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Please do not suffer in silence. On the afternoon of November 24th, 1971, a rainy Thanksgiving Eve in Portland, Oregon,

a nondescript middle-aged man approached the Northwest Orient Airlines ticket counter

at Portland International Airport.

He paid $20 in cash for a one-way ticket on the 250 p.m. Northwest Flight 305 bound for Seattle.

On the ticket voucher, written in neat block letters, the man gave the name Dan Cooper.

Before boarding, he double-checked with the gate agent

that Flight 305 was indeed a Boeing 727-100, an important detail that would only become significant

much later. Dan Cooper blended in easily with the holiday travel crowd. He was described as a

white male in his mid-forties, around 5 feet 10 inches to 6

feet tall with dark hair and brown eyes. He wore the conventional business attire of the day,

a dark suit, described in some accounts as russet brown, a starched white shirt, and a slim black tie

accented by a mother-of-pearl tie pin.

Completing his look, Cooper carried a black briefcase and an ordinary brown paper bag.

As he walked across the tarmac and up the boarding stairs to the awaiting Boeing 727,

the man showed little that was memorable, except perhaps the fact that despite the cloudy

autumn afternoon, he sported a pair

...