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Informationen zum Autor Kirsten Anderson; Illustrated by Tim Foley Klappentext "On November 24, 1971, an unidentified man hijacked an airplane that was flying from Portland, Oregon, to Seattle, Washington. He demanded $200,000 and told a flight attendant that he had weapons. After stopping in Seattle, the hijacker was given the money and he released the attendants. But he demanded that the pilots stay on-board, refuel, and fly him to Mexico City. Just thirty minutes after the plane took off, the man jumped out of the aircraft and parachuted away...never to be seen or heard from again. Did he escape with the money? Did he even survive the jump? Over fifty years later, the FBI still does not know what happened to the man they call 'D. B. Cooper.' Find out what we do know about one of America's most famous, unsolved mysteries in this book for young readers"-- Leseprobe What Do We Know About the Mystery of D. B. Cooper? It was clear and cool in Vancouver, Washington, on February 10, 1980, and the Ingram family decided to go on a picnic. Dwayne and Patricia Ingram drove with their eight-year-old son, Brian, to Tena Bar, a sandbar on the Columbia River where people often fished for salmon. Dwayne told Brian to clear a patch of sand so he could build a fire. He planned to grill some hot dogs. Brian swept his arm across the sand like a broom, smoothing it down. As he did so, his arm bumped against something. He brushed away more sand and pulled out a small blackened bundle. He looked at it closely. It was a stack of twenty--dollar bills! Brian kept digging, and pulled out more money. Then he ran to show the stacked bundles to his parents. They counted the money and found a total of $5,800. The family looked to see if there was any more cash in the sand, but didn’t find any. Still, $5,800 was a lot of money. The Ingrams planned to bring it to their bank and get it changed into new bills. But before they did that, they showed their find to a friend, who told them to bring the bills to the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The friend believed that the money could be related to a famous unsolved criminal case. The Ingrams drove to the FBI office in Portland, Oregon, where they met Special Agent Ralph Himmelsbach. He had been working on the case for years and had followed a lot of leads that went nowhere. But he agreed to look at the money Brian had found. Agent Himmelsbach checked each bill’s serial number against a list. (Serial numbers on paper money include the year the bill was printed and a string of other numbers. They can be used to identify a bill.) Slowly, Himmelsbach realized the numbers matched his list! This was some of the money he’d been looking for. It was the first big break in a case that had completely stumped the FBI for almost nine years. Brian Ingram didn’t know it yet, but he had just become part of the story of one of the greatest unsolved crimes in American history. It was a story that had captured the nation’s attention in 1971, and still has a hold on people’s imaginations today. For decades, people have tried to solve this mystery. Many have dedicated their lives to the investigation. But no one has been able to answer the big question at the center of it all: Who was D. B. Cooper? Chapter 1 Flying the Friendly—and Not-so-Friendly Skies What is called the “jet age” took off in the United States on October 26, 1958, when a Pan American Airways jet flew from New York City to Paris. The jet--engine aircraft was invented in 1939 and had been used by the military for years, but this was the first civilian flight for American ticket--buying passengers. And it changed travel forever. The best propeller--powered planes once took more than twelve hours to fly from the United States to Europe, but the new jets could get there in only seven. Suddenly, the world felt a lot smaller....
