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The mystery surrounding the disappearance of notorious airline hijacker D.B. Cooper might be unraveling.

Earlier this month, children unearthed a parachute outside their rural Amboy, Wash., home where their father had been grading a road. The parachute is similar to the one Cooper jumped with in November 1971. It's stamped with "307551 ... FEB 21 1946,” but has not yet been positively identified by the FBI as the one Cooper used.

For Oklahoma native Brian Ingram, the discovery is more than a fascinating tidbit.

Ingram, 36, and now residing in Mena, Ark., has lived with the mystery of the unsolved case for most of his life. In 1980, Ingram found $5,880 of Cooper's ransom money on a sandy bank of the Columbia River near Vancouver, Wash.

FBI agents authenticated the wadded bundles at the time through documented serial numbers on the fragmented $20 bills.

"If that is D.B. Cooper's parachute, then the money I found had to have been buried by him,” Ingram told The Oklahoman on Wednesday. "That's just wild. I'm really, really curious if the parachute will match.

"If it does, there's no way that money could have gotten where it did naturally.”

Amboy is 27 miles northeast of Vancouver, and more importantly, within Cooper's projected landing area. FBI agents defined that area based on the estimated time Cooper jumped from a Boeing 727 on Nov. 24, 1971. That night, Cooper jumped with $200,000 and a Navy-issue NB6 parachute.

Many experts, including retired FBI agent Ralph Himmelsbach and current FBI agent Larry Carr, don't think Cooper survived the jump. They characterize Cooper as likely a novice skydiver who naively flung himself into a torrential downpour and fierce winds.

"If D.B. Cooper had pulled his chute not long after that jump, he would have landed in that (Amboy) area,” Carr told The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. "Is this D.B. Cooper's parachute? We don't know yet.

"If this canopy can be traced to an NB6, it will start looking good.”

The prospective evidence could drastically alter Carr's theory.

"A lot of theories will be blown out of the water with this one,” Ingram said. "If the parachute was his, then I'd say it is likely he survived.”

Ingram based his conclusion on the one piece of evidence he knows best — the D.B. Cooper ransom money.

"If that's the case,” Ingram said, "then I'd say he buried that money.”

A long-standing FBI theory is that Cooper lost the money during the jump, and the few surviving bundles found by Ingram nine years later had likely been washed down river.

But Amboy doesn't sit on any watershed connected with the Columbia River.

"If this is D.B. Cooper's parachute, the money could not have arrived at its discovery location by natural means,” Carr said. "That whole theory is out the window.”