“D.B. Cooper” was actually the name of an early suspect in the case; the perpetrator had identified himself as “Dan Cooper”, and the police already knew of a man with a criminal record whose name happened to be “D.B. Cooper”, so they went and harassed him unnecessarily and threw his name out there to be reported in the papers. But you see what happened: the name “D.B. Cooper” is so much more storyworthy than “Dan Cooper”, so it stuck in the popular imagination.

It occurred to me, as it probably has to everyone, that this hijacker may actually have called himself “Dan Cupid”. Is that not possible?

They spent millions of dollars trying to find this guy, detectives, trackers, navy experts, at one point a division of soldiers was sent out to comb the area, stumbling over corpses of long-dead, irrelevant murder victims in caves, etc. They would find a skull and get excited, hoping it was that of “D.B. Cooper”, but then the scientists would report that it was just some unimportant person that had been killed probably by some random maniac.

“Yeah, uh-huh, whatever. Where's D.B. Cooper? Where? Where!?”

Imagine if your friend had been murdered and left in some cave but the authorities didn't care because they were so messed up about D.B. Cooper.

“Yeah, whatever. D.B. Cooper stole money. Do you not know what that means? He made us look like dicks”, they explain.