http://nomoregames.net/2006/03/05/we-have-some-holes-in-the-plane-stories/
March 5, 2006
Where there is much desire to learn,
Jim Hoffman contends that my June 9 article
“provides an excellent summary of evidence for the controlled
demolition of the WTC skyscrapers” but that about a third of my article
supports “the dubious idea that neither the Twin Towers, the Pentagon,
nor the field in Shanksville, PA were the sites of the crashes of the
jetliners commandeered on 9/11/01.” My article “thus weds the thesis of
controlled demolition of the skyscrapers with the denial that Flights
11, 175, 77, and 93 crashed where reported.” Hoffman believes that this
is “unfortunate because it functions to discredit the case for
demolition by associating it with ideas that lack scientific merit, are
easily debunked, and are inherently offensive to the victims of the
attack — especially the survivors of the passengers and crews of the
crashed flights.”
Hoffman’s critique uses intimidating language—“lack scientific merit, easily debunked, inherently offensive”—to denounce someone of a contrary mind about the government story of hi-jacked jetliners. This article constitutes part II of my reply to him and here is part I. Many 9/11 researchers would be surprised to learn that the controversy over the reported crashes of Flights 11, 175, 77, and 93 has been scientifically resolved and settled in favor of the official story. Whatever the state of disputation over crashes may be, the WTC demolition theory is in no danger of being discredited. Let’s make this statement in bold letters so that Hoffman and others worried about “unity” within the vaunted 9/11 truth movement cannot fail to understand:
WTC demolition is truth inviolate, entirely separate from airliner crashes, proven beyond reasonable doubt and newly supported by a BYU physicist who calls for a serious investigation. It’s the linchpin establishing that selected parts of the U.S. government, aided by certain outsiders, committed the crimes of 9/11.
But that unassailable fact of demolition does not settle all phases of this complex scam, a commonplace in ongoing criminal investigations. Further, if controversy over the role of airplanes and hijackers played in the 9/11 hoax is “inherently offensive,” then we are in worse shape than I thought. According to William Rodriguez, the janitor who was last man out of the WTC and a much-decorated hero, healing is impossible for survivors because only truth can bring closure.
Step back from wrangling over planes for a moment and three things stand out:
• 9/11 was a colossal hoax, an egregious example of false-flag terrorism
• Corporate media dutifully sold the scam
• Four reported airliners vanished as if by magic
September 11 was a well-planned psy-op, deceptive at every level, intended to manipulate public opinion, and wildly successful in the short run. Given this background, virtually everything the government and its media stenographers parrot to this day must be construed as deception until proven otherwise.
A primary question is, why investigate the crashes? Some writers object that pursuing questions surrounding the planes is a sideshow and can only distract from an uncompromising focus on the WTC demolitions. Yet the contention that young Arabs hijacked specific flights and crashed them is a vital component of the official fiction. New, rational understanding about the plane stories would have great value, and that probably explains the intense resistance to such scrutiny. Questions and answers about each plane crash matter for at least three reasons:
• If the perpetrators get away with the plane hoaxes, it encourages more audacious, blood-soaked scams
• The key to acquiescence in the government’s war on terror and global domination project is public belief in Arab hi-jacked airliners and crashes
• Exposure of airplane lies expands the proof that government committed the 9/11 atrocities
Some readers might object that critical examination of the official airplane stories is silly because everybody saw a plane hit the WTC south tower that morning. But that was only one of four events and seeing is not believing in a world of special effects. Something fantastic shown on TV is not the end of a criminal investigation but the beginning. Any important proposition delivered by the media must be established by evidence independent of their sleight-of-hand. They have been repeatedly exposed as liars, usually on behalf of the social apparatus of compulsion they must appease daily to continue their high-revenue businesses over the public airwaves. The media are not so much “embedded” with the U.S. government and military as “in bed” with them. Even if you reject this “echo chamber” view, there is no doubt that the technology exists to insert prepared images into pixels in real time and make the images prepared in advance look (mostly) real. The first-down stripe inserted in NFL telecasts is an example. Some analysts argue that the WTC crashes were little more than Tuesday-morning cartoons. Whether or not such a conclusion is warranted, any proposed theory of what happened must be consistent with physical evidence and conform to the principles of physics, the official conspiracy theory included. We should put aside preconceptions based on pixels and evaluate the physical evidence anew. Videos are discussed again toward the end of the article.
It is not my burden to prove what really happened. That burden lies entirely with apologists for the official plane story like Hoffman. Mr. Hoffman, not the skeptics, must prove that four Boeing airliners crashed as government and corporate media say they did. Proof must be verifiable, corroborated, physical facts and not contradictory reports from witnesses, including those bought off or pressured into a predetermined result by media coverage that morning. Evidence offered by so-called plane huggers like Hoffman should be obvious and powerful. After all, land crashes by big planes in populated areas are quite easy to identify. Skeptics, by contrast, need only point to one verified fact contrary to the official theory to send it crashing into oblivion. We have the facts to destroy the official account of each reported incident.
Ordinarily it is child’s play to confirm the exact identity of a commercial plane in a crash investigation but, no, not on 9/11. Almost nothing was normal that morning. Upon careful inspection, proof of the advertised crashes is extremely hard to locate, especially since no air accident investigations were conducted. After all, the administration “knew” who to go after immediately, so why bother? The most obvious defect of the official story is an absence or near-absence of conventional airplane wreckage at each crash site. Government could have ended controversy over planes long ago by allowing independent investigators to examine part numbers and compare them to each plane’s maintenance logbook. This did not happen following the 9/11 crashes.
Hoffman denounces “ideas that have no basis in evidence, such as the idea that no planes hit the towers.” Well, let’s be careful here: the idea that specific jetliners identified by government did not hit the WTC towers has an initial “basis in evidence” because officials have not produced a single airplane part by serial number for independent corroboration. Instead, we are supposed to largely rely on the word of the conspirators themselves who staged 9/11 to pursue vast geostrategic rearrangements.
Four large commercial jets vanished within 80 minutes that morning, unprecedented events in the northeastern United States. This is so incredible that it rivals the first collapses of three steel-framed skyscrapers on the same day at the same site, the first ever “caused” by fires in history.
We cannot overlook these facts. Hoffman dismisses critics of the “Big Boeing Theory” (BBT) as unscientific even though he cannot Show Me Debris. In scientific controversy, a plausible albeit unfashionable hypothesis cannot be dismissed until falsified by a verified fact.
A commuter plane, specially prepared aircraft, military planes, missiles or drones as some eyewitnesses reported or nothing at all may have hit the towers from outside. I do not have enough evidence yet to say. My present purpose is not to posit what really happened but demonstrate what did not happen: the official BBT theory about 767 and 757 crashes is full of holes. Physical facts at every turn refute the official story about what gashed the towers, Pentagon and Pennsylvania that morning.
So we have an intellectual contest. May the better scientist win. More importantly, may the truth come out and justice eventually prevail.
Phantom Flights?
Before examining physical evidence—our principal task—we should note that many facts about the alleged flights subvert the official account. The Colgan Air flight 5930 Portland-Logan is riddled with questions and AA Flights 11 and 77 were not scheduled that day. Official BTS data are meticulously kept because of liability issues. The two American Airlines Boeing 767s in question—tail numbers N334AA and N644AA—were deregistered January 14, 2002, but without evidence they were involved in the alleged flights. Mohammed Atta supposedly left a rental car at Portland International and absurdly left a second car full of incriminating evidence at Logan, in other words, evidence was planted/fabricated. And was Gate 26 or 32 used for the unscheduled flight 11? The two United Airlines aircraft that allegedly crashed that day—tail number N612UA for Flight 175 and N591UA for Flight 93—were deregistered four years later on September 28, 2005, despite a requirement that destroyed aircraft be deregistered within 24 hours.
Further fueling suspicion, all four cross-country flights had improbably light loads with most seats vacant (approximately 52-86% empty) while the airlines, government and media never produced credible passenger manifests, a routine matter, and all inexplicably lacked Arab names. Mainstream media have reported five to nine alleged hijackers alive while ongoing searches of birth, death and marriage records suggest some passenger names were fake. Families of air crash victims remain silent, suspicious behavior while government lies and spins, and families of ground zero victims are outspoken. Searches thus far fail to show hull insurance paid on the four jetliners. Then we have missing surveillance video tapes, an incredible string of airport security/screening failures, flights disappearing from conventional radar, missing flight data and cockpit voice recorders, gagged flight controllers and firefighters, physically impossible cell phone calls with fake dialogue (“I see water and buildings. Oh my God! Oh my God!” “Hello, mom. This is your son, Mark Bingham”), not to mention the technical impossibility of the purported Arabs piloting the planes as advertised. Little if anything checks out in the official account about the alleged flights. Corporate media steer a wide berth from these problems in favor of canonizing the official conspiracy theory.
A Boeing 757 Vanishes into the Pentagon
Of the four 9/11 crashes, extensive research and facts most clearly refute the government’s “a-757-went-into-the-Pentagon” whopper. It is surprising that a 9/11 researcher like Jim Hoffman defends this tale after it has been thoroughly debunked by analysts far and wide, including Thierry Meyssan, David Ray Griffin (chapter two in The New Pearl Harbor), Eric Hufschmid, A.K. Dewdney, Ralph Omholt, Gerard Holmgren, and others.
But review the evidence we must. The question is, did AA Flight 77 crash into the west side of the Pentagon at 9:37:46 on September 11, 2001 (aka Boeing 757 tail #N644AA, FAA-listed as destroyed and deregistered on January 14, 2002, four months late)? The answer is no beyond a reasonable doubt. We know for sure that something else blew holes in the Pentagon that morning, not a Boeing 757. Compelling evidence includes the following:
• After two terrorist attacks on the WTC, a hijacked, unscheduled FL 77 supposedly wandered about the countryside for some 40 minutes undisturbed as FAA bureaucrats and NORAD warriors went “hmmmm.”
• The government released flight control transcripts on October 16, 2001, but terminated Flight 77’s path 20 minutes before allegedly crashing into the Pentagon and excluded Flight 93 entirely (Thompson, The Terror Timeline, p. 505), so official lies were still being worked out.
• The Pentagon aircraft supposedly put on a stunt show, suggesting supreme skill in the cockpit, yet the terrorist-pilot decided to fly into the low-occupancy west side, bypassing the high-occupancy east where people like Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz might have been killed. Supposedly passing over a supine White House which failed to launch its SAMs, the Pentagon too remained passive as the aircraft performed an acrobatic 270 degree (or 330 degree according to The 9/11 Commission Report) dive from 7,000 feet (an altitude known to the FAA despite the transponder off), and smashed into outer ring E of the Pentagon dead center at the first and second floors traveling at an alleged 530 mph without an engine scraping the front lawn or disturbing construction material, after downing a few lamp posts on the highway with their associated debris pointed the wrong way and felling no lamp posts on the service road nearer the Pentagon. Very neat (physically impossible too). Curiously, no uniformed Air Force member was killed but the toll on Naval Intelligence and Army was high.
• Confusion has even reigned over the exact time of the Pentagon event. There was no seismic signal from the alleged Pentagon crash to corroborate the time.
• Hani Hanjour, the alleged pilot, “may not have had a ticket” (Thompson, The Terror Timeline, p. 493), was not listed on the passenger manifest and “couldn’t fly” (pp. 193-4). Professional pilots observe that it must have been “a crack pilot in the left seat” or remote control doing the flying (p. 493). Crack pilot John Lear doubts that he could have done such flying.
• A gaping hole in the government theory is that the Pentagon gash is too small both vertically and horizontally. A Boeing 757’s tail is 40 feet tall with landing gear up while the maximum height of the hole in the Pentagon could not have been 30 feet tall (two stories). The width of the hole was less than 20 feet before the façade collapsed, and windows above the impact hole were intact. The largest width claimed for the hole is 65 feet—more like 52 feet according to photographic expert Jack White—and that was after the façade collapsed, not upon impact. The 757wingspan is 125 feet, about twice the width of the post-façade-collapse hole. The Puny Pentagon Hole (PPH) falsifies the government’s “a-Boeing-757-hit-the-Pentagon” story. It is not a close call.
• A 757 flying a nearly flat flight profile (no dive) at 500+ mph as alleged could not hit the Pentagon’s ground floor because of an extremely powerful ground effect cushion beneath it. At high speeds, the highly energized wing-tip vortices and huge downwash sheet of a 200,000-lb. airliner make it physically impossible to get closer to the ground than one-half wingspan or about 60’ in this case. The physical forces of the compressible gas called air, in other words, stirred by a high-speed 757 traveling flat near the ground make it impossible to land it at high speed. An aeronautical engineer proves this proposition in an article at www.physics911.net, and he invites other engineers and pilots to prove him wrong. Very few pilots have experienced the aerodynamic effects in this rare flight domain because they normally only get this close to the ground during landing at low speeds. Highly wing-loaded aircraft like the Global Hawk or B1-B can land at high speed but not lightly wing-loaded aircraft like the 757. In addition, a ground-hugging 757 spewing a 100,000-lb. thrust jetblast behind it would have blown trailer trucks and people away, phenomena absent in the flight path (see the DVD “Loose Change” for an example). Irrefutable physics falsifies the Pentagon’s lies.
• The linear path through rings E, D and C implies vehicle impact at an approximate 45-degree angle. Geometry dictates that the hole would have to be 1.5 times a 757’s wingspan, or 187 feet. Therefore, the hole necessary to accommodate a 757 on a “non-magical” basis is three times the width of the post-façade-collapse hole.
