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Expedition Unknown: D.B. Cooper

The Travel Channel’s series hosted by Josh Gates
Original airdate: January 11, 2017

One of the most notorious mysteries in the history of skyjacking, D.B. Cooper was last seen in November of 1971 as he jumped out of the back of a plane carrying $200,000 in cash. He would have landed somewhere in the Northwest U.S., and the FBI has spent the past 45 years conducting one of their most thorough investigations to find out what happened to the skyjacker; the case remains the only unsolved plane hijacking in U.S. history.

In 2016, the show Expedition Unknown requested that an extensive analysis be performed on samples lifted from D.B. Cooper’s tie, one of the few pieces of evidence he left behind. McCrone Associates used an automated scanning electron microscope to find, photograph and analyze more than 100,000 particles from 20 different stubs.

In 2007, when the FBI released its files on the case to the public, a team of scientists called Citizen Sleuths was allowed special access to the evidence in the FBI archive.

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