of other crimes

of the time period. And it's like... I don't know if that's trying to do like the character assassination type of thing where it's like, this guy's already a bad guy, so he could also be Cooper, you know? And let's just like pile it on. We get that a lot. They're like, oh, Cooper was the Zodiac killer too. It's like, come on, no. It's like, that's a common one. Maybe Cooper killed Mussolini. He was Jack the Ripper too. Yeah, yeah. So I have a couple of questions real

quick too. And I know we're getting kind of close. And I know the big questions, of course, with the Cooper case are, outside of who was he is uh did did cooper survive the jump because it was a nighttime parachute jump yep a lot of people i don't know it seems pretty You know, kind of a lot of people say anyone could survive a jump at night. Not a big deal. Yeah. I was reading one today where somebody fired up Microsoft Flight

Simulator and was flying the path a lot. And they're like, it would be easy for them to jump here and here and here and here. Yeah. Use these lights as that. And especially if they know the plane lingo and stuff like that. And if they're trained in parachutes. requesting four and only needing one because you're one person, but wanting to not get other people off the plane because you're going to jump with hostages. It's all pre -calculated and not something Rockstraw would

do. Yeah, exactly. Do you think he did survive the jump? Yes, absolutely. I would say 99%, and that sounds crazy to say that, but again, it's not because I'm a Cooper fanboy. I mean, I wish the guy, I mean, not to say I wish he died, but he was a jerk. And I don't care if he lived or died. Sure. But I follow the evidence and the evidence suggests he lived. And in fact, we have heard for the longest time that the FBI believed

he dies or whatever. Well, that's just what they told the media because we can see their actual files now and they all believe he lived. Okay. And I'm friends. I mean, I interviewed one of the original, it's on my YouTube channel. I interviewed one of the original case agents from 71, the only one who's still alive. He was like, oh yeah, we all thought he lived. Of course. I mean, when, because again, parachutes work. Okay. People don't realize that. Like they really, really

do. Okay. You've got, if you look up skydiving accidents, it literally is one in a million. Okay. Something like there were, I mean. Every year, the U .S. Parachute Association has stats online. It's one in a million. And the thing about Cooper is the parachute that he jumped with, which I actually have behind me a replica, was a military emergency bailout rig specifically designed by the military for air crew who have

never jumped out of a plane before. Sure. To be jumping out on a death -spiraling, flaming aircraft and just pull the ripcord and you'll live. So they're designed to always open up efficiently. And that's what he had. And again, we know from the copycats, five of these guys jumped out the same plane, same thing, and they all live just fine. And some of them had never even put on a parachute and they made it down fine. And the thing about Cooper, too, is the main thing is

the money. OK, we haven't talked about that yet. You know, in my next question is, is the money in the sandbar is kind of the next question. Well, in 1980, a boy named Brian Ingram, who's going to be our guest this year at CooperCon, I think. Brian, another guy I know, he's in Arkansas, a very nice guy. But Brian, when he was about eight years old, was digging in the sand along the Columbia River and unearthed $6 ,000 of Cooper's money. And they tore that beach up and found

nothing. else from cooper but just this random six thousand dollars and what's really crazy about that is scientific research has been done because there was a lawsuit in the 80s and the boy the money the money that was recovered was split between the insurance company who paid out the two hundred thousand dollars And Brian and his family. So he kept about 150 of these bills. And he sells them off. I mean, these things sell for $10 ,000 these days. I mean, it's crazy.

Oh, I believe it. And he's been selling them a little bit. Anyway, he has been gracious enough to allow scientists to look at the money. And Tom Kay is a scientist. He's analyzed it and has written a peer -reviewed paper for Nature magazine about it. It turns out that in the Columbia River, they have these things called diatoms, which are these little microscopic organisms. And sometimes they, some species will bloom or

live in the springtime. And then there's another species that lives in the wintertime in the Columbia River. Well, the money, when the money was found, it was waterlogged. It had been wet at some point. Okay. So it was waterlogged and it was buried. And all they found, all Tom found was the springtime.