• While Jim Hoffman maintains that 767s “shredded” in the WTC crashes, he contends that a smaller 757 penetrated a three-foot thick concrete exterior wall at the Pentagon and continued on through two more Pentagon rings, a distance of at least 185 feet, poking a 9-foot diameter hole into C’s inside ring and apparently blowing two additional holes inside ring C. That means little or no shredding and an amazingly strong fuselage with a 15-foot diameter. The theories of aircraft crash behavior at the WTC and Pentagon appear contradictory. According to photographic expert Jack White, photos do not seem to show penetration into the second ring.
• Some apologists claim that the 757 vaporized on impact and left virtually no wreckage while penetrating three rings, an amazing proposition and unprecedented in crash history. Vaporization would require heat intense enough to melt all the metal, including aluminum, tempered steel, carbon and titanium, and heat the resulting liquids into gases. That is impossible with jet fuel. Losing over 60 tons of material? Ridiculous.
• Such “vaporizing” heat was selective enough to preserve sufficient fingerprints and DNA to identify victims. These miraculous results were courtesy the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, the government’s “trustworthy” producers of autopsies from Waco, TWA flight 800, etc. The chain of custody for these human remains is unspecified.
• The government possesses many tapes of the Pentagon attack but only offers a belated five frames from a parking lot video of the crash, dated September 12. The pictures were photoshopped, so sleuthing about what is pictured is probably worthless. One interpretation is that the engine exhaust looks like a tomahawk cruise missile with an engine not yet at full operating temperature. Another is that the “puffy plume” is a white Global Hawk photoshopped to obscure it. The explosion looks like it was caused by a warhead but is the fireball real?
• We don’t know exactly what hit the Pentagon (F-16, Global Hawk, A-3, cruise missile, etc., if anything), but “certain missiles are specially conceived to have a piercing effect… An airplane crashes and smashes. A missile of this type pierces” (Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor, p. 31). The tomahawk cruise missile is “the weapon of choice to strike reinforced, hardened targets.”
• In a “sheer coincidence,” emergency vehicles were pre-positioned at the Pentagon (Thompson, The Terror Timeline, p. 421) and the FBI quickly confiscated tapes of the crash from the Pentagon service station and Sheraton hotel after the crash (probably Virginia DOT too).
• The hapless fire chief Ed Plaugher of Arlington, VA, said there were no recognizable airplane parts at a press conference the next day.
• Many eyewitnesses at the Pentagon incident favor the military plane, missile or drone theory (Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor, p. 26, Holmgren). Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld endorsed the missile theory in a famous slip of the tongue, referring to “…the missile [used] to damage this building.” Others believe that there was no flying object at all, just interior explosions.
• Eyewitnesses saw a C-130 later confirmed to be piloted by Lt. Col. Steve O’Brien flying low over the aircraft or missile that hit the Pentagon. Contrary to eyewitness accounts, O’Brien claimed that he was not close to the crash and explosion: “With all of the East Coast haze, I had a hard time picking him out.” I was in Washington, DC, that morning and there was never a clearer morning in the history of East Coast aviation. The man is a liar. O’Brien’s C-130 showed up minutes later at the Pennsylvania crash, raising the suspicion that O’Brien was at both events for black ops purposes. Some 19 C-130s reportedly are equipped for electronic warfare/jamming/remote control capabilities (The Terror Timeline, pp. 513-4).
• CNN’s Jamie MacIntyre and others reported that close inspection showed “no evidence of a plane having crashed anywhere near the Pentagon.”
Conclusion? Irrefutable and abundant FACTS rule out AA Flight 77 as the object that flew into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.
Real plane crashes leave body parts strewn about as well as plane parts. “Numerous points based on the physical evidence of the crash site seem to make an overwhelming cumulative case against a 757 having crashed there,” Hoffman concedes, “provided one ignores the eyewitness evidence. However, most of these points involve some error in evaluating the evidence.” Hoffman dismisses physical evidence in favor of eyewitness testimony, an inversion of the ranking in science and law. Astounding. Hoffman’s flimsy arguments ignore the fact that physical facts trump witnesses’ contradictory testimony every time. There is no error in evaluating the evidence and Holmgren refutes Hoffman’s characterization of the eyewitness testimony. What we are left with is an overwhelming case against the Flight 77 theory.
A Boeing 757 Vanishes into Pennsylvania Turf
“There is no reasonable basis for questioning that [Flight 93] crashed in the field in Shanksville, PA,” Hoffman declares, “as thoroughly documented by the website Flight93Crash.com.” After taking it on the chin in three reported crashes (with virtually no wreckage) and sustaining horrific loss of life and property, the government’s heartwarming albeit murderous script says America picked itself off the canvas and roared back, setting up an eagerly-sought war on terror with the Beamer-Bush war cry, “Let’s roll!” Objective evidence on behalf of this propaganda tale, however, is scarce indeed.
With no substantiated airplane wreckage again, powerful evidence refutes the official Flight 93 hypothesis:
• Flight 93 was a scheduled flight beginning September 5, but the Arab hijackers allegedly bought tickets online August 24-29, though not on any passenger manifests, before the flight existed. One researcher contends that FL 93’s maiden Tuesday flight was on 9/11. Maybe the evidence exists but I haven’t seen a gate number at Newark nor heard credible eyewitnesses testify regarding boarding and wheels-up.
• The FAA registered Boeing 757 tail number N591UA as valid—the alleged Flight 93 aircraft—until September 2005. There are many fishy things about this tail number. United Airlines reportedly identified its Flight 93 as landing at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport on 9/11 and it was initially reported as a Boeing 767.
• An “aerial view of the impact crater of Flight 93 [that] suggests that the plane plunged into the soft ground on a nearly vertical trajectory,” yet a debris field was reported as far away as eight miles. Since it was a virtually windless morning, the physics make no sense: a hole with vertical wing marks (but no wings!) a fraction of the 125 feet wingspan of an intact 757 suggests a nearly vertical trajectory into soft ground but debris over a wide area suggests an explosion within the plane or “holed” by an air-to-air missile, as Defense Secretary Rumsfeld believes. A shoot-down might explain an 8-mile debris field but that would make the “airplane-outline” hole “for the folks to see” impossible because the plane presumably would have broken up in mid-air.
• Eyewitnesses reported an airliner flying low from the west with no suicide spiral, yet a “vertical impact hole” is impossibly at the eastern edge of the woods. Instead of an expected horizontal crash field with plenty of aircraft wreckage, a debris-free smoking hole in the ground completely contradicts the flight path seen by witnesses. No eyewitness actually saw impact.
• “There was no plane,” according to Ernie Stull, mayor of Shanksville. “Everyone was puzzled, because the call had been a plane had crashed. But there was no plane.” Reporter: “They had been sent here because of a crash, but there was no plane?” Reply: “No. Nothing. Only this hole.”
• “We haven’t seen anything bigger than a phone book, certainly nothing that would resemble a part of a plane,” said Capt. Frank Monaco of the Pennsylvania State Police. “[T]here was no tail section, no jet engines, no large sections of fuselage in view anywhere near the impact crater,” Webster G. Tarpley reports (9/11 Synthetic Terror, p. 268).
• Nena Lensbouer was the first to go up to the smoking crater and she described a hole 5-6 feet deep and smaller than the 24-foot trailer in her front yard. She described hearing “an explosion, like an atomic bomb’—not a crash.”
• Coroner Wallace Miller was stunned at how small the smoking crater looked: “[L]ike someone took a scrap truck, dug a 10-foot ditch and dumped all this trash into it…there were no bodies there.” He marveled because there was not a drop of blood: “It’s as if the plane had stopped and let the passengers off before it crashed.”
• Government has allowed no public access to the flight data and cockpit voice recorders it allegedly recovered. The FBI refused to allow a detailed investigation of the crash site, and it filled in the crater with dirt followed by topsoil and had scorched trees cut down and shredded into mulch (Tarpley, pp. 270-1), most likely hiding explosive residue from a missile or other source.
• One theory claims the military shot down an airliner over Indian Lake and then cordoned off New Baltimore, eight miles from the diversionary smoking hole near Shanksville.
Conclusion? No Boeing 757 crashed in the designated hole in Shanksville, PA. It is physically impossible.
Fools like us are supposed to believe that two Boeings hit the steel WTC towers and were strong enough to cut out cartoon plane shapes but not in soft ground in Pennsylvania. Big Boeing Flight 93 supposedly fell into a little bitty hole 20’x10’x5’ insufficient to hold half the 3.1 million parts of a 757. “United Airlines Flight 93 is the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania on September 11th, 2001,” Hoffman boldly asserts but he and the government have no proof.
Two Boeing 767s Vanish into Twin Towers
Most 9/11 researchers reject the government’s Big Boeing Theory for the Pentagon and Pennsylvania events for lack of supporting evidence and presence of contrary evidence. Skepticism about BBT at WTC is less common but if we look at the gashes in the towers, a telling question arises:
How could two large wide-bodied aluminum jetliners penetrate massive steel towers and disappear with no deceleration visible, no plane wreckage visible in gashes and none knocked to the ground below the impact zone?
Expressed another way, no confirmed debris exists from two alleged 767 high-speed crashes into skyscrapers within 17 minutes of each other, a stunning lack of evidence to support the official 767 theory. Given long experience with airplane crashes, it is difficult if not impossible to accept the proposition that a wide-body jetliner can smash into a dense steel-concrete tower and disappear virtually without a trace, much less do it twice within 17 minutes in the same city block. Yet the NIST (pdf pg 38) states about the south tower, “the aircraft completely disappeared into the building in a fifth of a second.”
Tower walls were composed of high-strength steel beams approximately 14 inches square on one-meter centers (39.37”) surrounding windows with each column beam secured to others by steel spandrel plates about 52 inches x 10 feet forming a belt around each floor (see p. 8 pdf). Steel beam thicknesses varied from 4” at the base and tapered from 5/8” to ¼” in the WTC 1 impact zone and 13/16” to ¼” in the WTC 2 impact zone. WTC floors were grids of steel topped by four inches of steel reinforced lightweight concrete in corrugated steel pans. Walls effectively were dense webs of nearly 40% steel covered by aluminum and backed by steel and concrete floor grids mated to an incredibly strong and dense core of 47 cross-braced steel columns, stairwells and elevator shafts.
In a violent encounter between an aluminum plane weighing nearly 140 tons and a steel tower weighing 500,000 tons, the plane, of course, would be crushed. Aluminum has lower yield and failure strengths than steel and a Boeing 767 mass was a minuscule—to use Hoffman’s term—three hundredths of one percent of each tower’s mass. “The impact did nothing,” as UC Berkeley structural engineer A. Astaneh-Asl said, “the airplane did not do much damage.” Like a pin into skin or a person falling through the ice on a lake, a 140-ton airplane flying at over 400 mph could inflict local damage without damaging the structure globally. In particular, the engines themselves thrusting along full throttle at approximately 450-550 mph obviously could penetrate a steel tower, even fly through it. But whatever blew each gash in the towers, only 13% or less of the upper perimeter columns on a few floors were broken and the upper structure of the towers remained intact.
A fuselage, with only minor hyperbole, could be termed a hollow aluminum tube. Among large jetliner components, only engines and landing gear would retain serious structural integrity in a collision although small parts like actuators would remain intact too. Higher speeds increase kinetic energy by the square of speed and a frontal area of under 25 square meters would create local damage. Yet planes running into mountains, construction equipment, concrete barriers, and steel buildings fare very poorly, just as speeding automobiles hitting a guardrail, telephone pole or tree do. A plane flying into a WTC tower should break up, shatter and scatter pieces everywhere. The only issue is the exact pattern of destruction the building would impose on its intruder.
A key question regarding each jetliner’s disappearance is:
Would wing tips and tail break off against each steel wall or disappear entirely inside each building?
Ordinarily the answer would be that wing tips and tail would shear off on impact and bounce to the ground below. Wing tips have enormous forward momentum at impact but begin to decelerate as the nose and fuselage collides with a steel wall, five floors of steel-truss-steel-reinforced-concrete, and a steel inner core. This would wreak complete havoc on the plane, although the plane in the south tower videos looks like an invincible hot knife going through a soft butter tower. Localized force applied by the wing tips was insufficient to fragment steel columns or spandrel plates and we should have seen video footage of the repelled wreckage bounce to the ground. There are no reports of such wreckage that I can find. A decelerating tail section would slow down and break off too, yet we saw no trace of it. “The impact of the inner half of an empty wing significantly damaged exterior columns but did not result in their complete failure,” the NIST concedes (pdf, p. 105). In plainer terms, the hollow sections of the wings may damage steel columns but not fragment them (complete failure). Instead, the dense steel exterior of each tower would “reject” or “bounce back” so-called empty aluminum wings, especially wing tips, the outer sections.
Airplanes crashing into buildings, much less steel skyscrapers, are rare events but there is some experience beyond airport terminal mishaps. The Empire State building and Tampa crashes suggest that wings and tails break off, and even a fuselage does not penetrate far, at least at low speeds. Higher speeds increase kinetic energy by the square of speed, raising penetration power at the WTC. A vertical dive by an El Al 747 cargo plane that must have weighed 300+ tons, twice the weight of an alleged 767 at a WTC tower, got the better of an approximately 12-story apartment building (notice the abundant plane debris?).
This recent crash in Iran into a 10-story building yielded the expected devastation of the 75-ton C130. Both of these buildings remained standing despite having structures that were far weaker than the 110 story steel framed WTC towers.
Most of us would agree that planes are flimsy things, as Marcus Icke points out: “Computer simulation and mathematical analysis of the impact by MIT, University of Purdue and others indicate that upon impact the wings of the 767 would have shattered and the fuel ignited outside the towers facade, the aircraft would have lost about 25% percent of its kinetic energy on impact and that the tail fin would have sheared off due to torsional forces. In layman’s terms this means that the aeroplane would have decelerated sharply [emphasis added] crumpled up and exploded against the tower’s wall with only heavy objects like the engines and undercarriage puncturing the towers facade. The entire airframe would not have glided through the outer wall and would not have left a large hole roughly the same shape and size of a Boeing 767-200.” Icke’s accompanying photos support his analysis by showing a MD80 landing hard, with its air frame bending and tail breaking off.
