At long last here it is. This is very long so if you don't care then obviously this isn't for you.
On November 24th, 1971, Milton B. Vordahl, a middle-aged, anti-social inventor from the state of Washington, walked into the Portland Airport and purchased a ticket to Seattle using the alias Dan Cooper. Shortly after takeoff, he passed a note to a stewardess informing her that he was hijacking the aircraft. He demanded that upon arrival in Seattle he be supplied with $200,000 in circulated bills and four parachutes or else he would detonate a bomb he had inside a briefcase. He also demanded that upon arrival in Seattle that the jet be refueled. Once the plane had landed in Seattle and these demands had been met, he let the passengers go and after some consultation with the pilots, they agreed that the plane would fly to Reno, Nevada. Somewhere in between Seattle and Reno, Milton Vordahl parachuted into the night. He was able to elude the authorities and detection until science finally caught up with him.
I just made my presentation at CooperCon two weeks ago and I'll just say it went over quite well.
I won't be cheesy and build the suspense, so here's the money-shots many of you folks have been waiting for:
Meet D.B. Cooper:
My team and I presenting Vordahl at CooperCon two weeks ago:
How did my team find Milton B. Vordahl?
SCIENCE! Vordahl was one of the most clever thieves in history. He was the first person in history to escape a crime scene by jumping from it. He made one mistake though: he brainfarted and left his tie on his seat. Not too big of a deal at the time I suppose, but 50 years later we've got some tricks up our sleeves. Before the FBI closed the case, they allowed a scientist named Tom Kaye to take three sticky-stub samples off the tie. These samples were then sent to McCrone and Associates, possessors of the most highly specialized electron microscope on Earth. They zapped those samples and found over 100,000 microscope particles. Nearly all of these particles were titanium pieces and other rare earth elements. For someone to have clothing containing this many and this unique of chemicals and elements, there can be one profession: metallurgy. In the 1950's and 60's metallurgists wore the shit out of black clip-on ties. This was the era of Mad Men, so of course if you were a professional sort you absolutely had to wear your tie, even pulling a sparking chunk of metal out of a forge.
This list of particles were then transferred to a spreadsheet and released publicly. So, any dork with enough time to look through 100,000 spectrums was free to do so. Three of these 100,000 particles stand out like a sore thumb. They are metal alloys that have a combination of titanium and antimony. These two elements, titanium and antimony (hereinafter called "TiSb) were occasionally mixed together in the 50's by a few research labs working for steel companies, but they were never used commercially as they were deemed a rather volatile mixture, especially when the antimony percentage of the alloy went higher than 10%.
One of the only places that attempted to make TiSb alloys during the 1950's was a company in Pittsburgh called Rem-Cru. This company was a leading supplier of titanium products to the Air Force and to the Airline and Aerospace industry. Their products were crucial in the development of the C-130, the 727, and even the SR-71. They had several research-metallurgists at Rem-Cru but the only metallurgist who was messing around with TiSb was Milton Vordahl. Rem-Cru has 12 patents for TiSb alloys in the 1950's, all of them made by Milton Vordahl. However, remember I told you that TiSb was never used in anything? Well, the bosses eventually got tired of Milt messing around with a mixture that was never going to be used commercially, so they told Vordahl to stop wasting his time.
So it turns out that the tie found on the plane, a black clip-on, was first sold at JcPenney's in 1964 and this specific run of ties would have been depleted in stores by 1966. So the owner of the tie purchased it between those dates. So we know that when these three TiSb particles sparked onto the tie, it had to be after 1964. So if you go check out all the patents in the US Patent Office, TiSb where the Sb is over 10% only appears TWICE in the entire decade of 1960's. One is from a patent made by a Massachusetts electronics company who was trying to put it in a transistor for a radio. Like all the other TiSb folks before them, they saw it was volatile and this thing never left the lab.
The only other patent in the 1960's? Well, I'll be damned if it isn't our good buddy Milton Vordahl revisiting his old girlfriend one last time in 1965. And to no one's surprise this alloy also is too volatile to be used in anything, but Milt goes and gets the patent anyways.
