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An artist's sketch of "Dan Cooper," the man who famously hijacked a Northwest Airlines flight in 1971.

(The Oregonian file)

"SCHAFFNER said that she had been seated for about 30 seconds, and as the plane started taxiing toward the runway, the hijacker turned around and handed her an envelope. She said that at first she thought he was making a pass at her and did not open it immediately. She said the man turned around and looked at her several times, and she felt that he was indicating that he wanted her to open the envelope immediately."

So goes the FBI's detailed report of its interview with one of the flight attendants who worked the Northwest Orient Airlines flight that was hijacked on Nov. 24, 1971, by a man calling himself "Dan Cooper," now known to history as "D.B. Cooper."

The note inside the envelope said, "MISS -- I have a bomb here and I would like you to sit by me."

"Cooper" extorted $200,000 from authorities, which he took possession of during a stopover in Seattle. (The flight originated in Portland.) The plane then took to the air again, and he put on a parachute and jumped out over southwest Washington. He immediately disappeared into the wilds of the Northwest -- and was reborn in our imaginations.

The FBI officially closed the D.B. Cooper case earlier this year, insisting that it had "exhaustively reviewed all credible leads" over 45 years.

The famed case, which has led to feature films and TV documentaries, has launched an army of amateur sleuths, known as "Cooperites." They don't want to give up the chase, and Geoffrey Gray, author of a 2011 book about the plane hijacking, is giving them reason to keep chasing.

Gray is publishing online the FBI's Cooper case files, which he acquired while doing research for his book, "Skyjack: The Hunt for D.B. Cooper." He wants his fellow Cooperites to burrow into the documents and help him come up with new leads and theories. This week, he published the FBI's interview reports with passengers and crew, and in the weeks ahead he will release hundreds more documents.

"We're opening up everything we have to the public, and we need help solving the case," Gray told the Washington Post.

Those who want to help Gray go through the documents (he admits he hasn't reviewed all of them) have to sign up for access on the website True Ink, which will allow them to type their investigation notes into an interactive section on the site.

The documents published so make clear that Cooper was a cool customer (and very polite), and that the flight crew handled the situation with crisp professionalism. Many passengers weren't even aware that the flight had been hijacked until the plane had landed in Seattle.

Will this document dump ultimately lead to the identification of D.B. Cooper? Probably not, seeing as they're the files from the FBI, whose professional investigators spent 45 years trying to figure out the hijacker's real identity. But who knows? And whether the files' online publication leads anywhere or not, they unquestionably make for interesting reading.

"This is the real stuff," Gray says. "These are internal reports and actual investigative documents that the bureau used to investigate the case."

-- Douglas Perry