The 2016 Letter That Said “Still Open”

Name: The 2016 Letter That Said “Still Open”
Genre: Documentary

The final mystery is no longer only Cooper's identity, but how an unresolved hijacking persists through surviving, withheld, and missing records.

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Transcript

After taking the money, Cooper jumped from the plane—and vanished.
That 1971 skyjacking became the D.B. Cooper case, with no confirmed identity or fate.
For 45 years, the FBI ran an active probe into the disappearance.
Cooper handed a flight attendant a note indicating an explosive device. Miss, you'd better look at that note. I have a bomb.
The FBI records search located one active file.
The FBI withheld that entire active file under a public-records exemption.
The same search found another potentially relevant file—but that record had been destroyed.
It was disposed of under the FBI's retention plan, leaving no record to review.
A vanished record cannot confirm what it contained, or whether it answered anything.
The FBI and U.S. Air Force ran experiments to determine how the theft was carried out.
But many collection records had not yet been digitized when the archive described them.
In November 2023, U.S. Archivist examined FBI case files in Seattle.
The archivist's name was Colleen Shogan, now clear to us. The page turns, and the room falls still around it.
The FBI suspended its active investigation in 2016, later accounts say.
The 2016 Office of Government Information Services letter said the FBI probe stayed open.
And beyond the record, the unanswered silence gathers.

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