The way alloys are patented is usually a solo effort. A chemist mixes up a special cocktail of chemicals and elements and shoves it into a forge to create a single ingot of metal. So given all this information it's quite possible that there are only two people on Earth who would have been standing near a forge as a TiSb alloy was created. Milton B. Vordahl and the fella from Sprague Electronics in Massachusetts. Well, I'll go ahead and answer your question: the dude from Sprague looked like Chris Farley. So he wasn't Cooper. Also, Sprague had nothing to do with the aviation industry and Rem-Cru had EVERYTHING to do with it.
A timeline of Milton B. Vordahl
- His parents were Norwegian immigrants and he was born shortly after they arrived in the States.
- In High School he was an expert rifleman and in doing our research we learned that many of his Washington State high school records were only recently broken. Of note: He was the only kid in his high school on both the Rifle Team and the Chemistry Club.
- He attended Washington State University where he eventually taught at while receiving his advanced degrees in Chemistry.
- He was working at DuPont Chemicals in Connecticut when WWII started. He first went to work for Remington Arms where he had multiple patents involving explosives and also had a patent for 30.06 rifle cartridges which made it to where they could be more reliably cycled through the M-1 Rifle for our infantry.
- In 1943 he was recruited to work on the Manhattan Project where he would work until 1946.
- He worked on the Hanford Site in Washington developing the Fat Man bomb that would eventually be dropped on Nagasaki. While there, he received an official commendation for solving a fuel cell equation that threatened the entire project.
- With the Manhattan Project, his specialty was Plutonium slugs. It's worth noting that his plutonium slugs were produced by an aluminum smelter outside Portland about a mile away from, and on the same road as, the infamous Tena Bar.
- Following the war he moved back to the East Coast and joined Crucible Steel outside Pittsburgh, PA.
- Over the next 20 years, his name appears on more inventions of Titanium alloys than any other American.
- 93% of the Titanium coating of the SR-71 was invented by Milton Vordahl. In fact, many of the alloys contained within the 727, C-130, and various other aircraft are traced to Vordahl patents.
- Despite the success of his patents, he did not get rich from royalties because they were assigned to the company he was working for.
- He moves in 1965 from Pittsburgh to Henderson, NV, just outside Las Vegas and has a lab set up for him at the TIMET Titanium plant there in Henderson.
- In 1967, he designs and has built for him a house in Pateros, WA. Over the next few years he divides his time between his home near Vegas (where his lab was) and his place in Washington.
- In the late 1960's, he was a Boeing consultant on their SST Project. For those who don't know, the SST (Super Sonic Transport) was to be the American answer to the Concorde. The Soviets had one as well. So because the Cold War was just a massive dick measuring contest, the US Government subsidized the development and construction of an entire fleet of these SST's. Boeing won the Government contract with their design and work began at the Seattle Boeing plant. This plane was almost 100% to be built out of titanium. As such, Vordahl was a consultant for Boeing on these matters. No doubt many of his alloys were to be included in the aircraft. By summer 1971, Congress had pulled the plug on the SST project. Boeing laid off literally over 30,000 engineers and titanium plants across the country shut down.
- When the SST project was cancelled, Vordahl had a laboratory at the TIMET plant in Henderson, NV. In August, 1971, 450 factory and lab workers there were fired. The plant manager at TIMET was named Don Cooper.
- Vordahl had around 80 patents. His first patent was published in 1943 and his final one was in 1971.
- He lived the rest of his life in obscurity living in his small town of Pateros in north-central Washington. He was an alderman and later mayor. His election results we have found look like Saddam Hussein or something. They are like "Vordahl - 287 votes, Smith - 1 vote, Jones - 1 vote". I will publish one of these funny clippings later.
- He dies of a rare neurological disease in 2002.
About Milton B. Vordahl:
- He was highly opinionated about everything. He seemingly hated everyone and every institution and would mercilessly launch his attacks in op-eds he had printed all across the country. We have found about 75 of them so far. In these op-eds he attacks every single administration from LBJ to Clinton, he supports apartheid, extols the virtues of eugenics, etc. The man even wrote op-eds attacking dogs... what a villain.
- He and his wife were essentially pagans. Milton would often write pagan-sounding op-eds about subjects and publish them in papers across the country. If the topic was something that usually would require a woman to have an opinion on (such as abortion), he would write using her name but it's very, very obvious that it's him doing the writing. His writing style is reminiscent of the Unabomber. It's like he's so smart that he's speaking over the heads of everyone. It's very unique and certainly shows signs of madness.
