Vector 23 (Excerpt).

1.The man who bought a one-way ticket with cash at Portland Airport on the afternoon of 24 November 1971 - who was the 36th passenger to board Flight 305 to Seattle-Tacoma Airport, who sat in seat 18C, who carried with him only a black attache case, and whose FBI file is now more than sixty volumes long - most certainly existed. 

He gave his name at the Northwest Orient Airlines counter as Dan Cooper.

Clyde Jabin, a young reporter rushing to file his story with United Press International that night spoke hastily on the phone with a records agent at the FBI.

“D. Cooper,” the agent had said.

“Is that ‘D’ as in dog? Or ‘B’ as in boy?” Jabin asked.

“Yeah, that’s right,” the agent said back in a hurry. “Look, I gotta go Clyde. Lots going on here tonight.” 

Jabin’s story identified the hijacker as D. B. Cooper. This was an unfortunate coincidence for a petty Portland Oregon criminal actually named D. B. Cooper who was visited by FBI agents Thanksgiving morning.

At about 8:13pm on the night of the 24th the nonexistent D. B. Cooper of Jabin’s story leapt from the aft stairway of the Boeing 727 as it passed over the Lewis River in southwestern Washington. He disappeared. Which is no small feat for a man who didn’t exist in the first place.

2.Everything presented here as fact is actually fact. Except for the things which aren’t.

3. The man who would be DB might have been born in 1926 in Vancouver Canada. His father could have been a fisherman, tall with thick arms, and a big beard that hung from his otherwise thin face. DB could have stood at the end of the dock each time his dad’s sixty-foot salmon trawler put out in the direction of Vancouver Island. DB might have waited there every time watching as the boat disappeared around a bend in the channel on its way out to the sea; such a very small boat when compared to the vastness of such a dark sea. As a little Canadian boy he could have read the Belgian comic book Les Aventures de Dan Cooper about the adventures of a Royal Canadian Air Force test pilot named Dan Cooper. The comic was never sold in the United States.  

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