On November 24, 1971, a man named Dan Cooper hijacked a Northwest Orient plane headed to Seattle, demanding $200,000 in ransom money and a flight to Mexico. After releasing passengers in Seattle, the hijacker, who would later be known as D.B. Cooper, parachuted out of the back of the plane somewhere over the Oregon-Washington border, with the ransom money strapped to his chest.

The country's only unsolved skyjacking, the case is now folklore, and D.B. Cooper has been immortalized as a dapper and dashing figure. His story was revived last week when children playing in Amboy, Washington, found what was initially suspected to be a possible link to the case: a parachute, partially buried in the ground.

Propeller Scout and user Lizbethxq submitted the story about a possible break in the Cooper case. "I had just watched a show on the Discovery Channel about D.B. Cooper," she tells Newsquake. "I thought it would make for an interesting story for Propeller."

F.B.I. agents have long contended that the hijacker probably didn't survive the fall. (A recent New York magazine article on the case describes the forbidding terrain this way: "The trees are hundreds of feet tall in the Cascades, a snow-capped collection of volcanoes and glaciers and miles of snowfields that never melt.") But that didn't stop locals from celebrating this latest twist in the D.B. Cooper saga. Dona Elliott, whose store in Ariel, Washington, is the site of an annual D.B. Cooper tribute, told the Los Angeles Times that if the parachute turned out to be authentic, "We're going to have to have a party."

But Friday, Earl Cossey, the very man who handed out the parachute to Cooper in 1971, delivered his verdict after being shown the material: It didn't match. "The D.B. Cooper parachute was made of nylon," he told The Columbian. "This 1945 parachute was made of silk." Cossey, who has been approached by the F.B.I. to examine a handful of other parachutes allegedly linked to the case, also said that the hijacker's chute was manufactured in the late 1950s or 1960s.

And late Tuesday, F.B.I. investigators agreed that the chute didn't belong to Cooper. "From the best we could learn from the people we spoke to, it just didn't look like it was the right kind of parachute in any way," agency spokeswoman Robbie Burroughs told the Associated Press.

The story didn't end there. As an April Fool's joke, Cossey told a reporter for the Columbian that the chute did belong to Cooper. According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a "story briefly appeared on the Columbian's Web site titled 'Parachute rigger now says it could have been DB Cooper's chute.'" Cossey subsequently received an angry phone call from the paper. "I could have been fired," one of the reporters told him. No doubt diehard D.B. Cooper fans appreciated Cossey's sense of humor.