The Mystery of D.B. Cooper

In 1971 a man boarded a flight from Portland to Seattle, said he had a bomb, demanded two hundred thousand dollars and four parachutes, let the passengers off, had the plane take off again and jumped out over the northwest of America in the middle of the night. He was never found. The documentary is not about the case but about the claims to his identity: four separate people say it was somebody they knew. John Dower directs. The method is to give no single answer. The four claims are presented in turn; each is convincing in itself and none can be proved. The narrative forces the viewer to decide and then shows that deciding is not possible. The most interesting part is the claimants themselves. People who have given years to this, former wives and relatives; at a certain point the documentary starts describing the obsession rather than the case. The FBI closed the file in 2016 and it remains the only unsolved hijacking in American history. There are dramatised sequences and they are the weakest element; the escape is unnecessarily dramatised. It was released on HBO in 2020. Who it is for: anyone interested in unsolved case documentaries and the America of the seventies. Who it is not for: there is no answer, most of the claims are weak, and the narrative starts repeating itself.