diatoms no no wintertime diatoms so the money did not enter the river in november of 71 okay because it would have the wintertime yeah stuff on it right so how'd the money get there okay if it didn't float there and again we've done experiments but you know knuckleheads like myself and others have gotten 300 bills 300 dollars not 320s but 300 bills and put them in a tub and rubber banded them the same way that they

had them, they sink. So if you threw a bundle of $6 ,000 of 20s into a river, it will sink within three minutes to the bottom. It won't float down the river and end up on a sandbar. So it seems like as crazy as it sounds, I mean, I hate saying this because it sounds so stupid, but it seems like somebody put that there. I have no idea why, but it seems like a human put

that there. And even if a human didn't put it there, It's evidence of Cooper's survival because Cooper jumps 10 miles west of there or east of there. And he jumps 10 miles north of the river. OK, so he's 10 miles north of the river, 10 miles east of the river. So for the money to get there without Cooper living and like leaving the area requires some crazy scenario where somebody finds his dead body. Right. And disposes of his body and keeps the money for themselves or some stupid

thing like that. I have no idea. Whenever people ask me about. Tina Bar is the sandbar. I always just joke and say, no habla ingles. Because it's really hard to understand how this got there. And why is it only $6 ,000? And how did it get there? If it wasn't wet by in the wintertime and, you know, it's just it's crazy. And but it really I avoid it because it doesn't tell us anything. All we know is it's Cooper's money. But yeah, yeah, it doesn't tell you a whole lot.

And I saw some interesting things online, like, you know, why? Why would it be there? What's going on? And people say maybe like, you know, he paid somebody to pick him up after his jump. Right. And they took it. Yeah. And then they bear and then the person buried it because they didn't want to get caught with hot cash. Right. They're going to go back and collect it later. And maybe later never happened. They maybe got cancer or got hit by a truck. Who knows? Like,

whatever. Or were drunk and forgot where they placed it. Yeah, lots of different things. I mean, lots of different things. And it kind of falls into kind of, what is it, Mike? It's like Occam's razor, right? Like the simplest solution is often most true or something like that. Where, you know, how else could it get there? Is it an unladen European swallow or an unladen, you know, African swallow? Nobody knows. Like, easiest explanation is somebody buried it there. Like

you say. Yeah, it seems that way. Is that data important? Does it give us insight? No. Not really, unless there were DNA samples on it, right? Yeah, it's not going to tell us who he was. But it does, though, I do think it indicates that he survived. And like I said, this is probably the biggest misconception of the Cooper case is that he jumps into a wilderness. I mean, that's what the media loves to say, two things, that he jumped into a wilderness and that he jumped in a freezing

rainstorm. OK, well, again, we have the files now. We can look and see that the FBI contacted the National Weather Service and said, hey, tell

us all that. details of the weather that you know at the time of the jump in the location well where cooper jumped out it was 44 degrees okay and it was quote light rain showers which is just the pacific northwest it's always drizzling you know yeah so it wasn't it was not a rainstorm it wasn't gonna freeze to death okay and where he jumps okay he jumped into a count into a county with a 1971 population of 130 000 people OK, he's jumping 10 miles away from Portland, Oregon,

which even at the time had 500 ,000 people of it. And currently the county where he jumped into has half a million people living there. OK, so it's totally grown up. If Cooper dies or something, you know, for one thing, I mean, there's going to be vultures. And we have the FBI files. They're looking for buzzards circling. I mean, they've done all kinds of stuff, you know. Yeah, you're going to find remains if he dies. Well, the remains is interesting because

so. The same month that Cooper went, the same month of the hijacking, earlier that month, in that same county, a 16 -year -old boy went missing. He was hunting. And they didn't find him. Well, about a year later, they found, and they thought it might have been Cooper. They found a femur. They found a femur and his rifle. Never found anything else. And that's only one year later. So if Cooper dies, his remains are going to be gone. I always tell people, like, go walking

in the woods. How many dead animals do you see? None. essentially, right? Because they're all eaten. But again, that parachute behind me, I mean, that thing's not going anywhere if it's on somebody's back, right? And the money bag, again, you have money with $200 ,000 in it. Where's that? How come no one's ever found that, right? And again, we talk about Cooper jumping into a wilderness. No, it's not a wilderness. He's

jumping 10 miles from Portland, Oregon. Cooper was literally as likely to land on somebody's roof as he was to get stuck on a tree somewhere. That's a fact. Yeah. He jumped into somebody's like above ground pool. They gave him Mai Tais and he never left. He's still there drinking. It could have happened. Yeah. I mean, who knows? But the point, yeah, that's probably the biggest misconception is that he jumps into this unsurvivable.

