Robert Foley

[Editor's note: It was a great pleasure to receive this blog from Robert Foley, especially since it's dated just the day before I did an interview with Brian Ruhe, "9/11: Who was Responsible and Why?", which I publish here. I welcome comparisons and comments that address differences between us, where it seems to me that, by and large, we are on the same page. Very interesting stuff!]





https://whathappenedon911.wordpress.com/ Posted on 

What Happened on 9/11?

I have never been much of a conspiracy buff. Even though my Irish-Catholic parents worshiped JFK, I took little interest in the assassination conspiracy theories. So when some people started calling 9/11 an inside job, I dismissed it as the idea of the chronically suspicious, the tinfoil-hat types who were sure the moon landings were faked. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as the 9/11 Truth movement until I ran across a book in the library by a Toronto journalist who was skeptical of the conspiracy story and at pains to debunk it. That made me curious, and I watched some YouTube videos and did some reading online. Then I read articles and watched videos by apparent experts who reassured the reader or viewer that the conspiracy was just a misinterpretation of the data, the result of false rumors, or the product of overactive — not to say paranoid — imaginations. And that seemed to settle it for me. 
Then, one day last year, I got something on my Facebook page about an ex-CIA pilot who had published three books attempting to show evidence of a conspiracy and was coming out with a fourth when he mysteriously killed his two children, himself, and even the family dog. The police concluded that he had been distraught over his impending divorce, but friends said he was happy and excited about his new book. Neighbors heard no shots and for several days afterward, they saw a black SUV with strange antennas on the roof. That induced me to go back and take a second look. This time I couldn’t get past two things: the pristine lawn at the Pentagon after the plane had allegedly hit the first floor, and the crater in Shanksville, Pennsylvania where United 93 had allegedly crashed. It just didn’t look like the site of a plane crash and I couldn’t picture a field, no matter how soft the ground, swallowing an entire airliner. The more I looked, the stranger things became.
There are, for  instance, videos of the plane hitting the South Tower of the World Trade Center in which it seems to simply disappear into the building. It seems to defy the laws of physics. Then there are eyewitness accounts in all three places that conflict with the official stories. It was all very confusing, and I’m in no way sure that I have solved it in a little under a year of going through research that many others have compiled and put online. But I have my own theories of how it was done and the reader can judge for himself or herself how plausible it all is. 
But before I launch into that, I want to address the first and biggest objection that always arises when someone mentions the possibility of 9/11 being an inside job. That is the question, who in government would do such a thing? Governments have been known to provoke wars that they thought were in their interest. If country A wished to go to war with country B, it could dress one of its ships in the colors of country B and fire upon one of its own ships, thus creating a justification for war. Is that what 9/11 was? And who would justify the murder of approximately three thousand people and for what reason?
I can’t answer that with any certainty because I don’t know. Suspicion, however, seems to center around the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). That is a think tank made up primarily by neoconservatives who are foreign policy hawks. Their position is that America has become an imperial power whether anyone wants to acknowledge it or not. America rules the waves as Britain did in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries up until World War II and the rise of American military power. They believe that this power can’t be un-built and any attempt to do so would be destructive and disruptive to world order. So the best thing America can do is to use its power for good, to maintain order and try to force change in places that are resistant to democracy and free markets,  which are thought to be essential to freedom. Still, it is a great leap to go from knowing that a group of neocons thought that Saddam Hussein and his regime had to go, and imagining that a cabal planned and executed 9/11. That is why I was skeptical until just last year. So I’m going to go briefly step-by-step over the three attacks. First I’ll give the official story, then the anomalies, and finally I will present things that I or others have found and how those things can be arranged into a plausible alternative scenario.
The World Trade Center
The Official Story
The official story is that, on the morning of September 11, 2001, planes out of Boston — American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 — were hijacked by Arab men armed with box-cutters. Flight 11 took off at 7:59 AM and Flight 175 took off fifteen minutes later at 8:14. Flight 11 had 92 people on board; Flight 175 had 65. Both were Boeing 767s. At 8:46, the hijackers crashed Flight 11 into the 93rd to the 99th floors of the North Tower, Tower One. At 9:03, Flight 175 crashed into ten floors of the South Tower, floors 75-85. At 9:59, the South Tower collapsed. Twenty-nine minutes later, at 10:28, the North Tower collapsed. The official story — or stories, because the original was slightly altered later — is that fires caused a softening of the steel to the point that the connections gave way, creating a pancaking effect and pulverizing everything on the way down.
The most glaring problem with that story is that, while there have been skyscraper fires that have gutted the whole buildings, none has ever collapsed. The towers were built to be exceptionally strong, strong enough to endure the impact of a Boeing 707, the largest airliner at that time. Engineers, architects, scientists, and experts of all stripes have come forward to say that jet fuel doesn’t burn hot enough to soften, let alone melt, steel. Firefighters are on record as saying they saw molten steel in the basements. Satellite images show hot spots in the locations of the towers and fires continued to burn underground for weeks after September 11. 
Another problem is the collapse of WTC Building 7. That was a 42-story building across the street from Buildings 5 and 6 and the main World Trade Center complex. It suffered no obvious structural damage during the collapse of the towers, but fires were ignited inside the building. Late in the afternoon of September 11, at 5:20, it collapsed, falling straight down. Again, the collapse of a steel-frame building from relatively small fires is mysterious. There is also the fact, suspicious to many, that it appears to collapse exactly like buildings that are brought down by controlled demolition. If it were, it would have taken weeks or months in advance, according to experts, to prepare a building that size for demolition. It is not something that can be done in an afternoon. The official story is that the fires were responsible for bringing it down and no explosives were used.
