Farmer's Children Find 'Chute Near Vancouver, WA

After all these years, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports there are still new wrinkles emerging in the DB Cooper case, the only unsolved airline hijacking in history.

Larry Carr, the FBI's lead agent on the Cooper case, tells the paper a farmer in Clark County, near Vancouver, WA claims his kids were playing in a field he'd recently plowed when they discovered a parachute.

Carr says the parachute is similar to the one Cooper jumped with, and muses, "If DB Cooper had pulled his chute not long after that jump, he would have landed in that area. Is this DB Cooper's parachute? We don't know yet."

Carr says the unearthed parachute is too worn to read any markings. He's hoping someone with expert knowledge can assist in determining whether it's a Navy NB6 backpack, consistent with the one working parachute known to have gone out the cabin door with DB Cooper back in 1971.

As ANN reported earlier this year, the FBI released new information it hoped would finally identify the infamous hijacker, including new DNA evidence.

Here's a prediction. Either the 'chute will disappear like the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and spend the next century in an long-forgotten evidence warehouse...or it'll end up fetching a handsome sum for that farmer on Ebay, as somewhere, the real DB Cooper smiles knowingly.

FMI: www.fbi.gov/page2/dec07/dbcooper123107.html