Like, you'll still see people. I mean, I released a video reaction today where there was a guy named Dr. Todd Grande who has like a million subs on YouTube. He's a psychologist. He did a thing on Cooper. And I did a reaction video, you know. Sure. Shameless reaction video to get clicks, I guess. But I did a reaction video to it. And he was saying how, you know, Cooper, you know, if he landed safely, he may have, you know, got lost in the woods and died. I'm like,

come on. Like, no way. I mean, he's not. Again, all he had to do is walk west and he's going to run into I -5 interstate. I mean, he's not within five miles away. I mean, he's not he's not jumping into some. He's not jumping into the Yukon, okay? Yeah, and he knew from the plane that they were coming over like an airbase and stuff. So he was familiar enough with the topography that— Well, sure. That corridor, Portland to Seattle, is a straight shot corridor up I -5,

okay? Yeah. Tacoma is there. There's the Air Force Base, McChord, which he mentioned. To the steward. That's kind of one of the things that Cooper gives us. The only real clues Cooper gives us is he does say he's at one point he's looking out the window and he tells the girl that looks that looks like Tacoma down there. OK, so he knew what Tacoma looked like from the air. OK,

that's a clue. At a certain point when he thinks that the parachutes are coming from McCord Air Force Base, he's bitching because the parachutes haven't arrived. And he goes, hell, McCord's only 20 miles away from here. You know, shouldn't take this long. So he knew geography of that

area. But I don't think he's I don't think he was living in the area at the time, because think about how many times you go to the airport and you see somebody that, you know, maybe not even a friend, but just an acquaintance or somebody who knows who you are. Yeah, we can look at the copycat hijackers and a lot of them hijacked 500 miles from where. they're from because you don't want to run into somebody at the airport

who saw you that day. Sure, yeah. I don't think he was living in the area at the time, but he had some familiarity with it. Yeah. But what's interesting, one last thing. Oh, not last thing. I'll keep talking all night. But one thing that's interesting about Cooper is that he was a copycat himself, I think, because 11 days earlier, a Canadian named Paul Sini, he's the one who came up with the idea. Paul Sini hijacked an Air Canada flight with a parachute. and requested a million

dollars. And he ended up getting $50 ,000. And before he could jump out, a male flight attendant bashed him in the head with an ax and ended it very quickly. But Paul Sini, though, was a big headline news all over America. This guy tried this ransom jump out with the money thing. And it's almost like, I think about the, what's the... Once upon a time in Hollywood, the DiCaprio gif where he's pointing at the TV like, I can do

that. Me, it's me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cooper has this like, oh my God, hold my beer moment, right? I can do that. Yeah, yeah. So the FBI totally believed this. And I believe it too, that Cooper was a copycat. Because I mean, what are the odds that two guys at the same time are devising the exact same neurodivergent scheme? Because I mean, this does require some, I mean, doing this is

like, oh my God, that's brilliant, right? I can jump away from my crime scene as my crime scene continues flying, you know, 300 miles an hour away from me. That's genius, really. Yeah. And at the time, you didn't have, you know, a cell phone in your pocket necessarily triangulating your location. So I know there's been a little bit of, you know, the radius of the search radius is big because they don't exactly know 100 % where. Right. I think like he jumped. There's

a pretty good idea. But I think at the time, you know, in 71 or whatever, it might not have been as good idea as perhaps people have had time to look at it and analyze it. Seems like we've gotten a better idea lately since. Yeah, we've got a little better on it. The FBI, I believe, were searching a little. They were searching a little farther north than they probably should have been. You know, who knows? But regardless,

nothing was found by anybody. It was a big, I mean, Clark County, Washington, which is where Vancouver, Washington is, which is, you know, just north of Portland. That's Cooper country. Okay. They grew up, they grow up even today. I mean, there's, you know, Cooper restaurants. There's a Cooper themed escape room there. You know, the Cooper Con is held there. There's, I mean, anytime a parachute or anything is found,

it's in the FBI files. Like somebody's like, oh, I found something, you know, and it's a strap from a firework parachute or something, you know. Things like this. So if something had been found, I mean, we would know about it, I think. And so my best guess for what Cooper did is I think that he landed on the ground. Now, Cooper did not know where he was going to be jumping. I mean, he didn't know precisely where he he may

have had a idea. I think the best thing Cooper could have known is what county he was in because he really didn't know. He didn't specify a speed to fly at. He didn't specify a flight path for them to follow. But I think he just assumed they were going to have to fly. over Portland to get to Reno, which kind of you do. And so I think he knew they were going to be flying south. Kind of jumps blindly. Now, he could have seen some