- He was an athlete. Many of the newspaper clippings you'll find when you do deep dives on him on newspaper archives are references to him winning amateur golf and tennis tournaments. He was also a runner/jogger well before his time. We have op-eds from the 1960's where he references going running.
- He was apparently such a miser and such a genius inventor that instead of purchasing contacts for his children in the 1960's, he MADE them their own contacts.
- Among his odd specialties, he was somehow an expert on dams. We have come across newspaper clippings where he was the featured speaker at the opening of dams.
- He has many published academic papers on aviation.
Coopery odds and ends:
- the FBI psychological profile on Cooper was done by John Douglas (of Mindhunter fame). Vordahl matches it almost perfectly. Douglas says that Cooper was someone with "extreme inventiveness", that Cooper was not a career criminal and that this was probably his first crime, that Cooper must have worked out and taken care of his body, that Cooper wasn't a poor man and this wasn't some desperate act or get rich quick scheme i.e. it wasn't just about the money, that Cooper was extremely skilled at problem solving quickly, that Cooper likely possessed a post-graduate education, that Cooper had intellectual knowledge of aviation issues but lacked practical knowledge i.e. he wasn't a pilot or an airplane mechanic, and many other things check out.
- Cooper had two matchbooks that he carried with him onto the flight that the witnesses saw: one was from SkyChef (an airport bar) and the other was from the International Correspondence School, which was basically a University of Phoenix type thing, except that they offered pretty advanced degrees. During my research I was looking through Vordahl's small town paper and it turns out that the week of the hijacking there was an ICS graduation dinner and banquet for Hydroelectric Engineer graduates at the Chief George Dam, which was two miles from where he was living at the time. There is a less than zero percent chance that this egghead would have missed this collection of eggheads two miles from his house. I do believe matches would be exactly the sort of thing that would be available at a graduation banquet for ICS.
- The only pre-hijacking fictional use of the name "Dan Cooper" in English comes from a 1937 AirTrails magazine short story titled "Canned Death". I found this on an archive site and no one had yet discovered it in the DB Cooper world. It is an 8 page short story that tells the story of a young airline pilot who is forced to defend himself from the attacks of these bushwacking pilots who force his airline to crash. Cooper gets out of his crashed airliner and beats all these thugs up. The name Dan Cooper is used around 50 times in the short story. The author uses it as a literary device i.e. "Dan Cooper laughed" or "Dan Cooper took a swig of whiskey". The page before and after this short story are articles about a guy named Clyde Pangborn. Pangborn gained some heroics for rescuing a skydiver who got caught on his wing. Vordahl and Cooper were from the same town. They knew each other. Their mothers played on the same competitive bridge team for years. There shouldn't be any doubt that the Vordahl household had a copy of this 1937 AirTrails magazine where friend of the family Clyde Pangborn was featured. So to get to the second Pangborn story you have to flip through all the Dan Cooper pages. I think this may be a source of the alias.
- His consulting gigs with Boeing would have exposed him to the knowledge that the aft stairs could be lowered in flight, something most people at the time were not aware of.
- When asked by the sketch artist to describe Cooper, the stewardesses could only describe one thing that was unique about his face. They said he had a protruding lower lip. Two of the stewardesses called it "pouty". The sketches all show this very unique feature that many have never noticed with D.B. Cooper. The farthest right "mouth" you see is from a 1989 Unsolved Mysteries episode where they had one of the flight attendants do a sketch. 18 years after the incident she still remembered Milton's weird pouty lip.
So there you have it. As it stands now, we have communicated with his family and not ONE of them have said anything like "no way" or "I just can't see him doing that". This is all quite telling. They are fully supportive of our investigative efforts. The place where Milton lived in 1971 is a beautiful place out in the boonies of north-central Washington. It is still owned by the family. We are currently looking to get an invite to come snoop around the place and go through his documents with our "Cooper-eyes" because according to his grandson (now 51 years old) many of his grandfather's things are still there in the workshop and all of his writings and journals and books are all still there.
I hope to get out there soon and hopefully find a $20 bill stuffed in a book somewhere. It looks lovely out there...it's calling my name.
Oh, and one last thing...
D.B. Cooper says "Sometimes crime does pay! Cheers!
My website with all of this info if you want to send to friends or family:
Was Vordahl Cooper?
