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After investigating a thousand suspects since a person who called himself (or herself) D.B. Cooper  skyjacked a Boeing 727 on November 24, 1971, the FBI thought it finally had a “credible” tip. Until last night, that is, when CBS News reported that the Cooper lead had fizzled and the FBI was expected to formally rule out the new evidence.

Tattered remains of ransom money in $20 bills Photo: FBI

Late last week a British newspaper leaked that the FBI sent evidence to its forensics lab in Quantico, Virginia, after an informant led them to recover an unspecified item from a person who has been dead for a decade.

Composite sketch Photo: FBI

But by Monday morning, author Geoffrey Grey told NBC’s Today staff that he doubted the credibility of any new evidence, because it would contain so many fingerprints as to defy an individual confirmation. Grey, coincidentally, was on Today to promote Skyjack, his book on D.B. Cooper for sale next week.

The skyjacker and most of a $200,000 ransom—other than $5,800 found in 1980 buried in a bank of the Columbia River in Washington—remain missing.

Still.

If you haven’t seen it yet, take a look at this video of the Martin Aircraft Company’s recent mile-high test of its personal jetpack and safety parachute system. The flight topped out at 5,000 feet, but could have gone higher. While a dummy was on board for this test, the New Zealand-based company is marketing their $100,000 jetpack as personal transportation, with special appeal to military and rescue workers. The design goal is to fly for up to 30 minutes at top speeds of 63 miles per hour. And if the gas-powered, two-stroke piston engine conks out, there’s always the parachute.

A WAVE parachute rigger. U.S. Navy photo.

On March 23, 1944, a British Lancaster bomber over Germany’s Ruhr River took heavy flak and exploded. As his oxygen mask and goggles began to melt, and his flight suit burned, tail gunner Nick Alkemade heard the pilot ordering the crew to bail out.

The aircraft was at 18,000 feet, and while Alkemade was wearing his parachute harness, he could see that his silk parachute—stored in its rack by the turret doors—was already burning.

What to do?

Well, if you’re Alkemade, you walk calmly over to the turret doors and backflip into space.

As Paul Brickhill wrote in 1950 (“They Fell without Parachutes—and Lived!”), three hours later Alkemade “opened his eyes and saw pinpoints of stars through a screen of pine branches above…. The branches had broken his fall, and then he had dropped into a deep snowdrift, and the snow and his lined leather kit had softened the blow still more.”

Dazed from a bump on his head, and immobile due to a wrenched knee, Alkemade lay in the snow until the Germans arrived. They took Alkemade to Stalag Luft III, where he met Brickhill, an Australian Spitfire pilot and  journalist who had also been shot down.

19th-century concept parachute. Illustration courtesy NASM.

The Germans gave Alkemade a document which said, It has been investigated and corroborated by the German authorities that the claim made by Sergeant Alkemade is true in all respects, namely that he made a descent from 18,000 feet without a parachute and made a safe landing without injuries, the parachute having been on fire in the aircraft. He landed in deep snow among fir trees.

Amazingly, Alkemade was not the only airman in the camp who had survived a parachuteless fall; Brickhill interviewed several others during his time as a POW. There was Wing Commander Ken Burns, whose Lancaster exploded at 18,000 feet, throwing him (still strapped in his seat) from the aircraft. When he regained consciousness, he was lying in a cabbage patch with his parachute still on—unopened. (Burns’ fall resulted in a collapsed lung, a cracked spine, and an amputated arm.)

Flight Lieutenant Gutowski, also in the RAF, had to bail from his Spitfire after being hit by a Focke-Wulf Fw 190. His parachute malfunctioned; after falling 150 feet, he landed in a pile of beet leaves, where he “rolled unhurt to the ground.”

There’s also the case of Pilot Officer Fred Bist, of the Canadian Air Force. His Douglas Boston bomber was strafed at 500 feet when the airplane broke in two; Bist was thrown out of the aircraft—without his parachute. He landed in a plowed field, where he was discovered by two German soldiers. They took Bist to the hospital where he was treated for a broken neck, severe burns, and a broken hand.

French artillery spotter Capitaine Larmier was in a Potez 63 when an enemy shell hit his aircraft and damaged the controls. Larmier jumped over the side. Unfortunately, he was at 100 feet, and parachutes need 400 feet to deploy. Just as the parachute started to stream out of his pack, Larmier hit “the top of a haystack, bounced, and stayed up there, winded, shocked and dumbfounded.”

Alas, his luck didn’t hold out. The Germans found him, “and he went on to five years behind barbed wire.”

That’s what they’re doing at the Royal Air Force’s Brize Norton base as an adjunct to regular jump training.