There probably is little dissent from the proposition that a jetliner is fragile relative to a WTC tower and even flimsy relative to a local impact area. Hoffman says, “In fact, jetliners are very light and fragile compared to buildings: they consist mostly of aluminum and have skin less than 2mm thick,” but he attempts to save the official theory with the following theory: “[T]he wing tips were shredded by the grating of meter-spaced columns.” This is the same story the NIST relies on to answer the implicit question: where is the wreckage? Why no debris? Wing tips and tail allegedly shredded instead of fracturing and shearing off. All the confetti then supposedly was deposited, absorbed or sucked inside the towers. This is an absurd proposition. Most steel beams and belt sections around the floors did not fail. Consequently, the wall rejected or repelled wing tips and tail because the gash is seriously undersized. Plane pieces do not deform like a gel or liquid and wrap around intact steel and pass into each tower. Major aircraft debris rejected by each tower would be knocked to the ground below the gashes. Hoffman offers no evidence for his “shred/wrap around” theory nor does he cite precedent from previous air crashes. It is an impossible proposition about how wing tips might have breakable joints precisely placed to coincide with columns and belts, break and then wrap around and vanish. Planes smash up, shatter, and disintegrate in irregular pieces in a crash, they don’t “shred” and wrap around intact steel pillars and belts. And even if 100% did “shred” in the metal-to-metal failure mechanism described by Wierzbicki, that material would not magically move around every beam and end up inside the building. To put it as bluntly as possible:
All steel beam and belt sections that were hit and did not fragment must have rejected plane pieces and bounced them outside each tower, period.
Yes, knife-edged grates shred cheese but dull steel columns and spandrel belts at each floor do not “shred” aluminum wings into thousands of aluminum strips and suck them into each tower. Columns and spandrel belts 52” high reject wing tips by shearing them off and bouncing them back to the ground in the fashion that telephone poles reject crashing cars. 100% of “shredded” parts cannot wrap around intact steel columns and belts and continue deep into the interior of each tower. Further, most parts do not shred, instead they shatter and break apart.
WTC crash videos show the south tower silently “absorbing” a plane and completely enshrouding it. Oddly enough, no deceleration occurs in these videos. Those clever Arab pilots parked each aircraft as if flying into an upper level airplane hangar without “braking.” A noiseless collision without deceleration is physically impossible and the chances of two 767s vanishing completely inside two towers are slim and none.
Suppose we explicitly enumerate the possibilities by strength and speed. For simplicity, assume two possible values for airplane strength upon exterior impact (invincible or flimsy), two values for aircraft strength during penetration inside a WTC tower (invincible or flimsy) and two possible speed changes during the crash process (deceleration or no deceleration). The following eight combinations exhaust the possibilities:
1 Invincible/Invincible/No deceleration
2 Invincible/Invincible/Deceleration
3 Invincible/Flimsy/No deceleration
4 Invincible/Flimsy/Deceleration
5 Flimsy/Flimsy/No deceleration
6 Flimsy/Flimsy/Deceleration
7 Flimsy/Invincible/No deceleration
8 Flimsy/Invincible/Deceleration
Looking this pattern over, physics declares all the odd theories (1,3, 5, 7) truly “odd” because they are impossible: a plane must decelerate at impact due to the laws of conservation of momentum and conservation of energy. It is no different than a human springboard diver going through air and then decelerating as he pushes against the resistance of water.
Furthermore, physics rejects any theory that posits an invincible airplane (a plane remaining intact after a high speed collision with a steel skyscraper) that also disintegrates (flimsy) or shreds itself in the next instant in the same general physical environment (temperature, etc.) eliminating theories 3 and 4. Nor is theory 8 possible because a solid airplane cannot transform itself from flimsy to invincible, thereby eliminating theories 4 and 8. That leaves theories 2 and 6. Yet theory 2 is contrary to established facts including the fact that 767 aircraft are fragile rather than invincible and the holes in the towers were too small to allow passage of an intact 767 even if it were built to “invincible” standards. Theory 6 is physically possible but it implies crumpling upon impact and that is contrary to the WTC facts. Conclusion: No Boeing 767 hit either WTC tower. QED
In detail, we have:
Theory 1 is impossible because the 767 would fly through a tower and continue at the same speed, speeding out the other side like a .357 magnum bullet fired through 1 mm thick balsa wood. Further, a Boeing 767 cutting completely through a tower would seriously destabilize the tower by cutting substantial core sections and major sections of at least two walls. Theory 1 does not apply and is contrary to observation.
Theory 2 cannot apply for multiple reasons: i) the holes were too small to allow an intact (“invincible”) 767 to pass through, ii) all parties agree 767s are not invincible and it is impossible to build them to such a standard; even the government felt obligated to produce photos of aircraft pieces, and iii) because of its large size relative to a tower, an intact 767 would almost certainly have been visible in a tower, on the ground below the impact hole or crashed at another site. All three observations contradict theory 2: undersized holes, agreed-upon impossibility of building an invincible plane, and no intact or crashed plane with its 3.1 million parts ever found in or around the Twin Towers.
Theory 3 is physically impossible because a solid like an airplane does not transform itself from invincible to flimsy within a fraction of a second in the same environment (temperature, etc.). Further, we would expect a sharp deceleration as the plane crumpled to fit into the 60 feet of space (north tower) or 37 feet of space (south tower) from the outer wall to the core. As we peer into the hole, this wreckage cannot be seen. NIST appears to support this impossible theory.
Theory 4 is physically impossible because a solid like an airplane cannot transform itself from invincible to flimsy within an instant in the same general environment (temperature, etc.). Theory 4 posits deceleration, contrary to the videos.
Theory 5 is physically impossible because a flimsy, high-speed object must decelerate sharply upon impacting an invincible object unless it acquires more energy from somewhere yet video evidence shows no deceleration.
Theory 6 is a logical, physically plausible combination that characterizes air disasters except for the four crashes within eighty minutes on the morning of 9/11. A 767 would be flimsy in a high-speed collision against a steel and concrete tower except for engines and undercarriage. Yet each tower had “clean” gashes free of airplane debris as if punctured by an invincible air vehicle. Flimsiness implies plenty of aircraft parts and cargo visible in gashes, elsewhere in each tower and on the ground below each impact site. These consequences of theory 6 are contrary to fact.
Theory 7 is physically impossible because a solid cannot transform itself from flimsy to invincible during a collision, given an essentially static environment. Further, a flimsy airplane must decelerate and fail to seriously penetrate a steel tower. Airplane pieces would be highly visible, contrary to observation.
Theory 8 is physically impossible because a solid cannot transform itself from flimsy to strong during a collision in a static environment. A flimsy airplane would decelerate but it would also leave visible debris, contrary to observation. A skeptic might argue that Option 4 is possible because the plane would easily pierce the outer walls and then slow as it encountered more resistance further into the building. The problem with this is that it requires the plane to be slowing and/or disintegrating at the front while maintaining velocity in the rear.
But we’re in luck! The government claims it has the rejoinder. NIST simulation videos purport to show how Theory 3 (Invincible/Flimsy/Deceleration) might have happened! Swaddled in twenty-million-dollar scientific trappings, this NIST flight of fantasy has some serious problems. First, NIST chooses Theory 3, a physical impossibility. Second, if that is not sufficient, NIST completely avoided modeling the official “progressive pancake collapse” theory for the obvious reason that such a model would conflict with all the data, especially near-free-fall-speed in all three skyscraper collapses. This omission signifies “the collapse of the pancake theory,” as A.K. Dewdney says. Third, despite impressive computer power and a high level of detail, the magnitudes of the parameters were amped up by as much as twenty percent to get the desired results. Fourth, a simulation is only as good as the model (Garbage In/Garbage Out) so any engineer modeler can play with the parameters and approximations until the desired result arrives. In the present case, they played plenty. By contrast, imagine NIST coming out with a model that found the invincible-penetration-then-obliteration theory contrary to physical law! Fifth, a model can only represent reality under given approximations and finite data. NIST denies curious scientists access to the model’s proprietary codes and parameters so they cannot examine the model’s behavior, especially against other data. Sixth, the time is barely readable on the two NIST videos and they cannot be downloaded for a frame-by-frame analysis with a regular PC. In short, a federal agency spends twenty million dollars and says, “Trust us.”
Turning back to reality again, another physical problem for the official WTC theory is that the maximum spread across the north tower hole is 126 feet and the south tower spread is only 103 feet, openings insufficient to accommodate a 767 wingspan of 156 feet. And wings with momentum do not “fold back onto themselves” in order to slip through an undersized hole along with the fuselage. Momentum breaks wings off in a forward motion and they torque inward (pdf) during deceleration but there is no evidence that this happened. Commenting on the Pentagon crash, Hoffman erroneously writes, “It would seem reasonable to assume that the wings and tail could have folded back and thereby avoided impacting those areas.” If I walk forward with my arms extended and bump into you, I can feel the forward momentum in my arms. Only when wings encounter a superior barrier would they “fold back” because they are breaking off. They will only fold back catastrophically in a collision. Engine thrust near maximum power makes wings “folding back” doubly impossible. In videos, we see zero wing and tail foldback, instead we observe 100% clean penetration of the wings and tail. A gash large enough to swallow a complete aircraft is important because wing tips and/or tail section were not sheared off on the impact side of either tower but disappeared.
The wings of a Boeing 767 are swept back approximately 35 degrees. This means wings do not strike the steel wall “flush” during the milliseconds of the crash process. Engines and wing roots impact first, almost simultaneously, and the wing tips, which are 40 feet back, hit a fraction of a second later. The official theory must be that wing roots and engines break through columns and spandrel plates following penetration of the “powerful” nose and fuselage, while wings stay intact to burst subsequent columns, floors and spandrel plates further away from the fuselage. The only way for tips to reach into the building and enter the “Hoffman shredding stage” is for the wings to remain intact and plow or “saw” through the steel columns and floors like an angled carpenters cut in the progressive fragmentation process (thanks to Gerard Holmgren for this point). Science is nothing but refined common sense and this “sawing” theory is contrary to common sense. While a 767 would carry enormous “momentum” or kinetic energy at impact, resistance by steel columns, spandrel plates, floors and core would consume its fixed energy supply rapidly. A more plausible sequence if only for its empirical regularity would be that the violence of the collision and consequent deceleration would shatter and break wing tips off. The wing tips would not break through columns, plates and floors but bounce to the ground below, rejected by intact columns and spandrel plates.
That leaves 767 proponents 100% dependent on the shredding/wrap-around theory that all debris slipped neatly between columns and around the spandrel belt at each floor, as if vacuumed into the deep interior. That hypothesis lacks plausibility, positive evidence and precedent, as far as I can tell. The shredding/wrap-around theory is much too neat. Wing spars have considerable structural integrity (“The wing tips were pulled up 15.5 feet from normal position over the top of the fuselage at a pressure of 1,200,000 pounds. The wing did not break…”) and 767 wing disappearance on the impact walls is impossible without bigger gashes or perfect shredding and wrap around.
For the sake of argument, suppose that a plane’s aluminum skin and frame were strong enough unaided to shatter braced steel walls and leave a tidy outline for “the folks to see.” In addition to a steel wall and multiple steel/concrete floors, within less than a tenth of a second the airliner would encounter resistance from a dense core occupying 27% of each tower’s floor space with 47 high-strength, cross-braced steel columns, three stair wells, multiple elevator shafts, and mechanical equipment within 60 feet of the WTC 1 impact wall and 37 feet of the WTC 2 wall. Even a sturdy “knife slicer” aircraft would not travel far against such dense resistance. The energy to plow through the local area of a tower is transferred from speed and the plane itself must slow because it has no new source of energy.
At 159 feet long a Boeing 767 is almost 77% as long as any side of a tower and planes do not fold up like accordions. Real terrorists would have flown much larger 747s into lower floors later in the day to maximize destruction and loss of life, but the 747 at 211.5’ wide and 232’ long would have been impossible to “sell” as vanishing. With smaller 767s anyone who thought about it nodded and said, “Oh I see, they disappeared inside. That figures. Sure enough.” Yet jetliners are not accordions, to state the obvious, nor are they aluminum beverage cans. Suppose, for the sake of argument, a crashing 767 maintained its shape and sliced all the way to the other end of the dense steel core. Seven feet of the intact jetliner’s tail section would have stuck out of the north tower. Yet peering as far as we can into the photos of the gashes, we see no tail section or aircraft debris whatsoever.
Hoffman and like-minded defenders of the 767 theory want their cake and eat it too: supposedly powerful 767s easily penetrated steel walls and floors yet identically crumbled within a fraction of a second and vanished inside despite huge fuselage length and wingspan ¾ the length of a tower wall. Both 767s were never seen again from any side of either tower, a dazzling combination of imposing strength and fragility within a tenth of a second.
The two end points—easy tower penetration at high speed without visible deceleration and flight termination within 200 feet—are nonsense.