light. He certainly saw some lights beneath him and could probably see Portland coming up ahead of him if he could look around. So he knows roughly where he's jumping, but he lands. What you do is you stash the parachute somewhere. You stash the money. Remember where you are. Remember where you are. And you go. And you walk and you get back to your transportation somehow. I mean, Cooper may have driven a car there that morning and parked in Vancouver, Washington and taken

a cab to the airport, something like that. So Cooper gets to his transportation, goes back and picks up his stuff. Or if he has an accomplice, what you do is you say, you tell your accomplice, hey, look, I don't know when or where I'm going to land, but sit by the damn phone. And whenever I get to a phone, I'll let you know where I am and you can get me, you know. So it's not that complicated, really, for Cooper to escape. I think that people think it's more. Sure. Cooper

gets bonus points. Remember I told you that the pilots felt this pressure bump thing. Well, they didn't know that this was Cooper's jump time until the FBI and the Air Force did experiments. With the same plane where they put a 200 pound sled on the back of the stairs and like push it off of the pole or whatever to see the reaction. And they actually had the flight engineer from the Cooper plane on that flight saying, yeah, that's the sensation we felt. So that's how they

could prove it. And so on all these subsequent hijackings, all these subsequent copycats, the FBI told those pilots, hey, look, when he jumps, you're going to feel something. So let us know exactly when that happens and we can, you know, cordon off the area below him or whatever, you know. And so. That's kind of how they caught these guys. And so Cooper got a wave with it, not because he was some super genius, but because he was the first to do it. Sure. He caught them

by surprise. It's very strange. You talk to the FBI guys. I've talked to a couple of them who were there back then, and they didn't think he was going to jump. And it sounds stupid. Like, well, why the hell would he ask for parachutes? They're like, well, we just didn't think he was going to jump because they didn't know. Part of them thought maybe he was going to make the crew jump out and fly the plane himself somewhere. So who knows? Yeah. But Cooper was smart, though,

asking for. four parachutes, that made the FBI, not the FBI, but it made Northwest Airlines really, because remember the FBI wasn't involved at this point, but it made Northwest Airlines assume that Cooper is going to make a hostage jump with him. And why do you want two sets of parachutes? So that way they're going to give him functioning parachutes, you know, they're not going to sabotage,

which is smart. For sure. And also having a bomb was a very smart way to do it because that really thwarts any sort of attempt to rush the aircraft and get in a gunfight, which the FBI did do gunfights with somebody. I mean, several of these copycats were killed during their attempts in gun battles with the FBI who stormed the plane. But you don't storm a plane when there's a bomb because the whole plane will blow up, you know, kill everybody. So Cooper was smart, but also stupid sometimes,

you know. But we like Cooper. And we like the story. But sadly, I don't think it's going to ever be solved. But you never know. Especially, you know, Cooper's long dead by now. This guy was middle -aged, heavy smoker. He was certainly dead, surely. And the hope was that maybe he had a spouse. Or, you know, somebody who... Was waiting till they died to say, hey, you know, dad was Cooper. And we get that, though. That's

the thing is we do get that. Yeah. And then we investigate him like that guy's full of shit or. Yeah. Why would you lie to your family on your deathbed? But like people did that. And it's a it's very common in conspiracy theories for people to have false confessions. That's true. Mussolini has 12 people that confess to killing him, even though they weren't even there. Some of them like you're not even in the area. You know, you get to say whatever you want, but

there's no documentation. Right. Yeah. And also another thing, too, is Cooper is a very safe thing to confess to because you're not confessing to being the Zodiac killer. Right. You're confessing to pulling off the coolest crime ever, essentially. You know, I mean, what a cool crime. You jump out of a plane with $20 ,000 after having a sexy stewardess light your cigarettes for you. It's very James Bond -ish, you know? Yeah. It's like an intro to a James Bond movie. Yeah, it is.

And then the title credits come up. Yeah, you're not confessing to being the Zodiac Killer. You're confessing to being this cool Han Solo in a business suit guy, you know? Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm about done with my cigar, but I do have, I've got one more question specifically about the Cooper case. And that is, and in the Rackstraw book, they bring this up quite a bit, is there were, I think, four notes to the FBI post hijacking. Yeah, right.

