On Feb. 10, 1980, 8-year-old Brian Ingram and his family were picnicking by the Columbia River near Vancouver, Wash., when Brian found a clue to a real-life mystery story that had been written shortly after he was born. While clearing a spot for a camp fire, "I got down to use my hand and arm to scoop the sand clear," recalls Brian, now 15. "I hit this sort of lump and dug it out. I wasn't excited at all at first, then I brushed the sand off, and it was money!"
The soggy, semisolidified packet of 299 identifiable $20 bills turned out to be the only tangible evidence ever recovered from the 1971 hijacking and ransoming of a Northwest Orient Airlines 727 by an unidentified man who came to be known as D.B. Cooper. With $200,000 in $20s, Cooper had parachuted out of the back of the plane at night over heavily wooded country somewhere in southwestern Washington and was never seen again.