Faith in the Big Boeing Theory rests on each 767 disintegrating completely into small pieces inside each tower, concealing all plane parts. The immense difficulty with this idea, also favored by the NIST, is how to reconcile an aluminum aircraft bursting through the steel in its path followed immediately by complete failure within 0.1 seconds, shredding completely and vanishing. The south tower plane should have decelerated in the videos and plane parts like wing tips should have bounced off the wall and many of the 626,000 parts should have been visible in the gashes. We did not see that. The official/Hoffman theory is impossible to accept unless the plane was rigged to explode or disintegrate upon contact with the wall, enabling its thorough destruction inside. That might restore some plausibility to the 767 story but it is certainly not the government story. Such explosives would add considerable complexity for the perpetrators in an already-complex crime package, violating the KISS rule. The basic problem remains that a large commercial jetliner could not punch a clean, debris-free hole into a steel tower wall to begin with. The plane would need help, explosive help of its own and/or explosives from inside the building. Even the explosions that took place blew no aircraft parts out the tower gashes to settle below the impact walls.
With respect to the south tower, it was amazing that the 9/11 maestros reproduced their wide-body magic within 16 ½ minutes in the same city block. If anything, more of the vaunted 767 should have been visible in the south tower because it was only 37 feet to the core, barely more than a 1st down and 10.
UA 175 supposedly hit the south tower at 543 mph or higher, although air resistance makes this is a suspect speed for a 767 at sea level in the absence of a dive. The NIST report (pdf p. 92) asserts a nearly flat approach with a descent angle of only 6 degrees below horizontal. UA 175 allegedly sliced through a hole two-thirds the wingspan of a 767, dumped abundant fuel in a spectacular fireball out the east side, and kept wings and tail section intact, disappearing completely inside the tower. After silent entry into the tower, UA 175’s remaining kinetic energy dissipated within a quarter second and proved insufficient to penetrate the east or north wall. A crashing jetliner would decelerate because of the resistance of the steel wall, six steel/concrete floors and the dense core within 37 feet of the south tower wall, impacted within .05 seconds. No deceleration and no visible plane wreckage means we have situation in progress because these alleged facts are physically impossible. A jetliner cannot be invincible and then flimsy the next instant.
A minor eyebrow-raiser was the 38-degree banking angle implied by the south tower hole. Such a banking angle ordinarily would imply a left-hand turn north in the last few seconds but it would take a skilled pilot at the controls of a cumbersome jetliner, to say the least, to hit the 207’ span at the alleged 543 mph.
The basic problem with any alleged trajectory, oblique or otherwise, remains how such a long and wide jetliner could vanish without decelerating in such limited floor space with nary a trace. With a fuselage 155 feet long, an intact 767 would have been visible out the south tower hole, the east side or both. The fuselage could not neatly fold up, accordion style, to conceal itself after demonstrating strength enough to silently rip through the south wall, six steel/concrete floors and penetrate so far into the core to vanish. In sum,
There is no convincing physics for how two wide-body aluminum jetliners flying at high speed could penetrate steel walls, floors and core via undersized gashes, exhibit no deceleration in videos, decelerate to zero within a quarter second, and conceal themselves entirely within each tower.
What about the plane parts government found? Engines and landing gear could have flown out of either tower, although we seem to lack solid eyewitness testimony and video evidence of major parts flying out. Spencer suspects that a canister was propelled from the NE corner of the South Tower with “debris” to support the passenger plane hoax. Some photos and videos show unidentified objects shooting out, for example, p. 39 in Hufschmid’s Painful Questions. The FBI and FEMA—a black ops agency with virtually no investigative expertise then headed by Bush campaign manager and family loyalist Joe Allbaugh—displayed a few parts during their felonious mission to destroy crime-scene evidence. None of the parts are consistent with 767 crashes (substantial sections of unburned fuselage, a 737 engine part, a piece of unburned landing gear) nor have they been independently verified and matched by serial number against the maintenance logs of the specified aircraft. This piece is a 737 engine part (CFM 56) according to aircraft experts rather than from a 767. By contrast, the authorities found an alleged hijacker’s paper passport that survived a fiery crash, subsequent fire and tower demolition. Its purpose obviously was to tell a bloodthirsty America whom to hate.
The 9/11 planners understood the physics of crashing aluminum jetliners into the steel towers. Logically enough, they did not rely on commercial 767s like backward “Arab terrorists” might. No, the deceivers used more reliable technology to get the desired special effects to foment war and its insider benefits.
Sorting out theories of “what really happened” awaits another day but note that nothing I have written above constitutes an endorsement of a particular alternative theory to the official 757/767 BBT lies. To reassure a few people out there, I want to state my skepticism about the most controversial, “holograms,” based on the implausibility of successfully projecting 3-D holograms of large commercial aircraft flying at high speed on a sunlit morning. We seem to lack solid evidence that such break-through stealth technology existed or was used. I am no expert but I understand that the big impediment would be a 360-degree display surface to project the deception to witnesses and cameras.
Miscellany
“To argue jetliners were not involved is baseless,” avers Jim Hoffman. I disagree, especially if Mr. Hoffman means the 767/757 fables sold to the public by the government. A series of physical impossibilities combined with numerous irrefutable facts contradict the official jetliner story, although questions about what really happened remain and multiple theories are still on the table.
Here’s an amazing statement for an objective scientist like Mr. Hoffman: “The failure of the authorities to produce evidence identifying the crashed airliners is not evidence that they didn’t crash as expected.” The vague phrase “as expected” (by whom?) might mean “As dictated by the kept media” because most of us were babes in the woods on 9/11, devoid of expectations except as formed by talking heads of the corporate media. Hoffman may also mean his personal expectations as an objective scientist but I am not impressed by his scientific acumen. Hoffman’s statement is predictable enough from a 9/11 government loyalist, but not a 9/11 skeptic. A legal maxim rightly says that fraud vitiates everything. Fraud may consist either, first, in the misrepresentation, or, secondly, in the concealment of a material fact. Government’s 9/11 guilt, its failure to produce verifiable evidence when it could and the physical impossibility of its 9/11 tale imply that we reject the government’s story across-the-board except when we find independent verification. Example of verified fact: the three WTC skyscrapers fell (this declaration answers my severest critics!).
The nature of the WTC holes has been a subject of debate. I looked at photos and saw some steel perimeter columns bent outward instead of inward, or so it appeared to my suspicious eyes back in June. If true, that would raise questions about gashes being punched in by large jetliners. While some aluminum cladding dangled, that’s not what bothered me since I know the difference between steel beams and aluminum facade. Ideally, profile photos of the holes might help to establish whether any perimeter beams curved outward, but I found no such photos.
The third beam left of the blond woman in white slacks looks like it bends toward her and outward. The triplet of upper beams located 4-6 beams to the right of where the woman stood also appear to bend slightly outward (best seen in Hufschmid, Painful Questions, p. 27, also p. 169 pdf), yet in the photo below the three upper beams do not seem to bend outward significantly and the “third beam” is now vertical despite being photographed near the previous spot.
Someone may have manipulated these photographs, “photoshopped” them as it were. The column bent outward in the first photo looks artificial, suspiciously like it is a watercolor or airbrushed in contrast to other beams. Perhaps a whistle blower is silently tipping us off. The image of the woman may have been inserted in the photo if only because she is so small, no taller than five feet, true of fewer than 2.5% of American women although there is video of her too. Suspicious photographs will not resolve questions about column curvature. Tim Canale also believes the WTC photos were photoshopped.
One Hoffman criticism of my June 9 article struck pay dirt: I cited the south tower’s “beveled edge [being] intact upon initial impact” as contrary to official doctrine. Hoffman is right that an unmarred beveled edge does not contradict the official account of the crash of UA 175 since a 38-degree banking angle implies that a plane could have avoided striking the edge. I was distracted by the first version of the official theory that the plane was flying at an oblique angle and almost missed the south tower, and I failed to take into account that a steep banking angle could leave the edge intact.
Hoffman believes that the mass of the two 767s remained inside the WTC towers, stopped by each core. Supposedly high speeds reduced the planes to confetti, shredding them into small pieces, as discussed above. Hoffman offers the example of a test plane crashed into a thick concrete barrier, although he does not show the “shredded” pieces after the collision, so we cannot examine how much was “confetti” versus identifiable aircraft parts. Gee, I wonder if the plane left a nice cartoon outline of itself too, so that the folks could know what it was? We need more photos of the aftermath of this not-very-relevant experiment to evaluate it further. There are many problems with the shredding theory as demonstrated above but note that even planes “shredded” by flying into stone mountain sides leave plenty of recognizable wreckage, phenomena absent at the towers.
Hoffman cites eyewitness accounts and videos to back up his pro-government version of 9/11 plane crashes. Eyewitness accounts are always problematic of course and I put them aside regarding the New York murders for a serious treatment later. On WTC videos, my bottom line is that until I learn more I don’t trust them. Knowing that 9/11 is a state-sponsored scam, the highest level of skepticism in evaluating videos is in order. We can be easily fooled by special effects. The videos show no deceleration, have well-timed zoom-outs by amateurs, grainy planes with artificial-appearing lighting, a United airliner that looks pitch black in profile and on its underside on a brilliant sunny morning, frame to frame deformation in tails-wings-engines-body, disappearing wings and stabilizers in single frames (which may be only interlacing effects), discolored sky in some frames, soundless impacts, planes morphing into liquid-like buildings without metal-to-metal smashing, premature and off-center flashes or explosions, and explosions and squibs near and far from the impact (I believe the last!). Notice how the smoke from the North Tower in this CNN video of the South Tower impact is static, implying that the footage is faked either by blue screen or computer graphic manipulation.
Eyewitness testimony about a Boeing 767 flying the length of Manhattan at high speed and crashing into the north tower may be scarce, but we have a “lucky” video: “Two French documentary filmmakers are filming a documentary on New York City firefighters about ten blocks from the WTC. One of them hears a roar, looks up, and captures a distant image of the first WTC crash.” These fortunate Frenchmen were perfectly situated only 10 blocks north of the tower and filmed the plane at low altitude, although it seems a distant image. Despite top-notch equipment used by the pros, it’s impossible to make out what the flying image or inject on the screen is frame-by-frame. Not surprisingly, it’s been tagged a whazzit, blurry blob and flying pig. Any amateur would have gotten a clearer image. Whatever the flying object is, it does not look like a commercial airliner to me. Was there an actual aircraft or projectile of some kind? I don’t know, but if there was, someone tampered with the Naudet pixels so that no one can identify it in the video. Just like the five Pentagon parking lot frames dated September 12, the video conceals more than it reveals. Both are intended to deceive.
Scientific Cover Up
Why would scientists at FEMA, NIST, Purdue University and MIT lie? The answers are simple:
• They are government employees, consultants or federally-funded scientists paid to arrive at a predetermined conclusion for their client, the government.
• Unlike impartial scientists that weigh one theory versus another for logic and evidence, theories supported by evidence that point to explosives, demolition and non-Big-Boeing causation are neither discussed nor discredited. They are simply ignored. While every theory does not require careful analysis, ignoring promising alternative theories is scientifically dishonest.
Conclusion
On 9/11 we had four astonishing, unverified and uninvestigated crashes. The airlines refuse to look at evidence that their planes did not crash as advertised. Wreckage at the four sites was virtually nonexistent and no parts were verified by serial number despite this routine ID method in aircraft accident investigations. Government claims two Boeing 767s disappeared into the twin towers within a 16.5-minute interval, that a Boeing 757 disappeared in the Pentagon, and another 757 crashed in rural Pennsylvania. All vanished through undersized holes. Credulous Americans believed George W. Bush and marched off to war. “What fools these mortals be,” Shakespeare wrote.
At WTC two Boeing 767s allegedly sliced into dense steel walls, steel-concrete floors and a dense steel core without a sound or deceleration and shredded themselves into nothing with virtually all the “crumbs” retained within the skyscrapers. Despite 767s three-fourths as long and wide as each tower side, both of the planes disappeared without breaking off a tail section, fuselage or wing tips upon impact.
These are physically impossible crashes. Airplanes do not exhibit completely different physical behaviors within .05 seconds at a given place. They cannot be invincible and then shatter and crumble without slowing down.
Mr. Hoffman’s critique of my June 9 article in my interested opinion does virtually no damage to my original analysis of the crashes and demolitions. The virtue of his critique is that it pushed me to think more deeply about the crashes. If the government wanted to prove that specific hi-jacked airliners crashed as advertised, it could show the time-change parts that uniquely identify each aircraft. Government could show the NSA and/or commercial satellite photos of the airliners going about their deadly business that morning. It could show Pentagon videos it is hiding, the flight data recorders, the cockpit voice recorders, and so much more. There is zero chance, of course, of the mass murderers doing anything of the sort because fabricating all this evidence is too risky. There are too many sharp analysts on the internet waiting to pounce.
The WTC demolitions are proven and the official 9/11 airliner tales are proven hogwash. This article, the beneficiary of work by many other investigators, proves it. I await the replies of Hoffman and other apologists to reestablish the official albeit impossible airliner stories. I expect little more than obfuscation. What really happened? I do not know. What is clear is that the government is lying about the four reported Big Boeing crashes.
We might never figure out exactly what happened with these crashes/explosions although every month we advance our knowledge and perhaps one day the mainstream media, Congress or a public prosecutor, seized by a sense of responsibility, will tap this growing body of research, thereby igniting probes that lead to justice. Failing that, 9/11 researchers have already convicted the perpetrators before the bar of history. Disgraced, the murderers will not get away with the crime of the century. Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld live in infamy.
*This article constitutes Part II of a reply to Jim Hoffman. My original article is here, Hoffman’s critique is here, and Part I of my reply is here. The author wishes to thank Rick Rajter, a materials science and engineering graduate student at MIT, whose contributions warranted co-authorship. He declined the offer, stating that he only wished to aid the 9-11 movement by removing any flawed or questionable scientific arguments from my analysis that would merely give my enemies ammunition to discredit me in this ongoing information battle. The author also wishes to thank some anonymous referees for their sympathetic corrections. The author remains solely responsible for any remaining errors.
