Video: Where is D.B. Cooper?

LESTER HOLT, co-host: It remains the only unsolved hijacking on the FBI 's books and on this 40th anniversary of his disappearance dozens of amateur sleuths have made it their personal crusade to figure out what happened to D.B. Cooper .

Mr. JERRY THOMAS: He could have landed anywhere in there and see what kind of terrain he had to come down?

HOLT: Jerry Thomas has been hunting D.B. Cooper for 25 years, deep in the woods of Washington state .

Mr. THOMAS: Now you get a general idea in here what he's going to have to negotiate.

HOLT: The army veteran believes the thick, rugged terrain could have played a role in the hijacker's fate.

Mr. THOMAS: The bottom line is he was not experienced enough or prepared for the terrain in which he jumped in.

HOLT: Thomas doesn't think Cooper survived.

Mr. TOM KAY: Now, there's some very good reasons to believe he lived because we've never found a body in 40 years.

Unidentified Man #1: I feel he very, very much survived it.

HOLT: Over the years, there have been dozens who have tried to crack the case and now on the 40th anniversary, these amateur sleuths are comparing notes.

Unidentified Man #2: If he's out there, there's no way he cannot come to this event.

HOLT: On Saturday, Geoffrey Gray , author of "Skyjack" hosted the first ever Cooper symposium in Portland , Oregon .

Man #2: Now you have this motley collection of folk all in a room because a guy boarded a plane and passed her note which said, 'Miss, I have a bomb here. I would like you to sit by me.'

JOHN CHANCELLOR reporting: There's a huge manhunt on in the state of Washington .

On Thanksgiving Eve 1971 the hijacker took over the flight from

HOLT: $200,000 and a means to escape.

Portland to Seattle. His demand: He asked for four parachutes, two backups and two primaries.

Unidentified Man #3: His demands met, the hijacker, who bought the ticket under the name Dan Cooper , freed passengers and instructed the crew to take off and fly south. The hijacker ordered the entire crew into the cockpit. He had the cabin to himself. At one point, they get a warning light that tells them that the rear exit had been opened. Cooper walks down these stairs, opens up the lower ramp, jumps out of the airplane and into history. He jumped into a cold, rainy night near the Washington / Oregon border. And not until some of the money was found in this Columbia River beach eight years later was there any sign of Cooper . Since 1971 , there have been thousands of tips from those claiming to be or know where D.B. Cooper is, another made public on Saturday.

HOLT: Well, we believe we know who D.B. Cooper is. He was a friend of ours that we met back in 1977 . I flew her for a full year before she told us that she used to be a man.

Mr. RON FORMAN (Claims He Knows Identity Of D.B. Cooper): Meanwhile new theories continue to emerge about the case. This week reports resurfaced suggesting that Cooper may have been Canadian and possibly got the idea from a comic book .

HOLT: Dan Cooper is the character in a comic book . He is a pilot for the Canadian Air Force .

Mr. KAY: Scientist Tom Kay has been investigating this lead as well as a possible link Cooper may have had to a rare metal. Kay and his team recently discovered traces of titanium on Cooper 's neck tie.

HOLT: We're kind of narrowing him down to someone who would have immigrated from Canada , worked in the titanium industry. Probably had a military history in Canada.

Mr. KAY: As far as motive, Geoffrey Gray believes it's Cooper 's own words that are most telling.

HOLT: One of the things that I've found in the files deals directly with this motive and it's right here. "It's not because I have grudge against your airline it's just because I have grudge." Dan Cooper likely was an extreme loner, depressed, I believe suicidal.

Mr. GEOFFREY GRAY: Ralph Himmelsbach , one of the FBI agents first assigned to the case, believes it's highly unlikely Cooper survived the jump.

HOLT: He bailed out of an airline going almost 200 miles an hour at 10,000 feet, with the air temperature outside of the airplane at seven degrees below zero. I think of him as being a just another sleazy rotten criminal.

Mr. RALPH HIMMELSBACH: Regardless of what you believe 40 years later these Cooper sleuths are determined to solve the mystery.

HOLT: Becoming part of the story is actually what you have to do in order to solve a case.

Mr. THOMAS: It is a great American mystery that's never been solved. And it's like the X Prize . When you throw a challenge out to the public, the public will pick it up and do a very good job of trying to solve it.

Mr. KAY:

Source: http://video.today.msnbc.msn.com/today/45452330/

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