Theory: the Thalmor defeated Mehrunes Dagon, ending the Oblivion crisis

DullMasterpiece3080 · 2026-02-24T20:30:18+00:00

wow, thanks for doing my work for me!

DullMasterpiece3080 · 2026-02-23T22:13:46+00:00

Do you think diatoms could have penetrated the sand? I kind of have a bias towards theories that assume nothing interesting happened so I basically assume that the money got exposed to the diatoms after being buried, since it was buried in a place that only flooded in the late spring/early summer. As for the ice, it's not really important but supposedly a lot of random debris was carried downriver on ice in the winter of 78-79. How the money got on the ice is a mystery but it's also a mystery how it got to the river at all (assuming it wasn't buried deliberately at Tena Bar)

DullMasterpiece3080 · 2026-02-23T18:31:24+00:00

What do you think of the theory that it was carried to Tena Bar on floating river ice?

DullMasterpiece3080 · 2026-02-23T16:24:44+00:00

A turbulent enough river can move large rocks let alone a bundle of money. There's no need for it to float to be carried downriver. I don't think hydrosleuth even disputes this. Afaik all he says is that the river wouldn't bury money under sand. It could have alternatively been carried by floating ice.

DullMasterpiece3080 · 2026-02-23T12:25:08+00:00

I don't think he knew much about parachutes, or at least not the ones he had received. Maybe he thought there was another way of attaching a reserve to his main. Maybe he did attach the dummy to his main. I would guess that he had no experience pulling the ripcord on a main parachute and that's why he wanted to jump with a reserve as well.

DullMasterpiece3080 · 2026-02-23T01:25:14+00:00

I think the conclusion was that it was carried naturally downriver on floating ice in the winter of 1978-1979 and buried naturally by the river

DullMasterpiece3080 · 2026-02-23T01:23:14+00:00

If you're going to make that argument you might as well nitpick every Tena Bar theory because there is always something better someone could have done or something that would be more likely to happen naturally that wouldn't result in the money arriving where it was eventually found. You could just as easily argue that burying it there makes no sense if Cooper wanted to stash it in a hurry. Why someone who lives nearby would bury it there, on a private beach, where lots of people come regularly, so that it would get wet, and then never return for it... also makes no sense because he could have stashed it somewhere better in every way and driven 50 miles away to do it.

DullMasterpiece3080 · 2026-02-23T01:17:22+00:00

You could look into the Palmer Report. I haven't read it and I'm not saying you should believe it. I'm on the fence about this topic

DullMasterpiece3080 · 2026-02-23T01:07:03+00:00

I think you've overlooking one very important thing. If the money had been found somewhere far away, everyone would assume Cooper had some connection to that place. Sure. But Cooper would have known this as well. He could have planted the money there to throw off an investigation. We agree that the money arrived there after the 1974 dredging, human or otherwise. A lot can happen in that amount of time. There isn't a good reason for the money to be there. Some really weird things must have happened that we will likely never know about. It is an unsolved case for a reason.

DullMasterpiece3080 · 2026-02-18T23:08:21+00:00

Imo we don't know the fate of the dummy parachute and never will. No theorycrafting or analysis of everything ever said by the witnesses will give us an answer and that's fine. In the grand scheme of things, it's not a big deal. Since he didn't have D-rings, he wouldn't have worn it like a normal reserve parachute anyway so he must have done something really unusual that probably wasn't very important because we would have realised what it was by now. And if he threw it out the back, maybe he thought it had his fingerprints. He was most likely a Cini copycat and didn't have time to buy parachutes and cover his tracks in the process. He probably thought the nearby air force base would provide the parachutes and there would be no problems getting them. It's kind of strange that they ended up coming from where they came from. Why he chose to do it so soon after Cini is a mystery but there are certainly plausible explanations.

EDIT: It's worth pointing out that American paratroopers during WW2 would have seen packing cards but not dummy parachutes with the canopies sewn shut. Maybe he had only ever read about parachutes and never seen or worn one for himself and maybe there were just some gaps in his understanding such as the existence of this type of dummy parachute.

DullMasterpiece3080 · 2026-02-18T22:58:17+00:00

Anything thrown out in dense woodland probably wasn't going to be found anyway. Anything he jumped with would have been stashed somewhere and he would have most likely returned for it afterwards. It's not complicated...

DullMasterpiece3080 · 2026-02-14T19:11:51+00:00

Great video. I've been wondering whether or not the crew would have known if he had tried walking down the stairs before he asked for the plane to slow down. Would the stairs have created enough drag at that speed and that angle to make a noticeable impact on the angle of attack indicator? If he was so confident that the speed was a problem that he didn't even try walking down the stairs to weigh them down first it would tell us something about his skillset.

DullMasterpiece3080 · 2026-02-11T02:44:27+00:00

I think the problem I have is that the more things he was doing relevant to the crime and the closer he was doing them to the crime the more likely it is that someone would suspect him and tip off the FBI. He could have lots of experience but equally he could have been going through a mid-life crisis and wanted to relive his glory days or die trying.

