Tom Colbert is 100 percent sure that D.B. Cooper is a 72-year-old Vietnam War veteran living in southern California. Colbert also believes the FBI has evidence that it is withholding.

Colbert is suing the FBI to compel disclosure of those files.

D.B. Cooper — no one knows his real name — hijacked a Northwest Orient Airlines flight out of Portland in November 1971 and ended up parachuting into 200 mph winds with $200,000, never to be seen again.

This past July, the FBI announced it was closing the case even though it had not been solved.

The FBI called it “one of the longest and most exhaustive investigations in our history.”

The bureau added that it “exhaustively reviewed all credible leads, coordinated between multiple field offices to conduct searches, collected all available evidence, and interviewed all identified witnesses.

“Over the years, the FBI has applied numerous new and innovative investigative techniques, as well as examined countless items at the FBI Laboratory.”

The evidence collected during the investigation will be preserved for historical purposes at FBI Headquarters, the bureau said.

“Although the FBI appreciated the immense number of tips provided by members of the public, none to date have resulted in a definitive identification of the hijacker,” the bureau said.

Colbert says that’s not even close to being true.

He spent five years working on a book about the case. The work became the center of a two-part documentary that aired on The History Channel in July 2016.

Colbert’s conclusion is that Cooper was actually Robert Rackstraw, a person, he says, who had the training and knowhow to pull off the hijacking and had claimed to people that he was Cooper.

The History Channel documentary, though, concluded the case was unsolved. The day after part two aired, the FBI announced it was closing the case, leaving it unsolved.

In his suit, Colbert says there was something more nefarious at work.

“For reasons unknown, the production team that created the History Channel program intentionally disregarded key pieces of evidence and cooperated with the FBI, resulting in the appearance that the case remains unsolved,” he says in court papers.

“The FBI took advantage of the airing of the program to close its case and hide the fact that it could not develop evidence sufficient to prosecute Rackstraw beyond a reasonable doubt because of earlier Bureau investigative errors and failures.”

Colbert says that he developed dozens of links between Rackstraw and Cooper and that he offered to share his information with the FBI, and it never took him up on the offer.

He filed a Freedom of Information Act request on July 12 — the day the FBI announced that the case was closed. When he didn’t hear back, he filed suit.

Colbert points out that the FBI is supposed to at least acknowledge the FOIA request within 20 days.

“As the FBI has administratively closed its investigation, release of the requested records could not reasonably be expected to interfere with pending enforcement proceedings,” he says in court papers.

The FBI has posted many documents from the case on its website.

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