SEATTLE — The FBI is analyzing a torn, tangled parachute found buried by children in southwestern Washington to determine whether it might have been used by famed plane hijacker D.B. Cooper, the agency said Tuesday.
Children playing outside their home near Amboy found the chute’s fabric sticking up from the ground in an area where their father had been grading a road, agent Larry Carr said. They pulled it out as far as they could, then cut the parachute’s ropes with scissors.
The children had seen recent media coverage of the case and urged their father to call the agency.
The FBI launched a publicity campaign last fall, hoping to generate tips to solve the decades-old mystery, in which a man identifying himself as Dan Cooper — later mistakenly, but enduringly, identified as D.B. Cooper — hijacked a Northwest Orient flight from Portland, Ore., to Seattle in November 1971, claiming he had a bomb.
When the plane landed at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, he released the passengers in exchange for $200,000 and asked to be flown to Mexico. He apparently parachuted from the plane’s back stairs somewhere near the Oregon border.
Agents doubt he survived because conditions were poor and the terrain was rough, but few signs of his fate have been found.
Carr spoke with the children’s father, whom he declined to identify, early this month and learned the chute was white, the same color as Cooper’s. And when Carr overlaid the family’s address onto a map investigators made in the early days of the investigation, he learned another encouraging fact: They lived right in Cooper’s most probable landing zone, between Green and Bald mountains.