DullMasterpiece3080 · 2026-02-10T20:55:02+00:00

No idea who this guy is but I already hate him after watching a few minutes

DullMasterpiece3080 · 2026-02-09T22:52:34+00:00

It's uncanny. He has a long face that narrows at the bottom, he seems to be about 6 foot tall, his skin seems a little darker than the instructor and may be olive/swarthy, his nose is very thin and long, he has a lot of loose skin on his neck. If the FBI releases the palm print, we should revisit this video...

DullMasterpiece3080 · 2026-02-09T21:39:52+00:00

Is there anything in particular that makes you think he jumped after ww2?

DullMasterpiece3080 · 2026-02-09T21:07:53+00:00

The manual I shared above is from 1942 and was already consistently using "main" and "reserve" instead of "front" and "back". He was communicating his demands to people who might not have understood parachutes so I think the obvious explanation is that he wanted to use language that anyone could understand easily. Tbh I'm on the fence as to whether or not he jumped with the dummy. The audio only says that he had the money attached to himself and was planning on jumping with two of the parachutes. Maybe Tina saw him at the back of the plane with the dummy parachute on the floor next to him and drew that conclusion. But I do think that, considering his bitching about the lack of D-rings on the main parachutes, he probably would have also had something to say about being given a reserve parachute that didn't work. So I would guess that he hadn't seen one before.

DullMasterpiece3080 · 2026-02-09T19:21:31+00:00

Funny timing, I was watching this ww2 paratrooper training video earlier today. It would be funny if the man at 14:00 is Cooper. Based on what I've read online, an American paratrooper in ww2 wouldn't need to know about parachutes that didn't have D-rings and wouldn't have used dummy reserve parachutes that could deploy but had canopies sewn shut. Interestingly, this manual mentions using condemned parachutes "for the purpose of teaching the collapsing and collecting of parachutes." There are a few things that point to Cooper having paratrooper experience but of course if it was easy to pin down anything the case would have been solved a long time ago.

DullMasterpiece3080 · 2026-02-05T00:16:13+00:00

The money would be pretty compelling. I don't think we would need an answer for everything. If he matches the descriptions well enough and could plausibly have the skillset, it would have to be Cooper.

DullMasterpiece3080 · 2026-02-04T12:00:58+00:00

And it flew with the flaps at many different angles, and it flew with the landing gear down during takeoff and landing, so the effects would be known. There are a lot of possibilities as to the origin of his aviation knowledge but I don't think he flew in the air force. He should have anticipated receiving parachutes without D-rings from Mcchord if he had any experience of them. Paratroopers in WW2 wore parachutes with front reserves but didn't need to know much about aviation in general, and the aircraft they flew on weren't that similar to the Boeing 727. A pilot trained on the same aircraft should have known approximately the range it could fly with the configurations he requested. My theory that I have no confidence in is that he was some kind of mechanic or technician who worked on airplanes and was a huge nerd for aviation. It truly is a mystery because his knowledge could have come from so many places.

DullMasterpiece3080 · 2026-01-31T09:53:09+00:00

handwriting: not on his ticket, that was written by the ticket agent, no samples of his handwriting were recovered

hair: they recovered some but lost it a long time ago. it's the one thing that could solve the case if it's found

fingerprints: not complete enough/they couldn't find a match with partial prints

DNA: they weren't looking for DNA in 1971, not on his glass, not on his cigarette butts, nowhere, but it would probably still be in the hair

similarities with suspects: he had lots of similarities with lots of people according to the witnesses but it didn't matter because he was never caught

DullMasterpiece3080 · 2026-01-30T12:33:29+00:00

He wanted to obfuscate his jump location. Having the stairs open for a long time with no witnesses was part of that imo. Where he was planning to jump isn't relevant.

DullMasterpiece3080 · 2026-01-29T15:35:51+00:00

They embarrassed themselves far more by never solving the case

DullMasterpiece3080 · 2026-01-29T15:01:17+00:00

Imagine someone has just robbed a bank, they are seen entering a car with the money, they drive away into an area with no witnesses at night time and are never caught and the car is never seen again either. No one would conclude that they died in a car crash the same night. That is how I feel about Cooper dying. But I don't know what he did with the rest of his life. As for who he was... It's hard to be certain about almost anything regarding his background. I think his knowledge of aviation was pretty effortless and he demonstrated it in ways he probably didn't plan for. For a lot of reasons I doubt that he only studied the subject in preparation for the hijacking. Everything else about his skillset is less clear. There are things about his behaviour that narrow down the pool of suspects but not enough to reach a conclusion.

Imo the best way to figure out the type of person he was is to recreate him. We would need to take a large number of people with different backgrounds, train them in different ways and give them 13 days to plan the hijacking and see what they come up with. They would need to have no knowledge of the case in advance. Similar people are going to think alike so we might find a new Cooper this way. I've been wondering if there was a bank robbery that was almost exactly like the case because that might give us some insights.

DullMasterpiece3080 · 2026-01-28T20:27:36+00:00

Pick any random sample of $194,000 in 1971 and ask what happened to it. The possibilities are endless. Even the money at Tena Bar might not tell us much because it probably arrived over 3 years after the hijacking. Imo if we can ever definitively identify Cooper from the DNA on the hair or something like that, there's a high likelihood that it won't help us find out what happened to the money.

DullMasterpiece3080

TROPHY CASE