On November 24th, 1971, Milton B. Vordahl, a middle-aged, anti-social inventor from the state of Washington, walked into the Portland Airport and purchased a ticket to Seattle using the alias Dan Cooper. Shortly after takeoff, he passed a note to a stewardess informing her that he was hijacking the aircraft. He demanded that upon arrival in Seattle he be supplied with $200,000 in circulated bills and four parachutes or else he would detonate a bomb he had inside a briefcase. He also demanded that upon arrival in Seattle that the jet be refueled. Once the plane had landed in Seattle and these demands had been met, he let the passengers go and after some consultation with the pilots, they agreed that the plane would fly to Reno, Nevada. Somewhere in between Seattle and Reno, Milton Vordahl parachuted into the night. He was able to elude the authorities and detection until science finally caught up with him.
I just made my presentation at CooperCon two weeks ago and I'll just say it went over quite well.
I won't be cheesy and build the suspense, so here's the money-shots many of you folks have been waiting for:
Meet D.B. Cooper:
My team and I presenting Vordahl at CooperCon two weeks ago:
How did my team find Milton B. Vordahl?
SCIENCE! Vordahl was one of the most clever thieves in history. He was the first person in history to escape a crime scene by jumping from it. He made one mistake though: he brainfarted and left his tie on his seat. Not too big of a deal at the time I suppose, but 50 years later we've got some tricks up our sleeves. Before the FBI closed the case, they allowed a scientist named Tom Kaye to take three sticky-stub samples off the tie. These samples were then sent to McCrone and Associates, possessors of the most highly specialized electron microscope on Earth. They zapped those samples and found over 100,000 microscope particles. Nearly all of these particles were titanium pieces and other rare earth elements. For someone to have clothing containing this many and this unique of chemicals and elements, there can be one profession: metallurgy. In the 1950's and 60's metallurgists wore the shit out of black clip-on ties. This was the era of Mad Men, so of course if you were a professional sort you absolutely had to wear your tie, even pulling a sparking chunk of metal out of a forge.
This list of particles were then transferred to a spreadsheet and released publicly. So, any dork with enough time to look through 100,000 spectrums was free to do so. Three of these 100,000 particles stand out like a sore thumb. They are metal alloys that have a combination of titanium and antimony. These two elements, titanium and antimony (hereinafter called "TiSb) were occasionally mixed together in the 50's by a few research labs working for steel companies, but they were never used commercially as they were deemed a rather volatile mixture, especially when the antimony percentage of the alloy went higher than 10%.
One of the only places that attempted to make TiSb alloys during the 1950's was a company in Pittsburgh called Rem-Cru. This company was a leading supplier of titanium products to the Air Force and to the Airline and Aerospace industry. Their products were crucial in the development of the C-130, the 727, and even the SR-71. They had several research-metallurgists at Rem-Cru but the only metallurgist who was messing around with TiSb was Milton Vordahl. Rem-Cru has 12 patents for TiSb alloys in the 1950's, all of them made by Milton Vordahl. However, remember I told you that TiSb was never used in anything? Well, the bosses eventually got tired of Milt messing around with a mixture that was never going to be used commercially, so they told Vordahl to stop wasting his time.
So it turns out that the tie found on the plane, a black clip-on, was first sold at JcPenney's in 1964 and this specific run of ties would have been depleted in stores by 1966. So the owner of the tie purchased it between those dates. So we know that when these three TiSb particles sparked onto the tie, it had to be after 1964. So if you go check out all the patents in the US Patent Office, TiSb where the Sb is over 10% only appears TWICE in the entire decade of 1960's. One is from a patent made by a Massachusetts electronics company who was trying to put it in a transistor for a radio. Like all the other TiSb folks before them, they saw it was volatile and this thing never left the lab.
The only other patent in the 1960's? Well, I'll be damned if it isn't our good buddy Milton Vordahl revisiting his old girlfriend one last time in 1965. And to no one's surprise this alloy also is too volatile to be used in anything, but Milt goes and gets the patent anyways.
