Investigators now claim that they believe they finally discovered the identity of D.B. Cooper, the infamous 1971 airplane hijacker.

Daily Mail reported that a team of cold case experts say they have decoded a 1972 message addressed to The Portland Oregonian Newspaper that was supposedly sent by Cooper months after the hijacking. The experts say that they found a confession in the message tying Cooper’s identity to 74-year-old Vietnam War veteran Robert W. Rackstraw.

The FBI gave the name D.B. Cooper to the mysterious man who hijacked a Boeing 727 at Seattle-Tacoma airport, using the alias Dale Cooper, and held its crew and passengers hostage with a bomb. After his demands for $200,000, which is the equivalent of $2 million today, were met, Cooper forced the crew to take off. Once they were in the air, he then famously parachuted out over the dense Pacific Northwest woods and disappeared.

In the decades since then, Cooper has become known as one of the biggest masterminds of the 20th century.

Television and film producer Tom Colbert obtained the confession letter after he has successfully sued the FBI for the DB Cooper files. Colbert has led a team of 40 private investigators in trying to find Cooper’s identity.

“This letter is too (sic) let you know I am not dead but really alive and just back from the Bahamas, so your silly troopers up there can stop looking for me. That is just how dumb this government is. I like your articles about me but you can stop them now. D.B. Cooper is not real,” the letter reads. “I want out of the system and saw a way through good ole Unk. Now it is Uncle’s turn to weep and pay one of it’s (sic) own some cash for a change. (And please tell the lackey cops D.B. Cooper is not my real name).”

Colbert handed the letter over to Rick Sherwood, a former member of the Army Security Agency, for him to decode.

“No one even knew about this letter,’ Colbert explained. “When I got it, I noticed it was typed just like (a different Cooper letter), so I called a code breaker and showed it to him. He said, ‘Tom, you’re not going to believe it, but his confession is in here.'”

Sherwood managed to decode the letter by finding four different phrases that were used numerous times throughout it. These four phrases were “D.B. Cooper is not real,” “Uncle” or “Unk” which referred to Uncle Sam, “the system,” and “lackey cops.”

Sherwood was able to decode this and translate “through good ole Unk” into “by skyjacking a jet plane” and “And please tell the lackey cops” into “I am 1st LT Robert Rackstraw.”

Rackstraw spent years serving in the military in the 1st Cavalry Division, which is one of the first major American air assault divisions. It was in the military that Rackstraw learned to parachute, and he was given two Distinguished Flying Crosses before being thrown out of the army when his superiors learned that he had lied about dropping out of high school and attending two colleges.

The FBI announced in 2016 that they were closing their investigation into Cooper, claiming that he died of exposure in the woods between Oregon and Washington after jumping from the plane.

Do you think this team has found D.B. Cooper’s real identity? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section!

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