**The case that Cooper might have survived:**
People have survived parachute accidents and emergency jumps under worse apparent conditions. Military paratroopers have made night jumps in dangerous terrain. The jump altitude—estimated at approximately 10,000 feet, the ceiling Cooper had imposed—is well within the range of a successful parachute descent if the equipment functioned.
The absence of a body is not proof of death. The Pacific Northwest terrain is vast and capable of concealing human remains for decades. A person who died in a remote river or dense forest in November 1971 might leave no recoverable physical evidence.
The Tena Bar bills complicate the simple “he died immediately” narrative. If Cooper drowned in or near the Columbia River immediately after the jump, the bills might have entered the river then. But the packet integrity and the diatom evidence raise questions about whether that simple scenario is correct. The bills’ presence at Tena Bar is consistent with Cooper surviving the jump and the bills being introduced to the river system later—though it is also consistent with other scenarios.
No definitive physical evidence of death has been found.
**The honest conclusion:**
The evidence does not establish whether Cooper survived or died. The weight of the evidence—the conditions, the absence of spending, the absence of any verified contact from a living man claiming to be Cooper—is more consistent with death than with survival. But this is a probabilistic judgment, not a factual finding. The case is unsolved, and the question of Cooper’s fate is one of the components of that unresolved status.