We Have Some Holes in the Plane Stories
By Morgan Reynolds, Ph.D.March 5, 2006
Where there is much desire to learn,
There of necessity will be much arguing,
Much writing, many opinions; for opinion
In good men is but knowledge in the making.
— John Milton
Jim Hoffman contends that my June 9 article
“provides an excellent summary of evidence for the controlled
demolition of the WTC skyscrapers” but that about a third of my article
supports “the dubious idea that neither the Twin Towers, the Pentagon,
nor the field in Shanksville, PA were the sites of the crashes of the
jetliners commandeered on 9/11/01.” My article “thus weds the thesis of
controlled demolition of the skyscrapers with the denial that Flights
11, 175, 77, and 93 crashed where reported.” Hoffman believes that this
is “unfortunate because it functions to discredit the case for
demolition by associating it with ideas that lack scientific merit, are
easily debunked, and are inherently offensive to the victims of the
attack — especially the survivors of the passengers and crews of the
crashed flights.”Hoffman’s critique uses intimidating language—“lack scientific merit, easily debunked, inherently offensive”—to denounce someone of a contrary mind about the government story of hi-jacked jetliners. This article constitutes part II of my reply to him and here is part I. Many 9/11 researchers would be surprised to learn that the controversy over the reported crashes of Flights 11, 175, 77, and 93 has been scientifically resolved and settled in favor of the official story. Whatever the state of disputation over crashes may be, the WTC demolition theory is in no danger of being discredited. Let’s make this statement in bold letters so that Hoffman and others worried about “unity” within the vaunted 9/11 truth movement cannot fail to understand:
WTC demolition is truth inviolate, entirely separate from airliner crashes, proven beyond reasonable doubt and newly supported by a BYU physicist who calls for a serious investigation. It’s the linchpin establishing that selected parts of the U.S. government, aided by certain outsiders, committed the crimes of 9/11.
But that unassailable fact of demolition does not settle all phases of this complex scam, a commonplace in ongoing criminal investigations. Further, if controversy over the role of airplanes and hijackers played in the 9/11 hoax is “inherently offensive,” then we are in worse shape than I thought. According to William Rodriguez, the janitor who was last man out of the WTC and a much-decorated hero, healing is impossible for survivors because only truth can bring closure.
Step back from wrangling over planes for a moment and three things stand out:
• 9/11 was a colossal hoax, an egregious example of false-flag terrorism
• Corporate media dutifully sold the scam
• Four reported airliners vanished as if by magic
September 11 was a well-planned psy-op, deceptive at every level, intended to manipulate public opinion, and wildly successful in the short run. Given this background, virtually everything the government and its media stenographers parrot to this day must be construed as deception until proven otherwise.
A primary question is, why investigate the crashes? Some writers object that pursuing questions surrounding the planes is a sideshow and can only distract from an uncompromising focus on the WTC demolitions. Yet the contention that young Arabs hijacked specific flights and crashed them is a vital component of the official fiction. New, rational understanding about the plane stories would have great value, and that probably explains the intense resistance to such scrutiny. Questions and answers about each plane crash matter for at least three reasons:
• If the perpetrators get away with the plane hoaxes, it encourages more audacious, blood-soaked scams
• The key to acquiescence in the government’s war on terror and global domination project is public belief in Arab hi-jacked airliners and crashes
• Exposure of airplane lies expands the proof that government committed the 9/11 atrocities
Some readers might object that critical examination of the official airplane stories is silly because everybody saw a plane hit the WTC south tower that morning. But that was only one of four events and seeing is not believing in a world of special effects. Something fantastic shown on TV is not the end of a criminal investigation but the beginning. Any important proposition delivered by the media must be established by evidence independent of their sleight-of-hand. They have been repeatedly exposed as liars, usually on behalf of the social apparatus of compulsion they must appease daily to continue their high-revenue businesses over the public airwaves. The media are not so much “embedded” with the U.S. government and military as “in bed” with them. Even if you reject this “echo chamber” view, there is no doubt that the technology exists to insert prepared images into pixels in real time and make the images prepared in advance look (mostly) real. The first-down stripe inserted in NFL telecasts is an example. Some analysts argue that the WTC crashes were little more than Tuesday-morning cartoons. Whether or not such a conclusion is warranted, any proposed theory of what happened must be consistent with physical evidence and conform to the principles of physics, the official conspiracy theory included. We should put aside preconceptions based on pixels and evaluate the physical evidence anew. Videos are discussed again toward the end of the article.
It is not my burden to prove what really happened. That burden lies entirely with apologists for the official plane story like Hoffman. Mr. Hoffman, not the skeptics, must prove that four Boeing airliners crashed as government and corporate media say they did. Proof must be verifiable, corroborated, physical facts and not contradictory reports from witnesses, including those bought off or pressured into a predetermined result by media coverage that morning. Evidence offered by so-called plane huggers like Hoffman should be obvious and powerful. After all, land crashes by big planes in populated areas are quite easy to identify. Skeptics, by contrast, need only point to one verified fact contrary to the official theory to send it crashing into oblivion. We have the facts to destroy the official account of each reported incident.
Ordinarily it is child’s play to confirm the exact identity of a commercial plane in a crash investigation but, no, not on 9/11. Almost nothing was normal that morning. Upon careful inspection, proof of the advertised crashes is extremely hard to locate, especially since no air accident investigations were conducted. After all, the administration “knew” who to go after immediately, so why bother? The most obvious defect of the official story is an absence or near-absence of conventional airplane wreckage at each crash site. Government could have ended controversy over planes long ago by allowing independent investigators to examine part numbers and compare them to each plane’s maintenance logbook. This did not happen following the 9/11 crashes.
Hoffman denounces “ideas that have no basis in evidence, such as the idea that no planes hit the towers.” Well, let’s be careful here: the idea that specific jetliners identified by government did not hit the WTC towers has an initial “basis in evidence” because officials have not produced a single airplane part by serial number for independent corroboration. Instead, we are supposed to largely rely on the word of the conspirators themselves who staged 9/11 to pursue vast geostrategic rearrangements.
Four large commercial jets vanished within 80 minutes that morning, unprecedented events in the northeastern United States. This is so incredible that it rivals the first collapses of three steel-framed skyscrapers on the same day at the same site, the first ever “caused” by fires in history.
We cannot overlook these facts. Hoffman dismisses critics of the “Big Boeing Theory” (BBT) as unscientific even though he cannot Show Me Debris. In scientific controversy, a plausible albeit unfashionable hypothesis cannot be dismissed until falsified by a verified fact.
A commuter plane, specially prepared aircraft, military planes, missiles or drones as some eyewitnesses reported or nothing at all may have hit the towers from outside. I do not have enough evidence yet to say. My present purpose is not to posit what really happened but demonstrate what did not happen: the official BBT theory about 767 and 757 crashes is full of holes. Physical facts at every turn refute the official story about what gashed the towers, Pentagon and Pennsylvania that morning.
So we have an intellectual contest. May the better scientist win. More importantly, may the truth come out and justice eventually prevail.
Phantom Flights?
Before examining physical evidence—our principal task—we should note that many facts about the alleged flights subvert the official account. The Colgan Air flight 5930 Portland-Logan is riddled with questions and AA Flights 11 and 77 were not scheduled that day. Official BTS data are meticulously kept because of liability issues. The two American Airlines Boeing 767s in question—tail numbers N334AA and N644AA—were deregistered January 14, 2002, but without evidence they were involved in the alleged flights. Mohammed Atta supposedly left a rental car at Portland International and absurdly left a second car full of incriminating evidence at Logan, in other words, evidence was planted/fabricated. And was Gate 26 or 32 used for the unscheduled flight 11? The two United Airlines aircraft that allegedly crashed that day—tail number N612UA for Flight 175 and N591UA for Flight 93—were deregistered four years later on September 28, 2005, despite a requirement that destroyed aircraft be deregistered within 24 hours.
Further fueling suspicion, all four cross-country flights had improbably light loads with most seats vacant (approximately 52-86% empty) while the airlines, government and media never produced credible passenger manifests, a routine matter, and all inexplicably lacked Arab names. Mainstream media have reported five to nine alleged hijackers alive while ongoing searches of birth, death and marriage records suggest some passenger names were fake. Families of air crash victims remain silent, suspicious behavior while government lies and spins, and families of ground zero victims are outspoken. Searches thus far fail to show hull insurance paid on the four jetliners. Then we have missing surveillance video tapes, an incredible string of airport security/screening failures, flights disappearing from conventional radar, missing flight data and cockpit voice recorders, gagged flight controllers and firefighters, physically impossible cell phone calls with fake dialogue (“I see water and buildings. Oh my God! Oh my God!” “Hello, mom. This is your son, Mark Bingham”), not to mention the technical impossibility of the purported Arabs piloting the planes as advertised. Little if anything checks out in the official account about the alleged flights. Corporate media steer a wide berth from these problems in favor of canonizing the official conspiracy theory.
A Boeing 757 Vanishes into the Pentagon
Of the four 9/11 crashes, extensive research and facts most clearly refute the government’s “a-757-went-into-the-Pentagon” whopper. It is surprising that a 9/11 researcher like Jim Hoffman defends this tale after it has been thoroughly debunked by analysts far and wide, including Thierry Meyssan, David Ray Griffin (chapter two in The New Pearl Harbor), Eric Hufschmid, A.K. Dewdney, Ralph Omholt, Gerard Holmgren, and others.
But review the evidence we must. The question is, did AA Flight 77 crash into the west side of the Pentagon at 9:37:46 on September 11, 2001 (aka Boeing 757 tail #N644AA, FAA-listed as destroyed and deregistered on January 14, 2002, four months late)? The answer is no beyond a reasonable doubt. We know for sure that something else blew holes in the Pentagon that morning, not a Boeing 757. Compelling evidence includes the following:
• After two terrorist attacks on the WTC, a hijacked, unscheduled FL 77 supposedly wandered about the countryside for some 40 minutes undisturbed as FAA bureaucrats and NORAD warriors went “hmmmm.”
• The government released flight control transcripts on October 16, 2001, but terminated Flight 77’s path 20 minutes before allegedly crashing into the Pentagon and excluded Flight 93 entirely (Thompson, The Terror Timeline, p. 505), so official lies were still being worked out.
• The Pentagon aircraft supposedly put on a stunt show, suggesting supreme skill in the cockpit, yet the terrorist-pilot decided to fly into the low-occupancy west side, bypassing the high-occupancy east where people like Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz might have been killed. Supposedly passing over a supine White House which failed to launch its SAMs, the Pentagon too remained passive as the aircraft performed an acrobatic 270 degree (or 330 degree according to The 9/11 Commission Report) dive from 7,000 feet (an altitude known to the FAA despite the transponder off), and smashed into outer ring E of the Pentagon dead center at the first and second floors traveling at an alleged 530 mph without an engine scraping the front lawn or disturbing construction material, after downing a few lamp posts on the highway with their associated debris pointed the wrong way and felling no lamp posts on the service road nearer the Pentagon. Very neat (physically impossible too). Curiously, no uniformed Air Force member was killed but the toll on Naval Intelligence and Army was high.
• Confusion has even reigned over the exact time of the Pentagon event. There was no seismic signal from the alleged Pentagon crash to corroborate the time.
• Hani Hanjour, the alleged pilot, “may not have had a ticket” (Thompson, The Terror Timeline, p. 493), was not listed on the passenger manifest and “couldn’t fly” (pp. 193-4). Professional pilots observe that it must have been “a crack pilot in the left seat” or remote control doing the flying (p. 493). Crack pilot John Lear doubts that he could have done such flying.
• A gaping hole in the government theory is that the Pentagon gash is too small both vertically and horizontally. A Boeing 757’s tail is 40 feet tall with landing gear up while the maximum height of the hole in the Pentagon could not have been 30 feet tall (two stories). The width of the hole was less than 20 feet before the façade collapsed, and windows above the impact hole were intact. The largest width claimed for the hole is 65 feet—more like 52 feet according to photographic expert Jack White—and that was after the façade collapsed, not upon impact. The 757wingspan is 125 feet, about twice the width of the post-façade-collapse hole. The Puny Pentagon Hole (PPH) falsifies the government’s “a-Boeing-757-hit-the-Pentagon” story. It is not a close call.
• A 757 flying a nearly flat flight profile (no dive) at 500+ mph as alleged could not hit the Pentagon’s ground floor because of an extremely powerful ground effect cushion beneath it. At high speeds, the highly energized wing-tip vortices and huge downwash sheet of a 200,000-lb. airliner make it physically impossible to get closer to the ground than one-half wingspan or about 60’ in this case. The physical forces of the compressible gas called air, in other words, stirred by a high-speed 757 traveling flat near the ground make it impossible to land it at high speed. An aeronautical engineer proves this proposition in an article at www.physics911.net, and he invites other engineers and pilots to prove him wrong. Very few pilots have experienced the aerodynamic effects in this rare flight domain because they normally only get this close to the ground during landing at low speeds. Highly wing-loaded aircraft like the Global Hawk or B1-B can land at high speed but not lightly wing-loaded aircraft like the 757. In addition, a ground-hugging 757 spewing a 100,000-lb. thrust jetblast behind it would have blown trailer trucks and people away, phenomena absent in the flight path (see the DVD “Loose Change” for an example). Irrefutable physics falsifies the Pentagon’s lies.
• The linear path through rings E, D and C implies vehicle impact at an approximate 45-degree angle. Geometry dictates that the hole would have to be 1.5 times a 757’s wingspan, or 187 feet. Therefore, the hole necessary to accommodate a 757 on a “non-magical” basis is three times the width of the post-façade-collapse hole.