And there was like, you know, they were like, oh, two of these were within where Rackstraw lived or postmarked from where within he lived. So it has to be Rackstraw and stuff like that. I don't know about the validity of some of these notes. And if they were, I mean, you've got all the files I saw you posted. I don't know if it was like this morning that you got a new request in from the FBI and a scan of this and that. So I don't know if you know more about these

notes after the fact. Yeah, the letters. The letters, yeah. Okay, so lots of letters, actually. It's more than four. There's several FBI files. So people would write hoax letters. You know, I'm Cooper. I'm on a beach somewhere. F you, you know. FBI. Yeah, yeah. So we do get a lot of these. And there is one, though. The one that they hone in on, on the Rackstraw, is the most complicated one. It's got all these numbers and weird things in it. And look, I don't put it

past Rackstraw to have done that. It doesn't make him Cooper, I guess, is what I'm saying. Sure. The problem with these letters, though, is that it's almost like a trope, where I think that what happened is, because of the Zodiac killer taunting the fifth eds, and you have Jack the Ripper's from hell letter, right? I mean, people... this image that people actually send

taunting letters to the authorities. But Cooper, remember, I didn't mention it earlier, but Cooper was so studious about not leaving anything behind that one of his matchbooks, he had these matchbooks with him. And remember, the stewardess is lighting his cigarettes because he's using matches. She uses the last match of this matchbook and she tosses it in the seat pocket in front of her like trash, right? He goes, no, no, no, give that back to me. So like he took an empty matchbook

with him. He was very, and all the notes, all the notes that like his notes that he brought aboard. Yeah, he kept all of those. Yeah, he asked for them back. And the tie really, I think people say, well, if he was so studious, why would he leave his tie? I really think that that was just a brain fart. Because if you think about all of us are men, think about when you take a tie off, you throw it on the first thing you see. Just almost a reflex. And I think that Cooper

did that. I think that it was dark by that point. And the tie is black. When he sent the girl Tina to the front, he said, turn all the lights off. Okay, so it's dark back there. He's about to, yes, yes. $200 ,000 tied to his body with parachute cord. He's about to jump out of a jet airliner. You know, this is the pivotal moment of his whole life, right? And he just brain farted and left his tie on accident, I think. I mean, I think

he wanted to bring it with him. Or if he was, you know, I guess I don't remember where they found it, but it's also possible he was on the steps ready to jump and he took it and threw it off and the wind blew it back in the plane or something. Like, you know, who knows? Well, they found it on his seat. So literally on his seat. Okay, sure. Yeah. I mean, there's like a thousand reasons why you would just, the tie would just, you know. Yeah, just brain fart.

And what's interesting about the tie is that. That was their trump card. So the FBI, they kept that a secret. OK, the only thing that they kept a secret really was the existence of a tie. And they did that because if there were lots of false confessors, I have a video on one of my YouTube videos. I have a little I have a little like 10 minute video about the eight questions that the FBI. There was a list. It's in the files of here are the questions you ask anyone who

confesses to being Cooper. Any crazy person walks in and these are the questions you ask them, you know. And but the tie, though, they would say, what did you leave on the plane? Because they know. The existence of the tie was not known until the late 80s. So the FBI kept this on the back burner. And in hindsight, that may have been a mistake because the tie did have a distinct tie clip on it. Now, it wasn't a one in a million

tie clip. It was sold in department stores. But if they had published that and said, look, we recovered this tie from the plane. In addition to the sketch, do you know somebody who looks like the sketch and would own a tie like this? And they didn't do that. And this tie, as we discuss, kind of the big thing now is they have microscopic, they've done very high electron microscope scans of this tie. And it is covered in... like metallurgical chemicals. And we can

see, actually, when you look at the... It's amazing. When you look at the scans and the UV light, you can actually see his fingers. You can see Cooper, whoever he was, where he held his tie, where he would hold his tie to put it on or take it off. And there are more particles of these metal fragments and chemicals on the part where he touched the most, right? Whatever he was doing, his job, most certainly, whoever he was, it's probably our biggest lead, really, was handling

chemicals. Okay, because it's all over. Ty is filthy. Like no other Ty is ever this filthy. So he was a metallurgist or something of some sort, perhaps. Or I mean, again, people say, well, the Ty could have been from goodwill or it could have been something he stole. It could have been his brothers. All fair, all true. But we don't have shit to go off of. So we may as well. That is a valid piece of evidence to follow. Right. Yeah. So as valid as anything else, honestly.

