Simmons' was on "In Search Of" back in the late 70's..his wife spoke as well...
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The only suspect mentioned in this docu is - Robt Rackstraw! Says, totally cleared. Then Colbert brings Rackstraw up all over again decades later, Colbert avoids the previous clearing by the FBI completely and goes on and on with his production. All of this happening at the very time in history that forensic science has advanced to the point where it actually offers advanced tools never available before, which could address the DB Cooper case.
Maybe the FBI has closed this case simply to try and suppress public involvement, so it can address the case in private on its own terms, for a change. The public side of the Cooper case has become so heavy and demanding, it had to be costing the FBI in resources. Dealing with the public is not free and can actually hamper investigating a case in the internet age.
It is also interesting to me that to date, Colbert has not used many modern forensic tools and methods available to crime investigators today. Colbert and his world class team have produced nothing and look like a bunch of Luddites! What accounts for that? It's a curious juxtaposition in 2018! Why is Colbert focusing on primitive methods and ideas vs modern forensic science? It's a puzzlement. 
Colbert and his team seem to be totally clueless about how modern investigations work? Mountains of advertising and promos' do not suffice for a modern criminal investigation today!
Entirely in agreement, Georger. This is the video that prompted my questions about the Simmons couple - it is invaluable in my writing for other reasons, ie. I can SEE what airports looked like in the 70s to make my fiction more realistic - but it also blew my mind when I watched it a few weeks back. (1) This video was from 1979 and Rackstraw was already done. Yet here we are, almost 40 years later, and Uncle Bob is still around. (2) This couple, one of whom says Cooper glared at him, and no FBI interview.
I'm such a Cooper nerd now, my hubby laughs. I'm screaming at the TV during this doc like it's a hockey game. It's also what prompted my brief side-foray into the vagaries of memory. They may well have gotten caught up in the celeb aspect of the case. Or they may actually have convinced themselves they remember now what they once only imagined. It's entirely possible some other suit glared at Simmons, or that no one did, or that he's remembering something from another time in his life.
Am delighted someone provided a variation on a quote I've always loved - "don't attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity." Humans make errors, and I don't necessarily think the more glaring errors in the FBI NORJAK investigation were due to a cover-up. After all, the biggest feather in their cap would be to solve the thing, regardless if it implicated someone in the Bureau or pointed to sloppy work by decades-earlier agents. It's the same reason I don't buy the motive "Cooper did this to embarrass the FBI." At that particular point in aviation history, the FBI didn't need his help.
Georger may be right, it may well be that the sheer amount of public input, curiosity, and criticism of the case, not the mention the hundreds of suspects brought to their attention, were hampering the feds more than helping them.
There's still something niggling at me about the History doc, namely the timing. Why close the case in conjunction with such a dramatic doc? Though, come to think of it, it may have been a way of getting a jump on Colbert. Tina herself eliminated Rackstraw, which is set and match for most viewers. By systematically eliminating each of the major named suspects as of that time, History helped the FBI show why closing the case seemed logical. (Caveat: to my mind, the doc didn't do that great a job eliminating most of the suspects - it piqued my own interest in a completely different suspect when I first saw it, in fact - but even in the early days of my own falling down this rabbit hole, I couldn't take Rackstraw seriously as a suspect and didn't understand why they were devoting so much of the doc to him and showing Tina only his photo.)
We can also probably assume they've kept back at least some factoids or scraps of evidence for the purpose of eliminating anyone else who might come forward to "confess", though at this point the prankster would have to be an elderly man.
Oh, weird little synchronicity. My sister just posted a video of Skippy the Bush Kangaroo. Huge show among kids in Canada (it was an Aussie import) in 1971 and I once again imagined DB jumping for middle-aged joy at the money. I mentioned Skippy on one of these threads yesterday. So for any Jungians out there, I'm taking this as a sign to keep looking. Or maybe to stay young at heart. Or maybe I'm getting money. Oh, I hope it's that one.
