3000 Days Later - The Boy Who Found D.B. Cooper's Ghost Money

A boy dug up $5,800 of hijack ransom from a riverbank.

The bills had last been seen on November 24, 1971, the night they were handed to the infamous hijacker known as D.B. Cooper, who had extorted $200,000 from a flight out of Portland. After getting the cash in Seattle, Cooper demanded the plane fly to Mexico, and then leaped from the aircraft's back stairs somewhere over Southwestern Washington. Nine years passed. No trace of the man or the money.

Then on February 10, 1980, exactly 3,000 days after the skyjacking, 8-year-old Brian Ingram discovered part of Cooper's ransom buried at a Columbia River beach called Tena Bar. The boy and his family were on a picnic on the Washington side of the river in Clark County, and Brian was smoothing the sand so his dad could build a campfire.

Some bills were so deteriorated they were unreadable. Others had shrunk to the size of business cards or turned black. The family estimated only about 30 bills were still in relatively good condition. Using serial numbers recorded on microfilm before the hijacking, the FBI confirmed the bills came from Cooper's ransom.

The FBI later said Ingram's find was the bureau's first physical evidence since Cooper vanished into the night, and decades later it remains its most compelling. The Columbia River ransom money remains the only confirmed physical evidence from the hijacking found outside the aircraft.

In 1986, a court judgment split the recovered bills between Ingram and the airline's insurance company. Ingram received $2,760. In 2008, 15 authenticated bills sold for $37,000 through a Dallas auction house, two to three times more than expected.

The FBI officially suspended active investigation of the case in 2016, and the hijacker's identity has never been confirmed.

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