The way alloys are patented is usually a solo effort. A chemist mixes up a special cocktail of chemicals and elements and shoves it into a forge to create a single ingot of metal. So given all this information it's quite possible that there are only two people on Earth who would have been standing near a forge as a TiSb alloy was created. Milton B. Vordahl and the fella from Sprague Electronics in Massachusetts. Well, I'll go ahead and answer your question: the dude from Sprague looked like Chris Farley. So he wasn't Cooper. Also, Sprague had nothing to do with the aviation industry and Rem-Cru had EVERYTHING to do with it.
A timeline of Milton B. Vordahl
- His parents were Norwegian immigrants and he was born shortly after they arrived in the States.
- In High School he was an expert rifleman and in doing our research we learned that many of his Washington State high school records were only recently broken. Of note: He was the only kid in his high school on both the Rifle Team and the Chemistry Club.
- He attended Washington State University where he eventually taught at while receiving his advanced degrees in Chemistry.
- He was working at DuPont Chemicals in Connecticut when WWII started. He first went to work for Remington Arms where he had multiple patents involving explosives and also had a patent for 30.06 rifle cartridges which made it to where they could be more reliably cycled through the M-1 Rifle for our infantry.
- In 1943 he was recruited to work on the Manhattan Project where he would work until 1946.
- He worked on the Hanford Site in Washington developing the Fat Man bomb that would eventually be dropped on Nagasaki. While there, he received an official commendation for solving a fuel cell equation that threatened the entire project.
- With the Manhattan Project, his specialty was Plutonium slugs. It's worth noting that his plutonium slugs were produced by an aluminum smelter outside Portland about a mile away from, and on the same road as, the infamous Tena Bar.
- Following the war he moved back to the East Coast and joined Crucible Steel outside Pittsburgh, PA.
- Over the next 20 years, his name appears on more inventions of Titanium alloys than any other American.
- 93% of the Titanium coating of the SR-71 was invented by Milton Vordahl. In fact, many of the alloys contained within the 727, C-130, and various other aircraft are traced to Vordahl patents.
- Despite the success of his patents, he did not get rich from royalties because they were assigned to the company he was working for.
- He moves in 1965 from Pittsburgh to Henderson, NV, just outside Las Vegas and has a lab set up for him at the TIMET Titanium plant there in Henderson.
- In 1967, he designs and has built for him a house in Pateros, WA. Over the next few years he divides his time between his home near Vegas (where his lab was) and his place in Washington.
- In the late 1960's, he was a Boeing consultant on their SST Project. For those who don't know, the SST (Super Sonic Transport) was to be the American answer to the Concorde. The Soviets had one as well. So because the Cold War was just a massive dick measuring contest, the US Government subsidized the development and construction of an entire fleet of these SST's. Boeing won the Government contract with their design and work began at the Seattle Boeing plant. This plane was almost 100% to be built out of titanium. As such, Vordahl was a consultant for Boeing on these matters. No doubt many of his alloys were to be included in the aircraft. By summer 1971, Congress had pulled the plug on the SST project. Boeing laid off literally over 30,000 engineers and titanium plants across the country shut down.
- When the SST project was cancelled, Vordahl had a laboratory at the TIMET plant in Henderson, NV. In August, 1971, 450 factory and lab workers there were fired. The plant manager at TIMET was named Don Cooper.
- Vordahl had around 80 patents. His first patent was published in 1943 and his final one was in 1971.
- He lived the rest of his life in obscurity living in his small town of Pateros in north-central Washington. He was an alderman and later mayor. His election results we have found look like Saddam Hussein or something. They are like "Vordahl - 287 votes, Smith - 1 vote, Jones - 1 vote". I will publish one of these funny clippings later.
- He dies of a rare neurological disease in 2002.
About Milton B. Vordahl:
- He was highly opinionated about everything. He seemingly hated everyone and every institution and would mercilessly launch his attacks in op-eds he had printed all across the country. We have found about 75 of them so far. In these op-eds he attacks every single administration from LBJ to Clinton, he supports apartheid, extols the virtues of eugenics, etc. The man even wrote op-eds attacking dogs... what a villain.
- He and his wife were essentially pagans. Milton would often write pagan-sounding op-eds about subjects and publish them in papers across the country. If the topic was something that usually would require a woman to have an opinion on (such as abortion), he would write using her name but it's very, very obvious that it's him doing the writing. His writing style is reminiscent of the Unabomber. It's like he's so smart that he's speaking over the heads of everyone. It's very unique and certainly shows signs of madness.