• While Jim Hoffman maintains that 767s “shredded” in the WTC crashes, he contends that a smaller 757 penetrated a three-foot thick concrete exterior wall at the Pentagon and continued on through two more Pentagon rings, a distance of at least 185 feet, poking a 9-foot diameter hole into C’s inside ring and apparently blowing two additional holes inside ring C. That means little or no shredding and an amazingly strong fuselage with a 15-foot diameter. The theories of aircraft crash behavior at the WTC and Pentagon appear contradictory. According to photographic expert Jack White, photos do not seem to show penetration into the second ring.
• Some apologists claim that the 757 vaporized on impact and left virtually no wreckage while penetrating three rings, an amazing proposition and unprecedented in crash history. Vaporization would require heat intense enough to melt all the metal, including aluminum, tempered steel, carbon and titanium, and heat the resulting liquids into gases. That is impossible with jet fuel. Losing over 60 tons of material? Ridiculous.
• Such “vaporizing” heat was selective enough to preserve sufficient fingerprints and DNA to identify victims. These miraculous results were courtesy the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, the government’s “trustworthy” producers of autopsies from Waco, TWA flight 800, etc. The chain of custody for these human remains is unspecified.
• The government possesses many tapes of the Pentagon attack but only offers a belated five frames from a parking lot video of the crash, dated September 12. The pictures were photoshopped, so sleuthing about what is pictured is probably worthless. One interpretation is that the engine exhaust looks like a tomahawk cruise missile with an engine not yet at full operating temperature. Another is that the “puffy plume” is a white Global Hawk photoshopped to obscure it. The explosion looks like it was caused by a warhead but is the fireball real?
• We don’t know exactly what hit the Pentagon (F-16, Global Hawk, A-3, cruise missile, etc., if anything), but “certain missiles are specially conceived to have a piercing effect… An airplane crashes and smashes. A missile of this type pierces” (Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor, p. 31). The tomahawk cruise missile is “the weapon of choice to strike reinforced, hardened targets.”
• In a “sheer coincidence,” emergency vehicles were pre-positioned at the Pentagon (Thompson, The Terror Timeline, p. 421) and the FBI quickly confiscated tapes of the crash from the Pentagon service station and Sheraton hotel after the crash (probably Virginia DOT too).
• The hapless fire chief Ed Plaugher of Arlington, VA, said there were no recognizable airplane parts at a press conference the next day.
• Many eyewitnesses at the Pentagon incident favor the military plane, missile or drone theory (Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor, p. 26, Holmgren). Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld endorsed the missile theory in a famous slip of the tongue, referring to “…the missile [used] to damage this building.” Others believe that there was no flying object at all, just interior explosions.
• Eyewitnesses saw a C-130 later confirmed to be piloted by Lt. Col. Steve O’Brien flying low over the aircraft or missile that hit the Pentagon. Contrary to eyewitness accounts, O’Brien claimed that he was not close to the crash and explosion: “With all of the East Coast haze, I had a hard time picking him out.” I was in Washington, DC, that morning and there was never a clearer morning in the history of East Coast aviation. The man is a liar. O’Brien’s C-130 showed up minutes later at the Pennsylvania crash, raising the suspicion that O’Brien was at both events for black ops purposes. Some 19 C-130s reportedly are equipped for electronic warfare/jamming/remote control capabilities (The Terror Timeline, pp. 513-4).
• CNN’s Jamie MacIntyre and others reported that close inspection showed “no evidence of a plane having crashed anywhere near the Pentagon.”
Conclusion? Irrefutable and abundant FACTS rule out AA Flight 77 as the object that flew into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.
Real plane crashes leave body parts strewn about as well as plane parts. “Numerous points based on the physical evidence of the crash site seem to make an overwhelming cumulative case against a 757 having crashed there,” Hoffman concedes, “provided one ignores the eyewitness evidence. However, most of these points involve some error in evaluating the evidence.” Hoffman dismisses physical evidence in favor of eyewitness testimony, an inversion of the ranking in science and law. Astounding. Hoffman’s flimsy arguments ignore the fact that physical facts trump witnesses’ contradictory testimony every time. There is no error in evaluating the evidence and Holmgren refutes Hoffman’s characterization of the eyewitness testimony. What we are left with is an overwhelming case against the Flight 77 theory.
A Boeing 757 Vanishes into Pennsylvania Turf
“There is no reasonable basis for questioning that [Flight 93] crashed in the field in Shanksville, PA,” Hoffman declares, “as thoroughly documented by the website Flight93Crash.com.” After taking it on the chin in three reported crashes (with virtually no wreckage) and sustaining horrific loss of life and property, the government’s heartwarming albeit murderous script says America picked itself off the canvas and roared back, setting up an eagerly-sought war on terror with the Beamer-Bush war cry, “Let’s roll!” Objective evidence on behalf of this propaganda tale, however, is scarce indeed.
With no substantiated airplane wreckage again, powerful evidence refutes the official Flight 93 hypothesis:
• Flight 93 was a scheduled flight beginning September 5, but the Arab hijackers allegedly bought tickets online August 24-29, though not on any passenger manifests, before the flight existed. One researcher contends that FL 93’s maiden Tuesday flight was on 9/11. Maybe the evidence exists but I haven’t seen a gate number at Newark nor heard credible eyewitnesses testify regarding boarding and wheels-up.
• The FAA registered Boeing 757 tail number N591UA as valid—the alleged Flight 93 aircraft—until September 2005. There are many fishy things about this tail number. United Airlines reportedly identified its Flight 93 as landing at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport on 9/11 and it was initially reported as a Boeing 767.
• An “aerial view of the impact crater of Flight 93 [that] suggests that the plane plunged into the soft ground on a nearly vertical trajectory,” yet a debris field was reported as far away as eight miles. Since it was a virtually windless morning, the physics make no sense: a hole with vertical wing marks (but no wings!) a fraction of the 125 feet wingspan of an intact 757 suggests a nearly vertical trajectory into soft ground but debris over a wide area suggests an explosion within the plane or “holed” by an air-to-air missile, as Defense Secretary Rumsfeld believes. A shoot-down might explain an 8-mile debris field but that would make the “airplane-outline” hole “for the folks to see” impossible because the plane presumably would have broken up in mid-air.
• Eyewitnesses reported an airliner flying low from the west with no suicide spiral, yet a “vertical impact hole” is impossibly at the eastern edge of the woods. Instead of an expected horizontal crash field with plenty of aircraft wreckage, a debris-free smoking hole in the ground completely contradicts the flight path seen by witnesses. No eyewitness actually saw impact.
• “There was no plane,” according to Ernie Stull, mayor of Shanksville. “Everyone was puzzled, because the call had been a plane had crashed. But there was no plane.” Reporter: “They had been sent here because of a crash, but there was no plane?” Reply: “No. Nothing. Only this hole.”
• “We haven’t seen anything bigger than a phone book, certainly nothing that would resemble a part of a plane,” said Capt. Frank Monaco of the Pennsylvania State Police. “[T]here was no tail section, no jet engines, no large sections of fuselage in view anywhere near the impact crater,” Webster G. Tarpley reports (9/11 Synthetic Terror, p. 268).
• Nena Lensbouer was the first to go up to the smoking crater and she described a hole 5-6 feet deep and smaller than the 24-foot trailer in her front yard. She described hearing “an explosion, like an atomic bomb’—not a crash.”
• Coroner Wallace Miller was stunned at how small the smoking crater looked: “[L]ike someone took a scrap truck, dug a 10-foot ditch and dumped all this trash into it…there were no bodies there.” He marveled because there was not a drop of blood: “It’s as if the plane had stopped and let the passengers off before it crashed.”
• Government has allowed no public access to the flight data and cockpit voice recorders it allegedly recovered. The FBI refused to allow a detailed investigation of the crash site, and it filled in the crater with dirt followed by topsoil and had scorched trees cut down and shredded into mulch (Tarpley, pp. 270-1), most likely hiding explosive residue from a missile or other source.
• One theory claims the military shot down an airliner over Indian Lake and then cordoned off New Baltimore, eight miles from the diversionary smoking hole near Shanksville.
Conclusion? No Boeing 757 crashed in the designated hole in Shanksville, PA. It is physically impossible.
Fools like us are supposed to believe that two Boeings hit the steel WTC towers and were strong enough to cut out cartoon plane shapes but not in soft ground in Pennsylvania. Big Boeing Flight 93 supposedly fell into a little bitty hole 20’x10’x5’ insufficient to hold half the 3.1 million parts of a 757. “United Airlines Flight 93 is the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania on September 11th, 2001,” Hoffman boldly asserts but he and the government have no proof.
Two Boeing 767s Vanish into Twin Towers
Most 9/11 researchers reject the government’s Big Boeing Theory for the Pentagon and Pennsylvania events for lack of supporting evidence and presence of contrary evidence. Skepticism about BBT at WTC is less common but if we look at the gashes in the towers, a telling question arises:
How could two large wide-bodied aluminum jetliners penetrate massive steel towers and disappear with no deceleration visible, no plane wreckage visible in gashes and none knocked to the ground below the impact zone?
Expressed another way, no confirmed debris exists from two alleged 767 high-speed crashes into skyscrapers within 17 minutes of each other, a stunning lack of evidence to support the official 767 theory. Given long experience with airplane crashes, it is difficult if not impossible to accept the proposition that a wide-body jetliner can smash into a dense steel-concrete tower and disappear virtually without a trace, much less do it twice within 17 minutes in the same city block. Yet the NIST (pdf pg 38) states about the south tower, “the aircraft completely disappeared into the building in a fifth of a second.”
Tower walls were composed of high-strength steel beams approximately 14 inches square on one-meter centers (39.37”) surrounding windows with each column beam secured to others by steel spandrel plates about 52 inches x 10 feet forming a belt around each floor (see p. 8 pdf). Steel beam thicknesses varied from 4” at the base and tapered from 5/8” to ¼” in the WTC 1 impact zone and 13/16” to ¼” in the WTC 2 impact zone. WTC floors were grids of steel topped by four inches of steel reinforced lightweight concrete in corrugated steel pans. Walls effectively were dense webs of nearly 40% steel covered by aluminum and backed by steel and concrete floor grids mated to an incredibly strong and dense core of 47 cross-braced steel columns, stairwells and elevator shafts.
In a violent encounter between an aluminum plane weighing nearly 140 tons and a steel tower weighing 500,000 tons, the plane, of course, would be crushed. Aluminum has lower yield and failure strengths than steel and a Boeing 767 mass was a minuscule—to use Hoffman’s term—three hundredths of one percent of each tower’s mass. “The impact did nothing,” as UC Berkeley structural engineer A. Astaneh-Asl said, “the airplane did not do much damage.” Like a pin into skin or a person falling through the ice on a lake, a 140-ton airplane flying at over 400 mph could inflict local damage without damaging the structure globally. In particular, the engines themselves thrusting along full throttle at approximately 450-550 mph obviously could penetrate a steel tower, even fly through it. But whatever blew each gash in the towers, only 13% or less of the upper perimeter columns on a few floors were broken and the upper structure of the towers remained intact.
A fuselage, with only minor hyperbole, could be termed a hollow aluminum tube. Among large jetliner components, only engines and landing gear would retain serious structural integrity in a collision although small parts like actuators would remain intact too. Higher speeds increase kinetic energy by the square of speed and a frontal area of under 25 square meters would create local damage. Yet planes running into mountains, construction equipment, concrete barriers, and steel buildings fare very poorly, just as speeding automobiles hitting a guardrail, telephone pole or tree do. A plane flying into a WTC tower should break up, shatter and scatter pieces everywhere. The only issue is the exact pattern of destruction the building would impose on its intruder.
A key question regarding each jetliner’s disappearance is:
Would wing tips and tail break off against each steel wall or disappear entirely inside each building?
Ordinarily the answer would be that wing tips and tail would shear off on impact and bounce to the ground below. Wing tips have enormous forward momentum at impact but begin to decelerate as the nose and fuselage collides with a steel wall, five floors of steel-truss-steel-reinforced-concrete, and a steel inner core. This would wreak complete havoc on the plane, although the plane in the south tower videos looks like an invincible hot knife going through a soft butter tower. Localized force applied by the wing tips was insufficient to fragment steel columns or spandrel plates and we should have seen video footage of the repelled wreckage bounce to the ground. There are no reports of such wreckage that I can find. A decelerating tail section would slow down and break off too, yet we saw no trace of it. “The impact of the inner half of an empty wing significantly damaged exterior columns but did not result in their complete failure,” the NIST concedes (pdf, p. 105). In plainer terms, the hollow sections of the wings may damage steel columns but not fragment them (complete failure). Instead, the dense steel exterior of each tower would “reject” or “bounce back” so-called empty aluminum wings, especially wing tips, the outer sections.
Airplanes crashing into buildings, much less steel skyscrapers, are rare events but there is some experience beyond airport terminal mishaps. The Empire State building and Tampa crashes suggest that wings and tails break off, and even a fuselage does not penetrate far, at least at low speeds. Higher speeds increase kinetic energy by the square of speed, raising penetration power at the WTC. A vertical dive by an El Al 747 cargo plane that must have weighed 300+ tons, twice the weight of an alleged 767 at a WTC tower, got the better of an approximately 12-story apartment building (notice the abundant plane debris?).
This recent crash in Iran into a 10-story building yielded the expected devastation of the 75-ton C130. Both of these buildings remained standing despite having structures that were far weaker than the 110 story steel framed WTC towers.
