A tangled and torn parachute found buried by children at play in southwest Washington is being examined by the FBI to determine if it might have been used by notorious airliner hijacker D.B. Cooper, the U.S. law enforcement agency said Tuesday.
Children playing outside their home near Amboy, Washington, found the chute's fabric sticking up from the ground in an area where their father had been grading a road, agent Larry Carr said. They pulled it out as far as they could, then cut the parachute's ropes with scissors.
The children had seen media coverage of a FBI-launched publicity campaign last fall that hoped to jar memories and generate tips to solve the 36-year-old mystery. They urged their father to call the agency.
"When we went to the public, the whole idea was that the public is going to bring the answers to us," Carr said. "This is exactly what we were hoping for."
A man identifying himself as Dan Cooper — later mistakenly but enduringly identified as D.B. Cooper — hijacked a Northwest Orient flight from Portland, Oregon, to Seattle in November 1971. He claimed he had a bomb.
When the plane landed at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, he released the passengers in exchange for 200,000 U.S. dollars and asked to be flown to Mexico. He apparently parachuted from the plane's back stairs somewhere near the Oregon border. Agents doubt he survived because conditions were poor and the terrain was rough, but few signs of his fate have been found.
When Carr overlaid the family's address onto a map investigators made in the early days of the investigation, he learned they lived right in Cooper's most probable landing zone, between Green and Bald mountains.
There are no obvious markings on the parachute to indicate whether it's the type Cooper used, a Navy Backpack 6 with a 26-foot canopy, Carr said. He's hoping a member of the public who has expertise in the parachutes will come forward and confirm whether it's the right kind before the FBI bothers to excavate the property. Barring that, the agency could turn to scientific analysis of the fabric.
Source:Xinhua
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