November 24 · This Day in America
On the eve of Thanksgiving, a quiet man in a dark suit boards Northwest Orient Flight 305 from Portland to Seattle under the name Dan Cooper. He hands a stewardess a note: he has a bomb. On the ground in Seattle he trades the 36 passengers for $200,000 in cash and four parachutes, then orders the half-empty jet back into the air toward Mexico. Somewhere over the dark forests of southwest Washington, with the cabin pressure dropping, he lowers the rear stairway and steps off the airplane into a freezing storm. He is never found. Not the man, not the parachute, not the body — only, nine years later, a rotting bundle of his marked twenties in the sand of the Columbia River. The FBI worked the case for 45 years. It remains the only unsolved skyjacking in American history, an open door no one ever closed.
Source: www.fbi.gov
Also on this day · 1947
On November 24, 1947, the House votes to hold ten screenwriters and directors in contempt for refusing, on First Amendment grounds, to tell the House Un-American Activities Committee whether they had been Communists. The next day the studios announced they would fire or suspend them. The blacklist had begun — and for years afterward, careers in American film could end with a name on a list and a question no one was allowed to refuse.
Source: www.britannica.com