- He was an athlete. Many of the newspaper clippings you'll find when you do deep dives on him on newspaper archives are references to him winning amateur golf and tennis tournaments. He was also a runner/jogger well before his time. We have op-eds from the 1960's where he references going running.
- He was apparently such a miser and such a genius inventor that instead of purchasing contacts for his children in the 1960's, he MADE them their own contacts.
- Among his odd specialties, he was somehow an expert on dams. We have come across newspaper clippings where he was the featured speaker at the opening of dams.
- He has many published academic papers on aviation.
Coopery odds and ends:
- the FBI psychological profile on Cooper was done by John Douglas (of Mindhunter fame). Vordahl matches it almost perfectly. Douglas says that Cooper was someone with "extreme inventiveness", that Cooper was not a career criminal and that this was probably his first crime, that Cooper must have worked out and taken care of his body, that Cooper wasn't a poor man and this wasn't some desperate act or get rich quick scheme i.e. it wasn't just about the money, that Cooper was extremely skilled at problem solving quickly, that Cooper likely possessed a post-graduate education, that Cooper had intellectual knowledge of aviation issues but lacked practical knowledge i.e. he wasn't a pilot or an airplane mechanic, and many other things check out.
- Cooper had two matchbooks that he carried with him onto the flight that the witnesses saw: one was from SkyChef (an airport bar) and the other was from the International Correspondence School, which was basically a University of Phoenix type thing, except that they offered pretty advanced degrees. During my research I was looking through Vordahl's small town paper and it turns out that the week of the hijacking there was an ICS graduation dinner and banquet for Hydroelectric Engineer graduates at the Chief George Dam, which was two miles from where he was living at the time. There is a less than zero percent chance that this egghead would have missed this collection of eggheads two miles from his house. I do believe matches would be exactly the sort of thing that would be available at a graduation banquet for ICS.
- The only pre-hijacking fictional use of the name "Dan Cooper" in English comes from a 1937 AirTrails magazine short story titled "Canned Death". I found this on an archive site and no one had yet discovered it in the DB Cooper world. It is an 8 page short story that tells the story of a young airline pilot who is forced to defend himself from the attacks of these bushwacking pilots who force his airline to crash. Cooper gets out of his crashed airliner and beats all these thugs up. The name Dan Cooper is used around 50 times in the short story. The author uses it as a literary device i.e. "Dan Cooper laughed" or "Dan Cooper took a swig of whiskey". The page before and after this short story are articles about a guy named Clyde Pangborn. Pangborn gained some heroics for rescuing a skydiver who got caught on his wing. Vordahl and Cooper were from the same town. They knew each other. Their mothers played on the same competitive bridge team for years. There shouldn't be any doubt that the Vordahl household had a copy of this 1937 AirTrails magazine where friend of the family Clyde Pangborn was featured. So to get to the second Pangborn story you have to flip through all the Dan Cooper pages. I think this may be a source of the alias.
- His consulting gigs with Boeing would have exposed him to the knowledge that the aft stairs could be lowered in flight, something most people at the time were not aware of.
- When asked by the sketch artist to describe Cooper, the stewardesses could only describe one thing that was unique about his face. They said he had a protruding lower lip. Two of the stewardesses called it "pouty". The sketches all show this very unique feature that many have never noticed with D.B. Cooper. The farthest right "mouth" you see is from a 1989 Unsolved Mysteries episode where they had one of the flight attendants do a sketch. 18 years after the incident she still remembered Milton's weird pouty lip.
So there you have it. As it stands now, we have communicated with his family and not ONE of them have said anything like "no way" or "I just can't see him doing that". This is all quite telling. They are fully supportive of our investigative efforts. The place where Milton lived in 1971 is a beautiful place out in the boonies of north-central Washington. It is still owned by the family. We are currently looking to get an invite to come snoop around the place and go through his documents with our "Cooper-eyes" because according to his grandson (now 51 years old) many of his grandfather's things are still there in the workshop and all of his writings and journals and books are all still there.
I hope to get out there soon and hopefully find a $20 bill stuffed in a book somewhere. It looks lovely out there...it's calling my name.
Oh, and one last thing...
D.B. Cooper says "Sometimes crime does pay! Cheers!
My website with all of this info if you want to send to friends or family:
Was Vordahl Cooper?
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