SEATTLE -- A parachute unearthed in Southwest Washington could explain whether D.B. Cooper survived his leap from a plane 36 years ago.

The man calling himself Dan Cooper, also known as D.B. Cooper, boarded a Northwest flight in Portland for a flight to Seattle on the night of Nov, 24, 1971, and commandeered the plane, claiming he had dynamite.

In Seattle, he demanded and got $200,000 and four parachutes and demanded to be flown to Mexico. Somewhere over southwestern Washington, he jumped out of the plane's tail exit with two of the chutes and the money strapped to his body. He was never seen again, alive or dead.

Cooper's crime has kept investigators guessing over the decades. But the parachute, which was recently dug up by the children of a Clark County farmer in the area where the mysterious skyjacker likely landed, has raised new questions.

"It's fragile to the touch, and it's obviously been in the ground for some time," agent Larry Carr said of the canvas.

Children playing outside their home near Amboy found the chute sticking up from the ground this month in an area where their father had been grading a road.

Carr says they pulled on the fabric as much as they could, then cut the parachute's ropes with scissors. They had seen recent media coverage on the D.B. Cooper case and urged their dad to call the FBI.

The FBI previously said that while Cooper was originally thought to have been an experienced jumper, it has since concluded that was wrong and that he almost certainly didn't survive the jump in the dark and rain. He hadn't specified a route for the plane to fly and had no way of knowing where he was when he went out the exit.

"There are lots of odds against him surviving this jump," Carr said.

Until the parachute was recovered, the best evidence in the case was the $5,800 recovered along the Columbia River in 1980. A boy found the decomposing $20 bills in the mountains.

The rest of the money was never found, but the FBI determined the bills were a match to the Cooper crime. However, the found chute calls into question exactly how those bills reached their location.

"If this is D.B. Cooper's chute, then that whole theory about the finding of the money is gone," said Carr. "Where the money was recovered, there's no way (they were his). There are no tributaries that feed in that direction."

The FBI is now reevaluating the case and looking for people who had experience parachuting in the 1970s to help identify the chute.

Those who wish to contact investigators can do so on the FBI's Web site.

Several people have claimed to be Cooper over the years but were dismissed on the basis of physical descriptions, parachuting experience and, later, by DNA evidence recovered in 2001 from the cheap tie the skyjacker left on the plane.