The FBI examined the parachute. Its investigation concluded that the parachute was not connected to the Cooper hijacking. The bureau did not publicly release detailed findings about the parachute’s age or origin, but it confirmed that it could be excluded from the Cooper case.
This episode is worth noting because it illustrates the ongoing nature of the Cooper mythology: more than forty-seven years after the hijacking, a discovery in the Pacific Northwest woods could still generate immediate national coverage and an FBI response. The case has a cultural weight that keeps it alive in public consciousness in a way that most fifty-year-old unsolved crimes do not.
The parachute found in 2018 was not Cooper’s. But the fact that its discovery was taken seriously—by the public, by the media, and by the FBI—is itself a measure of the case’s unique place in American crime history.
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## The 1978 Airstair Placard
Two physical finds in the decades after 1971 generated sustained investigative attention. The first was the airstair placard; the second was the Tena Bar money.
In 1978, a deer hunter found a placard from the aft airstair door of a Boeing 727 near a logging road in a rural area of Cowlitz County, Washington. The placard fell within the general corridor of the route that Flight 305 followed southward on the night of November 24, 1971.
The placard’s presence in that location was consistent with it having come from the aircraft—either blown loose during the flight or dislodged as Cooper deployed or operated the airstair. It was the first physical item after the hijacking that could be connected to the case based on location and type, rather than on an explicit serial number or identifying mark.