Most of us would agree that planes are flimsy things, as Marcus Icke points out: “Computer simulation and mathematical analysis of the impact by MIT, University of Purdue and others indicate that upon impact the wings of the 767 would have shattered and the fuel ignited outside the towers facade, the aircraft would have lost about 25% percent of its kinetic energy on impact and that the tail fin would have sheared off due to torsional forces. In layman’s terms this means that the aeroplane would have decelerated sharply [emphasis added] crumpled up and exploded against the tower’s wall with only heavy objects like the engines and undercarriage puncturing the towers facade. The entire airframe would not have glided through the outer wall and would not have left a large hole roughly the same shape and size of a Boeing 767-200.” Icke’s accompanying photos support his analysis by showing a MD80 landing hard, with its air frame bending and tail breaking off.
There probably is little dissent from the proposition that a jetliner is fragile relative to a WTC tower and even flimsy relative to a local impact area. Hoffman says, “In fact, jetliners are very light and fragile compared to buildings: they consist mostly of aluminum and have skin less than 2mm thick,” but he attempts to save the official theory with the following theory: “[T]he wing tips were shredded by the grating of meter-spaced columns.” This is the same story the NIST relies on to answer the implicit question: where is the wreckage? Why no debris? Wing tips and tail allegedly shredded instead of fracturing and shearing off. All the confetti then supposedly was deposited, absorbed or sucked inside the towers. This is an absurd proposition. Most steel beams and belt sections around the floors did not fail. Consequently, the wall rejected or repelled wing tips and tail because the gash is seriously undersized. Plane pieces do not deform like a gel or liquid and wrap around intact steel and pass into each tower. Major aircraft debris rejected by each tower would be knocked to the ground below the gashes. Hoffman offers no evidence for his “shred/wrap around” theory nor does he cite precedent from previous air crashes. It is an impossible proposition about how wing tips might have breakable joints precisely placed to coincide with columns and belts, break and then wrap around and vanish. Planes smash up, shatter, and disintegrate in irregular pieces in a crash, they don’t “shred” and wrap around intact steel pillars and belts. And even if 100% did “shred” in the metal-to-metal failure mechanism described by Wierzbicki, that material would not magically move around every beam and end up inside the building. To put it as bluntly as possible:
All steel beam and belt sections that were hit and did not fragment must have rejected plane pieces and bounced them outside each tower, period.
Yes, knife-edged grates shred cheese but dull steel columns and spandrel belts at each floor do not “shred” aluminum wings into thousands of aluminum strips and suck them into each tower. Columns and spandrel belts 52” high reject wing tips by shearing them off and bouncing them back to the ground in the fashion that telephone poles reject crashing cars. 100% of “shredded” parts cannot wrap around intact steel columns and belts and continue deep into the interior of each tower. Further, most parts do not shred, instead they shatter and break apart.
WTC crash videos show the south tower silently “absorbing” a plane and completely enshrouding it. Oddly enough, no deceleration occurs in these videos. Those clever Arab pilots parked each aircraft as if flying into an upper level airplane hangar without “braking.” A noiseless collision without deceleration is physically impossible and the chances of two 767s vanishing completely inside two towers are slim and none.
Suppose we explicitly enumerate the possibilities by strength and speed. For simplicity, assume two possible values for airplane strength upon exterior impact (invincible or flimsy), two values for aircraft strength during penetration inside a WTC tower (invincible or flimsy) and two possible speed changes during the crash process (deceleration or no deceleration). The following eight combinations exhaust the possibilities:
1 Invincible/Invincible/No deceleration
2 Invincible/Invincible/Deceleration
3 Invincible/Flimsy/No deceleration
4 Invincible/Flimsy/Deceleration
5 Flimsy/Flimsy/No deceleration
6 Flimsy/Flimsy/Deceleration
7 Flimsy/Invincible/No deceleration
8 Flimsy/Invincible/Deceleration
Looking this pattern over, physics declares all the odd theories (1,3, 5, 7) truly “odd” because they are impossible: a plane must decelerate at impact due to the laws of conservation of momentum and conservation of energy. It is no different than a human springboard diver going through air and then decelerating as he pushes against the resistance of water.
Furthermore, physics rejects any theory that posits an invincible airplane (a plane remaining intact after a high speed collision with a steel skyscraper) that also disintegrates (flimsy) or shreds itself in the next instant in the same general physical environment (temperature, etc.) eliminating theories 3 and 4. Nor is theory 8 possible because a solid airplane cannot transform itself from flimsy to invincible, thereby eliminating theories 4 and 8. That leaves theories 2 and 6. Yet theory 2 is contrary to established facts including the fact that 767 aircraft are fragile rather than invincible and the holes in the towers were too small to allow passage of an intact 767 even if it were built to “invincible” standards. Theory 6 is physically possible but it implies crumpling upon impact and that is contrary to the WTC facts. Conclusion: No Boeing 767 hit either WTC tower. QED
In detail, we have:
Theory 1 is impossible because the 767 would fly through a tower and continue at the same speed, speeding out the other side like a .357 magnum bullet fired through 1 mm thick balsa wood. Further, a Boeing 767 cutting completely through a tower would seriously destabilize the tower by cutting substantial core sections and major sections of at least two walls. Theory 1 does not apply and is contrary to observation.
Theory 2 cannot apply for multiple reasons: i) the holes were too small to allow an intact (“invincible”) 767 to pass through, ii) all parties agree 767s are not invincible and it is impossible to build them to such a standard; even the government felt obligated to produce photos of aircraft pieces, and iii) because of its large size relative to a tower, an intact 767 would almost certainly have been visible in a tower, on the ground below the impact hole or crashed at another site. All three observations contradict theory 2: undersized holes, agreed-upon impossibility of building an invincible plane, and no intact or crashed plane with its 3.1 million parts ever found in or around the Twin Towers.
Theory 3 is physically impossible because a solid like an airplane does not transform itself from invincible to flimsy within a fraction of a second in the same environment (temperature, etc.). Further, we would expect a sharp deceleration as the plane crumpled to fit into the 60 feet of space (north tower) or 37 feet of space (south tower) from the outer wall to the core. As we peer into the hole, this wreckage cannot be seen. NIST appears to support this impossible theory.
Theory 4 is physically impossible because a solid like an airplane cannot transform itself from invincible to flimsy within an instant in the same general environment (temperature, etc.). Theory 4 posits deceleration, contrary to the videos.
Theory 5 is physically impossible because a flimsy, high-speed object must decelerate sharply upon impacting an invincible object unless it acquires more energy from somewhere yet video evidence shows no deceleration.
Theory 6 is a logical, physically plausible combination that characterizes air disasters except for the four crashes within eighty minutes on the morning of 9/11. A 767 would be flimsy in a high-speed collision against a steel and concrete tower except for engines and undercarriage. Yet each tower had “clean” gashes free of airplane debris as if punctured by an invincible air vehicle. Flimsiness implies plenty of aircraft parts and cargo visible in gashes, elsewhere in each tower and on the ground below each impact site. These consequences of theory 6 are contrary to fact.
Theory 7 is physically impossible because a solid cannot transform itself from flimsy to invincible during a collision, given an essentially static environment. Further, a flimsy airplane must decelerate and fail to seriously penetrate a steel tower. Airplane pieces would be highly visible, contrary to observation.
Theory 8 is physically impossible because a solid cannot transform itself from flimsy to strong during a collision in a static environment. A flimsy airplane would decelerate but it would also leave visible debris, contrary to observation. A skeptic might argue that Option 4 is possible because the plane would easily pierce the outer walls and then slow as it encountered more resistance further into the building. The problem with this is that it requires the plane to be slowing and/or disintegrating at the front while maintaining velocity in the rear.
But we’re in luck! The government claims it has the rejoinder. NIST simulation videos purport to show how Theory 3 (Invincible/Flimsy/Deceleration) might have happened! Swaddled in twenty-million-dollar scientific trappings, this NIST flight of fantasy has some serious problems. First, NIST chooses Theory 3, a physical impossibility. Second, if that is not sufficient, NIST completely avoided modeling the official “progressive pancake collapse” theory for the obvious reason that such a model would conflict with all the data, especially near-free-fall-speed in all three skyscraper collapses. This omission signifies “the collapse of the pancake theory,” as A.K. Dewdney says. Third, despite impressive computer power and a high level of detail, the magnitudes of the parameters were amped up by as much as twenty percent to get the desired results. Fourth, a simulation is only as good as the model (Garbage In/Garbage Out) so any engineer modeler can play with the parameters and approximations until the desired result arrives. In the present case, they played plenty. By contrast, imagine NIST coming out with a model that found the invincible-penetration-then-obliteration theory contrary to physical law! Fifth, a model can only represent reality under given approximations and finite data. NIST denies curious scientists access to the model’s proprietary codes and parameters so they cannot examine the model’s behavior, especially against other data. Sixth, the time is barely readable on the two NIST videos and they cannot be downloaded for a frame-by-frame analysis with a regular PC. In short, a federal agency spends twenty million dollars and says, “Trust us.”
Turning back to reality again, another physical problem for the official WTC theory is that the maximum spread across the north tower hole is 126 feet and the south tower spread is only 103 feet, openings insufficient to accommodate a 767 wingspan of 156 feet. And wings with momentum do not “fold back onto themselves” in order to slip through an undersized hole along with the fuselage. Momentum breaks wings off in a forward motion and they torque inward (pdf) during deceleration but there is no evidence that this happened. Commenting on the Pentagon crash, Hoffman erroneously writes, “It would seem reasonable to assume that the wings and tail could have folded back and thereby avoided impacting those areas.” If I walk forward with my arms extended and bump into you, I can feel the forward momentum in my arms. Only when wings encounter a superior barrier would they “fold back” because they are breaking off. They will only fold back catastrophically in a collision. Engine thrust near maximum power makes wings “folding back” doubly impossible. In videos, we see zero wing and tail foldback, instead we observe 100% clean penetration of the wings and tail. A gash large enough to swallow a complete aircraft is important because wing tips and/or tail section were not sheared off on the impact side of either tower but disappeared.
The wings of a Boeing 767 are swept back approximately 35 degrees. This means wings do not strike the steel wall “flush” during the milliseconds of the crash process. Engines and wing roots impact first, almost simultaneously, and the wing tips, which are 40 feet back, hit a fraction of a second later. The official theory must be that wing roots and engines break through columns and spandrel plates following penetration of the “powerful” nose and fuselage, while wings stay intact to burst subsequent columns, floors and spandrel plates further away from the fuselage. The only way for tips to reach into the building and enter the “Hoffman shredding stage” is for the wings to remain intact and plow or “saw” through the steel columns and floors like an angled carpenters cut in the progressive fragmentation process (thanks to Gerard Holmgren for this point). Science is nothing but refined common sense and this “sawing” theory is contrary to common sense. While a 767 would carry enormous “momentum” or kinetic energy at impact, resistance by steel columns, spandrel plates, floors and core would consume its fixed energy supply rapidly. A more plausible sequence if only for its empirical regularity would be that the violence of the collision and consequent deceleration would shatter and break wing tips off. The wing tips would not break through columns, plates and floors but bounce to the ground below, rejected by intact columns and spandrel plates.
That leaves 767 proponents 100% dependent on the shredding/wrap-around theory that all debris slipped neatly between columns and around the spandrel belt at each floor, as if vacuumed into the deep interior. That hypothesis lacks plausibility, positive evidence and precedent, as far as I can tell. The shredding/wrap-around theory is much too neat. Wing spars have considerable structural integrity (“The wing tips were pulled up 15.5 feet from normal position over the top of the fuselage at a pressure of 1,200,000 pounds. The wing did not break…”) and 767 wing disappearance on the impact walls is impossible without bigger gashes or perfect shredding and wrap around.
For the sake of argument, suppose that a plane’s aluminum skin and frame were strong enough unaided to shatter braced steel walls and leave a tidy outline for “the folks to see.” In addition to a steel wall and multiple steel/concrete floors, within less than a tenth of a second the airliner would encounter resistance from a dense core occupying 27% of each tower’s floor space with 47 high-strength, cross-braced steel columns, three stair wells, multiple elevator shafts, and mechanical equipment within 60 feet of the WTC 1 impact wall and 37 feet of the WTC 2 wall. Even a sturdy “knife slicer” aircraft would not travel far against such dense resistance. The energy to plow through the local area of a tower is transferred from speed and the plane itself must slow because it has no new source of energy.
At 159 feet long a Boeing 767 is almost 77% as long as any side of a tower and planes do not fold up like accordions. Real terrorists would have flown much larger 747s into lower floors later in the day to maximize destruction and loss of life, but the 747 at 211.5’ wide and 232’ long would have been impossible to “sell” as vanishing. With smaller 767s anyone who thought about it nodded and said, “Oh I see, they disappeared inside. That figures. Sure enough.” Yet jetliners are not accordions, to state the obvious, nor are they aluminum beverage cans. Suppose, for the sake of argument, a crashing 767 maintained its shape and sliced all the way to the other end of the dense steel core. Seven feet of the intact jetliner’s tail section would have stuck out of the north tower. Yet peering as far as we can into the photos of the gashes, we see no tail section or aircraft debris whatsoever.
Hoffman and like-minded defenders of the 767 theory want their cake and eat it too: supposedly powerful 767s easily penetrated steel walls and floors yet identically crumbled within a fraction of a second and vanished inside despite huge fuselage length and wingspan ¾ the length of a tower wall. Both 767s were never seen again from any side of either tower, a dazzling combination of imposing strength and fragility within a tenth of a second.
The two end points—easy tower penetration at high speed without visible deceleration and flight termination within 200 feet—are nonsense.
