In 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper hijacked a plane, collected $200,000 in ransom, and vanished into a storm over the Pacific Northwest — parachute, cash, and all. Nine years later, an eight-year-old boy digging in the sand along the Columbia River found $5,800 of it, badly deteriorated but still rubber-banded together. It's the only physical trace ever recovered — and it raises more questions than it answers. This week on Actually..., we follow the money: the diatom analysis that upended the leading theory of how it got there, the FBI's surprisingly short-lived search for the marked bills, a clip-on tie that's become the center of a decades-long DNA fight, and the family that's spent fifty years wondering if their own father was Cooper. Plus, where the case actually stands as of the FBI's quiet, unexplained move in December 2025.

In 1971, a "real diary" from an anonymous, drug-addicted teenage girl hit bookshelves — and terrified a generation. Except the girl never existed. "Go Ask Alice" was invented by Beatrice Sparks, a struggling writer with no real diary, no credentials, and no shortage of ambition. This week on Actually..., we trace how Sparks turned a fabricated hoax into a publishing empire, exploited a grieving mother's trust to fictionalize her son into a Satanist for "Jay's Journal," helped ignite the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, and somehow kept the con running for over five decades — right up to her death in 2012, still maintaining every word was true.

Show Notes:

Referenced in this episode: Unmask Alice by Rick Emerson — the definitive investigation into Beatrice Sparks and the "Go Ask Alice" hoax.

In 1966, the CIA spent five years and roughly $20 million (in today's money) turning a house cat into a surveillance device — implanting a microphone in its ear canal, a transmitter at the base of its skull, a battery in its abdomen, and threading an antenna wire down its spine and out through its tail. The mission to eavesdrop on Soviet agents outside their embassy in Washington, D.C. lasted less than 30 seconds before it ended in the street. This week on Actually..., we dig into the real, declassified story behind Project Acoustic Kitty — the surgeries, the training that never stood a chance, the conflicting insider accounts of what actually happened when those van doors opened, and how one of the strangest chapters in Cold War espionage still echoes in intelligence work today.