A damaged fragment of a $20 bill was sold at an auction in Dallas for $134,200. The price of the lot is explained by the history of the banknote—it is linked to the famous 1971 hijacking by D.B. Cooper.

The story of this banknote began on November 24, 1971, when a passenger calling himself Dan Cooper boarded a Northwest Orient Airlines Boeing 727 flight from Portland to Seattle. Cooper handed a note to a flight attendant, claiming he had a bomb in his briefcase.

After landing, the passenger released 36 passengers in exchange for $200,000 in cash. The ransom consisted of 10,000 $20 bills and four parachutes. At the hijacker's instruction, the plane took off again and headed to Reno, during which Cooper jumped out over a dense forest with all the money.

It was only in February 1980 that three badly deteriorated bundles from the ransom were found in the sand on a beach. In the following decades, these banknotes occasionally appeared at major auctions.

The D.B. Cooper hijacking remains the only unsolved case in commercial aviation history. As Heritage Auctions notes, the sale of the banknote fragment for $134,200 shows that public interest in the unsolved case remains strong to this day.