Faith in the Big Boeing Theory rests on each 767 disintegrating completely into small pieces inside each tower, concealing all plane parts. The immense difficulty with this idea, also favored by the NIST, is how to reconcile an aluminum aircraft bursting through the steel in its path followed immediately by complete failure within 0.1 seconds, shredding completely and vanishing. The south tower plane should have decelerated in the videos and plane parts like wing tips should have bounced off the wall and many of the 626,000 parts should have been visible in the gashes. We did not see that. The official/Hoffman theory is impossible to accept unless the plane was rigged to explode or disintegrate upon contact with the wall, enabling its thorough destruction inside. That might restore some plausibility to the 767 story but it is certainly not the government story. Such explosives would add considerable complexity for the perpetrators in an already-complex crime package, violating the KISS rule. The basic problem remains that a large commercial jetliner could not punch a clean, debris-free hole into a steel tower wall to begin with. The plane would need help, explosive help of its own and/or explosives from inside the building. Even the explosions that took place blew no aircraft parts out the tower gashes to settle below the impact walls.
With respect to the south tower, it was amazing that the 9/11 maestros reproduced their wide-body magic within 16 ½ minutes in the same city block. If anything, more of the vaunted 767 should have been visible in the south tower because it was only 37 feet to the core, barely more than a 1st down and 10.
UA 175 supposedly hit the south tower at 543 mph or higher, although air resistance makes this is a suspect speed for a 767 at sea level in the absence of a dive. The NIST report (pdf p. 92) asserts a nearly flat approach with a descent angle of only 6 degrees below horizontal. UA 175 allegedly sliced through a hole two-thirds the wingspan of a 767, dumped abundant fuel in a spectacular fireball out the east side, and kept wings and tail section intact, disappearing completely inside the tower. After silent entry into the tower, UA 175’s remaining kinetic energy dissipated within a quarter second and proved insufficient to penetrate the east or north wall. A crashing jetliner would decelerate because of the resistance of the steel wall, six steel/concrete floors and the dense core within 37 feet of the south tower wall, impacted within .05 seconds. No deceleration and no visible plane wreckage means we have situation in progress because these alleged facts are physically impossible. A jetliner cannot be invincible and then flimsy the next instant.
A minor eyebrow-raiser was the 38-degree banking angle implied by the south tower hole. Such a banking angle ordinarily would imply a left-hand turn north in the last few seconds but it would take a skilled pilot at the controls of a cumbersome jetliner, to say the least, to hit the 207’ span at the alleged 543 mph.
The basic problem with any alleged trajectory, oblique or otherwise, remains how such a long and wide jetliner could vanish without decelerating in such limited floor space with nary a trace. With a fuselage 155 feet long, an intact 767 would have been visible out the south tower hole, the east side or both. The fuselage could not neatly fold up, accordion style, to conceal itself after demonstrating strength enough to silently rip through the south wall, six steel/concrete floors and penetrate so far into the core to vanish. In sum,
There is no convincing physics for how two wide-body aluminum jetliners flying at high speed could penetrate steel walls, floors and core via undersized gashes, exhibit no deceleration in videos, decelerate to zero within a quarter second, and conceal themselves entirely within each tower.
What about the plane parts government found? Engines and landing gear could have flown out of either tower, although we seem to lack solid eyewitness testimony and video evidence of major parts flying out. Spencer suspects that a canister was propelled from the NE corner of the South Tower with “debris” to support the passenger plane hoax. Some photos and videos show unidentified objects shooting out, for example, p. 39 in Hufschmid’s Painful Questions. The FBI and FEMA—a black ops agency with virtually no investigative expertise then headed by Bush campaign manager and family loyalist Joe Allbaugh—displayed a few parts during their felonious mission to destroy crime-scene evidence. None of the parts are consistent with 767 crashes (substantial sections of unburned fuselage, a 737 engine part, a piece of unburned landing gear) nor have they been independently verified and matched by serial number against the maintenance logs of the specified aircraft. This piece is a 737 engine part (CFM 56) according to aircraft experts rather than from a 767. By contrast, the authorities found an alleged hijacker’s paper passport that survived a fiery crash, subsequent fire and tower demolition. Its purpose obviously was to tell a bloodthirsty America whom to hate.
The 9/11 planners understood the physics of crashing aluminum jetliners into the steel towers. Logically enough, they did not rely on commercial 767s like backward “Arab terrorists” might. No, the deceivers used more reliable technology to get the desired special effects to foment war and its insider benefits.
Sorting out theories of “what really happened” awaits another day but note that nothing I have written above constitutes an endorsement of a particular alternative theory to the official 757/767 BBT lies. To reassure a few people out there, I want to state my skepticism about the most controversial, “holograms,” based on the implausibility of successfully projecting 3-D holograms of large commercial aircraft flying at high speed on a sunlit morning. We seem to lack solid evidence that such break-through stealth technology existed or was used. I am no expert but I understand that the big impediment would be a 360-degree display surface to project the deception to witnesses and cameras.
Miscellany
“To argue jetliners were not involved is baseless,” avers Jim Hoffman. I disagree, especially if Mr. Hoffman means the 767/757 fables sold to the public by the government. A series of physical impossibilities combined with numerous irrefutable facts contradict the official jetliner story, although questions about what really happened remain and multiple theories are still on the table.
Here’s an amazing statement for an objective scientist like Mr. Hoffman: “The failure of the authorities to produce evidence identifying the crashed airliners is not evidence that they didn’t crash as expected.” The vague phrase “as expected” (by whom?) might mean “As dictated by the kept media” because most of us were babes in the woods on 9/11, devoid of expectations except as formed by talking heads of the corporate media. Hoffman may also mean his personal expectations as an objective scientist but I am not impressed by his scientific acumen. Hoffman’s statement is predictable enough from a 9/11 government loyalist, but not a 9/11 skeptic. A legal maxim rightly says that fraud vitiates everything. Fraud may consist either, first, in the misrepresentation, or, secondly, in the concealment of a material fact. Government’s 9/11 guilt, its failure to produce verifiable evidence when it could and the physical impossibility of its 9/11 tale imply that we reject the government’s story across-the-board except when we find independent verification. Example of verified fact: the three WTC skyscrapers fell (this declaration answers my severest critics!).
The nature of the WTC holes has been a subject of debate. I looked at photos and saw some steel perimeter columns bent outward instead of inward, or so it appeared to my suspicious eyes back in June. If true, that would raise questions about gashes being punched in by large jetliners. While some aluminum cladding dangled, that’s not what bothered me since I know the difference between steel beams and aluminum facade. Ideally, profile photos of the holes might help to establish whether any perimeter beams curved outward, but I found no such photos.
The third beam left of the blond woman in white slacks looks like it bends toward her and outward. The triplet of upper beams located 4-6 beams to the right of where the woman stood also appear to bend slightly outward (best seen in Hufschmid, Painful Questions, p. 27, also p. 169 pdf), yet in the photo below the three upper beams do not seem to bend outward significantly and the “third beam” is now vertical despite being photographed near the previous spot.
Someone may have manipulated these photographs, “photoshopped” them as it were. The column bent outward in the first photo looks artificial, suspiciously like it is a watercolor or airbrushed in contrast to other beams. Perhaps a whistle blower is silently tipping us off. The image of the woman may have been inserted in the photo if only because she is so small, no taller than five feet, true of fewer than 2.5% of American women although there is video of her too. Suspicious photographs will not resolve questions about column curvature. Tim Canale also believes the WTC photos were photoshopped.
One Hoffman criticism of my June 9 article struck pay dirt: I cited the south tower’s “beveled edge [being] intact upon initial impact” as contrary to official doctrine. Hoffman is right that an unmarred beveled edge does not contradict the official account of the crash of UA 175 since a 38-degree banking angle implies that a plane could have avoided striking the edge. I was distracted by the first version of the official theory that the plane was flying at an oblique angle and almost missed the south tower, and I failed to take into account that a steep banking angle could leave the edge intact.
Hoffman believes that the mass of the two 767s remained inside the WTC towers, stopped by each core. Supposedly high speeds reduced the planes to confetti, shredding them into small pieces, as discussed above. Hoffman offers the example of a test plane crashed into a thick concrete barrier, although he does not show the “shredded” pieces after the collision, so we cannot examine how much was “confetti” versus identifiable aircraft parts. Gee, I wonder if the plane left a nice cartoon outline of itself too, so that the folks could know what it was? We need more photos of the aftermath of this not-very-relevant experiment to evaluate it further. There are many problems with the shredding theory as demonstrated above but note that even planes “shredded” by flying into stone mountain sides leave plenty of recognizable wreckage, phenomena absent at the towers.
Hoffman cites eyewitness accounts and videos to back up his pro-government version of 9/11 plane crashes. Eyewitness accounts are always problematic of course and I put them aside regarding the New York murders for a serious treatment later. On WTC videos, my bottom line is that until I learn more I don’t trust them. Knowing that 9/11 is a state-sponsored scam, the highest level of skepticism in evaluating videos is in order. We can be easily fooled by special effects. The videos show no deceleration, have well-timed zoom-outs by amateurs, grainy planes with artificial-appearing lighting, a United airliner that looks pitch black in profile and on its underside on a brilliant sunny morning, frame to frame deformation in tails-wings-engines-body, disappearing wings and stabilizers in single frames (which may be only interlacing effects), discolored sky in some frames, soundless impacts, planes morphing into liquid-like buildings without metal-to-metal smashing, premature and off-center flashes or explosions, and explosions and squibs near and far from the impact (I believe the last!). Notice how the smoke from the North Tower in this CNN video of the South Tower impact is static, implying that the footage is faked either by blue screen or computer graphic manipulation.
Eyewitness testimony about a Boeing 767 flying the length of Manhattan at high speed and crashing into the north tower may be scarce, but we have a “lucky” video: “Two French documentary filmmakers are filming a documentary on New York City firefighters about ten blocks from the WTC. One of them hears a roar, looks up, and captures a distant image of the first WTC crash.” These fortunate Frenchmen were perfectly situated only 10 blocks north of the tower and filmed the plane at low altitude, although it seems a distant image. Despite top-notch equipment used by the pros, it’s impossible to make out what the flying image or inject on the screen is frame-by-frame. Not surprisingly, it’s been tagged a whazzit, blurry blob and flying pig. Any amateur would have gotten a clearer image. Whatever the flying object is, it does not look like a commercial airliner to me. Was there an actual aircraft or projectile of some kind? I don’t know, but if there was, someone tampered with the Naudet pixels so that no one can identify it in the video. Just like the five Pentagon parking lot frames dated September 12, the video conceals more than it reveals. Both are intended to deceive.
Scientific Cover Up
Why would scientists at FEMA, NIST, Purdue University and MIT lie? The answers are simple:
• They are government employees, consultants or federally-funded scientists paid to arrive at a predetermined conclusion for their client, the government.
• Unlike impartial scientists that weigh one theory versus another for logic and evidence, theories supported by evidence that point to explosives, demolition and non-Big-Boeing causation are neither discussed nor discredited. They are simply ignored. While every theory does not require careful analysis, ignoring promising alternative theories is scientifically dishonest.
Conclusion
On 9/11 we had four astonishing, unverified and uninvestigated crashes. The airlines refuse to look at evidence that their planes did not crash as advertised. Wreckage at the four sites was virtually nonexistent and no parts were verified by serial number despite this routine ID method in aircraft accident investigations. Government claims two Boeing 767s disappeared into the twin towers within a 16.5-minute interval, that a Boeing 757 disappeared in the Pentagon, and another 757 crashed in rural Pennsylvania. All vanished through undersized holes. Credulous Americans believed George W. Bush and marched off to war. “What fools these mortals be,” Shakespeare wrote.
At WTC two Boeing 767s allegedly sliced into dense steel walls, steel-concrete floors and a dense steel core without a sound or deceleration and shredded themselves into nothing with virtually all the “crumbs” retained within the skyscrapers. Despite 767s three-fourths as long and wide as each tower side, both of the planes disappeared without breaking off a tail section, fuselage or wing tips upon impact.
These are physically impossible crashes. Airplanes do not exhibit completely different physical behaviors within .05 seconds at a given place. They cannot be invincible and then shatter and crumble without slowing down.
Mr. Hoffman’s critique of my June 9 article in my interested opinion does virtually no damage to my original analysis of the crashes and demolitions. The virtue of his critique is that it pushed me to think more deeply about the crashes. If the government wanted to prove that specific hi-jacked airliners crashed as advertised, it could show the time-change parts that uniquely identify each aircraft. Government could show the NSA and/or commercial satellite photos of the airliners going about their deadly business that morning. It could show Pentagon videos it is hiding, the flight data recorders, the cockpit voice recorders, and so much more. There is zero chance, of course, of the mass murderers doing anything of the sort because fabricating all this evidence is too risky. There are too many sharp analysts on the internet waiting to pounce.
The WTC demolitions are proven and the official 9/11 airliner tales are proven hogwash. This article, the beneficiary of work by many other investigators, proves it. I await the replies of Hoffman and other apologists to reestablish the official albeit impossible airliner stories. I expect little more than obfuscation. What really happened? I do not know. What is clear is that the government is lying about the four reported Big Boeing crashes.
We might never figure out exactly what happened with these crashes/explosions although every month we advance our knowledge and perhaps one day the mainstream media, Congress or a public prosecutor, seized by a sense of responsibility, will tap this growing body of research, thereby igniting probes that lead to justice. Failing that, 9/11 researchers have already convicted the perpetrators before the bar of history. Disgraced, the murderers will not get away with the crime of the century. Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld live in infamy.
*This article constitutes Part II of a reply to Jim Hoffman. My original article is here, Hoffman’s critique is here, and Part I of my reply is here. The author wishes to thank Rick Rajter, a materials science and engineering graduate student at MIT, whose contributions warranted co-authorship. He declined the offer, stating that he only wished to aid the 9-11 movement by removing any flawed or questionable scientific arguments from my analysis that would merely give my enemies ammunition to discredit me in this ongoing information battle. The author also wishes to thank some anonymous referees for their sympathetic corrections. The author remains solely responsible for any remaining errors.
No comments:
Post a Comment