Imagine being told that tomorrow the “D.B. Cooper” mystery will finally be solved. His identity will be revealed, we’ll learn whether he survived his infamous jump, and the evidence will leave absolutely no room for doubt.
Would you want to know the answer?
Firstly, a little about the case.
Back in 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper boarded a Northwest Orient flight from Portland, Oregon, to Seattle, Washington. Wearing a business suit with a black tie and white shirt, he handed a flight attendant a note stating that he had a bomb in his briefcase. He demanded $200,000 in $20 bills and, rather peculiarly, four parachutes.
The plane eventually landed in Seattle, where the passengers were released in exchange for the ransom money and parachutes. Cooper then ordered the remaining crew to take off again and head towards Mexico City.
Somewhere between Seattle and Reno, a little after 8 p.m., Cooper lowered the rear airstairs, put on a parachute and jumped into the darkness with the ransom money. He was never seen again.
The only confirmed portion of the ransom recovered afterward was $5,800 in declining $20 bills, found by a young boy beside the Columbia River near Vancouver, Washington, in 1980.
Mysteries like this fascinate a lot of people. But why?
Research into curiosity suggests that when we become aware of a gap in our knowledge, that gap itself can create a strong desire to find the missing information. The Cooper case gives us plenty of gaps. Who was he? Did he survive? What happened to the rest of the money?
More than half a century later, we still cannot definitively answer any of them.
The other thing human nature seems to love is the mystery itself. We tend to dislike uncertainty when it affects our own lives. But when the uncertainty belongs to a story that cannot hurt us, it can become part of the entertainment. Research into mystery enjoyment has even found that greater uncertainty, combined with curiosity, can make a mystery more enjoyable.
As somebody who loves mysteries myself, I have realised that when one is finally solved, I can feel both satisfaction and disappointment. In fact, sometimes even more of the latter.
That probably comes back to the fact that we just love an unsolved mystery. Especially one that the media has turned into a legend. And without turning this article into a psychology textbook, danger, death and disturbing possibilities can make these stories even harder to look away from.
The Cooper case contains almost every ingredient required to make that information gap unusually powerful: danger, audacity, an extraordinary escape, money, an unknown identity and two very simple unanswered questions.
Who was he?
And what happened to him?
There is also the community surrounding mysteries like this. Reddit forums and other online communities allow people to come together, compare evidence, argue over suspects and speculate to their heart’s content.
Imagine suddenly getting a definitive answer.
Some of that disappears with it.
What I find most fascinating is the strange contradiction. We want the answer, but getting it can destroy part of what fascinated us in the first place.
What disappears, exactly? The excitement is probably the biggest part. All those scenarios we concocted in our minds — including the wildly far-fetched ones — suddenly vanish. Every solution closes off dozens of other possibilities.
Let’s face it. Many of us secretly hope for some extraordinary conclusion worthy of the mystery. Unfortunately, when mysteries are finally solved, the answer can sometimes turn out to be far more mundane than the theories surrounding them.
That is not to say the D.B. Cooper mystery would necessarily end that way. If it ever ends at all.
More than half a century after he disappeared into the night, we still do not know the man behind the legend. And perhaps the fact that we don’t know is part of the reason the legend has survived for so long.
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