Yeah. And so the tie can point us in some directions to say, hey, let's look at. I know that a buddy of mine has done some really he's fed all the information into chat GPT or some kind of AI service. And they're there. The AI, I think it's Gronk or Gronk or whatever the the. Elon's AIS. And I think they determined that this guy may have been an airline crash investigator because of the particular fragments that he would have

been sorting through. Like if you're an airline crash investigator, you're picking up things, right? And you're going to wear a tie too because you're a professional, right? I mean, men back then, that denoted you from being blue collar. If you're wearing a tie, you're the manager, you're middle management or whatever, you know, that sort of thing in that era. And also a clip -on tie too means you're going to be around machinery and things. you don't want your tie to get snagged

on something and choke you to death. So that's why metallurgists and people who operated machines who wore ties would wear clip -on ties, because they didn't want to get caught in a machine and choke them, you know? So it was a clip -on to pop off. So Cooper, probably an engineer of some sort, maybe an airline crash investigator, or maybe his brother was, and he was just taking it, you know? But we'll never know, probably, sadly. Well, maybe not. Yeah, I mean, the time

is running out. But it's the journey, as we say. It's the journey and the fringe you make along the way. Yes. Yes, the real treasure was the friends you made along the way. And the connections you made. And it's a fascinating piece of piece of history. And I don't know, it kind of, you know, it sucked me in a bit. And hence why I reach out to you. And I know I'm done with my cigar, Mike. Are you done with yours? I am. OK, so let's do final cigar thoughts and then we

will wrap up the episode here with Ryan. What did you think, Mike? I thought it was a decent medium bodied cigar. I would put it at probably probably three and a half, something like that. It's not crazy. But it was decent. Yeah, that sounds good to me. Three and a half, it was pretty good. It's not really our, we rate on a five point scale. It's not really our flavor profile that we normally go for. But I think this one

was pretty good. I think the shelf appeal would alone make it a, I mean, it's a 3 .5 smoke quality, but I think the shelf appeal would make it an easy four for sure. How much was it? It was $7 .99. Okay. And the shelf appeal on this one, and I think this one would be a fine. want to give somebody that You don't really know what their cigar preference is and just hand it to them and be like, hey, and they'd be like, wow,

this looks fantastic. It's great. We've been sucked in before on the packaging sometimes of cigars and we think it's going to be really good and it's not. But we try and do things that are affordable for the everyday person to be able to go and we can say, hey, is this cigar worth your $2 or $3? Is it worth your $8? Generally, if you spend more than $10, it should be a decent smoke. You shouldn't be complaining. about it.

Good. I would say that advisory note, probably 13 now with inflation, cigars have gone up in price, unfortunately. Okay. I thought China was going to pay for that, but who knows? But anyway, yeah, if I could get any other country to pay for my cigar habit, I'd be happy. I'm sure. But, you know, what do you do? And you say you might have or you've got you've got some leads. So you're going to have a book out soon, hopefully, or I don't know how long the process takes. Yeah,

it's called I mean, it's called D .B. Cooper, the FBI files. And we in the Cooper world, we that book you have, the Bruce Smith book is called we call that like the Bible of Cooper, because it is kind of like a big Bible. But sure, I've been talking to Bruce himself, you know, about it and my book. It's probably, it's like, if it's the Bible, his is BC and mine, I mean, his is, you know, the Old Testament and mine's the New Testament because he wrote that book before

a lot of the files came out. Right. And so we're kind of like saying the same story, but in a different way. And so he's the Old Testament, I'm the New Testament. And yeah, I'm excited about it. I've never read, I've never written a book. I'm a lawyer. I can write decently well. And it was really fun to do it. So it'll be. Hopefully it'll be and it will be a officially published book. You know, I do these agents working

on it. And so it'll be cool. I have no idea when it's gonna come out because it's already written. So maybe they can print it quickly. I mean, I would like for it to be out by November because that's we have Cooper Con every year. And this year in Vancouver, Washington, last year was in Seattle. But we go back and forth. And I'd like for it to be out by the time that Cooper Con comes around and the anniversary of it. So hopefully it will be. Yeah, that would be awesome.

And we do occasionally. more than occasionally do book reviews on our podcast. So that would definitely be one that we would like to do a book review on. Maybe we can have you back on and talk about that. I would love that. I really enjoyed this, guys. And I really appreciate you letting me babble on as y 'all smoke cigars because I can paddle on for hours on this. This was so enjoyable. This was so fun. It's great hearing from somebody who has a lot more knowledge in

something than I do. And being able to learn and listen and you very clearly have a passion for it and know a lot. about it. So thank you very much. All right. Well, thank you guys. And y 'all have a good night and hopefully we can talk again soon. Okay. Yep. That sounds great to all our listeners. Thanks for listening. Bye guys. Be safe. Have fun.