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PORTLAND — Eric Ulis was only 5 when a dapper man in a suit and sunglasses boarded a commercial flight in Portland, Oregon, ordered a bourbon and soda from his seat in 18E and then handed a flight attendant a handwritten note saying he had a bomb.
It was Nov. 24, 1971, and the unidentified man, who later became known as D.B. Cooper, had a one-way ticket on the flight to Seattle.
Cooper opened his carry-on bag to reveal a jumble of wires and red sticks and demanded four parachutes and $200,000 in cash. After the plane landed in Seattle he swapped three dozen passengers for the cash and parachutes, then ordered the pilot to fly to a new destination: Mexico City.
But soon after takeoff, Cooper did something incredible: With the money strapped to his waist, he parachuted out of the rear of the plane and into the night, vanishing over the vast wilderness of the Pacific Northwest.
Cooper has not been seen or heard from since. His audacious stunt made him a folk hero, triggered an FBI investigation, led to tightened security at airports and inspired dozens of books and TV documentaries. It remains the only unsolved hijacking in U.S. aviation history.
When decades passed without any solid new leads, the FBI officially closed the case in 2016.
But Ulis is still searching for clues. Now in his 50s, he says he's spent countless hours scouring tens of thousands of FBI documents on Cooper for any details federal agents may have missed.
"It's real. He was real. This is not a … Bigfoot legend," he says. "No one was physically harmed. Of course, the crew endured some stress, but even they admit he was quite polite, all things considered. He exhibited grace under pressure."
Ulis keeps a notebook next to his bed in his Phoenix, Arizona, home, just in case a new thought about the case strikes him in the middle of the night.
In the meantime, he's pursuing a lead – related to Cooper's clip-on necktie, which was left behind on the plane – he believes could possibly help amateur sleuths like himself figure out who Cooper was.
And to gain access to the necktie, he's suing the FBI.
Ulis runs a CooperCon and is leading a search in the woods
For decades, law enforcement and amateur investigators alike have wondered: Who was the mysterious hijacker? Did he survive the plunge? Was his name really Dan Cooper, as his boarding pass indicated, or was that an alias inspired by a French Canadian comic book hero – as the FBI later speculated?
Even Cooper's name added to the intrigue. A journalist at the time mistyped it as D.B. instead of Dan, and the name stuck.
"For 52 years, everybody's continued to call him D.B. Cooper," Ulis says. "Back then, you didn't have to go through a metal detector at the airport. You didn't have to be checked. You didn't have to provide a driver's license to get an airplane to get a ticket. You could give a fake name."
Ulis describes himself as a crime historian and aviation geek. For the past decade, he has devoted much of his time to seeking answers to the many questions surrounding D.B. Cooper.
He took part in a 2022 Netflix series titled, "D.B. Cooper, Where Are You?" and has hosted a History Channel show on the hunt for evidence about Cooper. He's also written an e-book, "Silver Bullet: The Undoing of D.B. Cooper," one of nearly 40 books on the elusive hijacker.
Since 2018, Ulis also has held an annual CooperCon, at which fans of the hijacker gather to discuss elements of the case in granular detail.
And next month he'll lead a team of volunteer searchers to explore an area near Tena Bar, a stretch of beach along the Columbia River in Washington state where $5,800 of Cooper's ransom money was found in 1980.
Ulis says he has spent a lot of time in the area, trying to figure out how close the ransom money was to where Cooper may have landed. He's viewed old news footage, studied FBI photos and familiarized himself with landmarks so he can guide searchers to specific areas.
He hopes to find important clues, including the parachute Cooper used that night.
"I firmly believe that D.B. Cooper's parachute is lying in that area somewhere. It's stashed away somewhere under some blackberry bushes or a thicket of trees or something of that nature," he says. "It's been sitting there for 52 years."
He's also focusing on a clip-on tie the hijacker left behind
Before he became a D.B. Cooper expert, Ulis says he was a professional blackjack player, a skill he says helps him focus on facts and avoid conspiracy theories.
"That's the world I came from. And it actually played a big part of shaping how I think," he says. "Because that's a world where you're really just focused strictly on the math. You try to remove emotion as much as possible."
Some friends consider his fascination an "eccentric hobby," he says, but he tries not to bombard them with minutia on the case. He saves that for when he's around like-minded people at CooperCon and other events.
Ulis says Cooper's cigarette butts were initially recovered but later disappeared – a crucial piece of lost evidence that may have been useful given today's advancements in DNA technology, he says.
But he has recently zeroed in on another piece of evidence: A clip-on necktie from JCPenney that Cooper left behind before he jumped off the plane nearly 10,000 feet over southern Washington.
The tie and the found ransom money are the key pieces of physical evidence in the case, Ulis says. While the FBI has already tested the tie for traces of DNA, Ulis believes the tie knot has a metal spindle that may still have undiscovered DNA on it.
In March of this year, Ulis filed suit against the FBI for access to the tie, which he says is being stored at FBI headquarters in Washington, DC. In his suit, Ulis asks that he and a DNA expert be allowed to collect swabs from the spindle.
"That's all I'm trying to get – access to that spindle to open it up. Have the DNA expert kind of swab it, and let's just see what we come up with," he says.
The FBI has not responded to CNN's repeated requests for comment on Ulis' request.
Larry Carr, a former FBI agent who worked on Cooper's case, tells CNN he doesn't believe the FBI took the spindle apart to process it. But whatever DNA found on the tie may be compromised, he says.
"The tie was never collected and handled by today's standards. It was collected and handled by standards in 1971. And so who knows whose DNA is actually on the tie," says Carr, a speaker at this year's CooperCon event in Seattle in November. "That's still another hurdle we have to jump because we don't know if that, in fact, is Cooper's DNA."
However, he adds, "anything's possible."
