I have a real affection for unsolved mysteries, the kinds of stories that forever fascinate people so long as we never definitively learn what actually happened. Did Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan run out of fuel, crash in open water, and drown, or did they manage to set down on some uncharted rock somewhere and live as castaways, at least for a time? Were Butch and Sundance killed in a shootout with government troops in Bolivia or did one or both of them manage to slip away and return to the U.S., where they assumed new identities and lived to be old men? Was Brushy Bill Roberts really Billy the Kid, as he claimed, or was he just crazy? The possibilities are invariably more exciting than mundane (and frequently very grim) fact, which is why I always find myself rejoicing a bit when some new piece of evidence in these cases raises more questions than it solves.

Consider, for example, this story about the discovery of an old parachute in southwestern Washington. In a nutshell, some kids found a ‘chute partly buried in the woods near where the notorious hijacker D.B. Cooper is believed to have jumped from a 727 way back in 1971 with $200,000 in cash, and there’s some speculation that the ‘chute may have been his.

That’s pretty cool on its own, but here’s the interesting thing about today’s news: Some of Cooper’s money was found on a beach near Vancouver in 1980; the official theory has long been that Cooper did not survive his jump and the recovered cash had washed down the Washougal River to arrive on the beach. But if Cooper came down in the area where this parachute has been found, there’s no way that recovered cash could have naturally ended up in the Washougal. In other words, Cooper may have survived his landing and somehow lost some of his dough miles away, or else somebody else found the money and later dropped some of it in the Washougal. Either way, it’s a far more interesting thought than the image of a dead hijacker hanging in a tree somewhere with a broken neck and his ill-gotten booty falling into a river. (For the record, I like to believe that Cooper survived, eluded capture, and lived it up somewhere. I also like to think that Butch Cassidy returned to the States and visited his sister in 1925, just as she claimed. What can I say? I’m a romantic with a thing for lovable rogues.)

The FBI is currently examining the parachute to determine if it’s the right type and age to have been Cooper’s. I hope it is, for the sake of a good story…