As mentioned, the video of the alleged United 175 hitting the South Tower is very strange. Supposedly, it was traveling at such speed that it simply sliced through the steel of the building leaving no trace of it outside or on the street below. Professional pilots question whether a plane at a thousand feet could go as fast as it is claimed Flight 175 was going. They also question whether a novice pilot could hit that target at that speed. In addition, there appears to be no resistance on the part of Tower 2. Even if the plane were going upwards of 500 mph, even if it punched a hole in the side of the tower, one would expect to see pieces of the plane blown backwards and falling after impact. A karate master can break a board or a concrete block with his fist, but there is a reaction in the form of pain felt in his hand. The building had to have offered some resistance and sent energy backward in resistance to the force of the plane. 
There is also a good deal of confusion about engines, one of which was found on the street, north of the WTC. Experts who have looked at the picture, however, say it doesn’t appear to belong to a Boeing 767. In addition, there is a good deal of confusion by eyewitnesses over what they saw. Someone who saw what strike the North Tower said it looked like a small jet. People who saw what struck the South Tower say it was a dark gray, military-looking plane. Some say it had no windows. Some see some kind of protuberance on the underside of the plane in photos and videos — a so-called “pod”. They believe this is part of a military aircraft or something used to penetrate the steel walls. Many believe the plane was empty and flown by remote-control, something that has been possible for several decades. So after reading and watching videos and looking at many photographs and not being able to make more progress, I decided to use a photo editor and look at the pictures and video stills from New York. I first looked at a still from a video of United 175 heading for the South Tower:
Flight 175 original
I was curious about the way the tail pipe curved downward. Unlike on a typical airliner:
real united 767
On an airliner, that is the exhaust for the auxiliary engine, the engine that powers the plane when the main engines aren’t turning. I used the photo app in Windows 10 with its various filters and got this:
175 from behind (3)175 from behind (4)
Viewed through a filter, the plane appeared transparent and there appeared to be internal structures. I enlarged it:
175 from behind (5)
175 from behind (6)enlarged 800 text
In this video, the plane appears shadowy and gray. I tried the same thing with stills from videos that showed an image of a plane clearly marked as a United Airlines plane and they were opaque. I looked at a still taken from the other side:
175 front view
This also seemed to be transparent. A closer look:
175 front view enlarged (5)
It has what appears to be a spiral tube in front connected to a tank of some kind. The bright spot on the front is the other engine. There are, as far as I can see, only three possibilities here. This may be a photographic artifact. The images of the plane’s right side, however, are too detailed to be an artifact. The other possibility is that they are faked. I can assure the reader that at the time, I had never used a photo editing program and had no idea how to do it. Even now, when I’ve had a little more experience with photo editing, I’m not sure I could do something like this successfully. That doesn’t preclude the possibility that someone else faked them. The only thing I can say about that is that I think that if I or anyone else were going to embed an image within the image of the plane, I would have simply grabbed a picture of a cruise missile off the Internet and stuck it in there. Who would come up with such an outlandish-looking object if it didn’t have a practical purpose? 
The third alternative I initially rejected as too far out there to be true. Some have suggested that no plane hit the South Tower at all. They believe that, either there was nothing in the air and the holes in the building were blown open by internal explosives, or else, an idea I considered too far-fetched, they were laser projections, projected in mid-air and visible to both the naked eye and cameras. it sounded like the product of the fevered imaginations of the Internet conspiracy crowd, but there is a Washington Post story from 1999 that says in the mid-nineties, a general was idly musing That it would be good if they could project an image of Allah in the sky telling the people of Iraq to rise up against Saddam. The Pentagon being the Pentagon, somebody started researching it. It turned out to feasible but would require building a mirror a square mile in area and floating in space — prohibitively costly even for the U.S. military. 
But just because a giant image of Allah was unfeasible doesn’t mean they gave up on the idea. There is a YouTube video posted in recent years which purports to be of an Alaskan Airlines commuter plane. The person shooting the video says he can even hear the sound of the engines. The problem is, the propellers aren’t turning. If that video is genuine, and that is a laser projection of realistic-looking Alaska Airlines plane, it seems that in 2001, it may have been possible to project a gray, shadowy image of a plane in the air. If that was a laser image, I began to wonder what those objects were that look far more solid than the plane itself. The thing visible on the right side of the “plane” seems to clearly be a bomb with tail-fins. On the left side, the spiral tube struck me as resembling a laser tube:
The laser resonator tube is where photons bounce back and forth until they acquire enough energy to break through the partially-mirrored surface in front.  In 2001, the military had a laser weapon capable of cutting through the steel of artillery shells and missiles:
Some time after, I found this picture
carolciemiengo2 unidentified plane part
carolciemiengo2 unidentified plane part cropped.
It is supposed to have been found at the site of the World Trade Center. If that isn’t part of an airplane, it looks a lot like a laser resonator tube. Going on the assumption that a laser was part of that flying craft in the picture, I started looking into military lasers. The high-energy laser used by the military is a gas laser, also used in industry. It creates energy by mixing gases together. That being the case, I wondered if what appears to be a tail pipe on that object could be used for exhausting gas from the laser. I took some stills from a video:
175 tail smoketail smoke 6tail smoke 2tail smoke 4tail smoke 8
It could be that smoke from the auxiliary engine or something else is being ejected. It’s hard to explain, however, that explosion beginning on the center of the east-facing wall. It would seem if that wall were going to explode outward, it would start nearer to the side where the plane was entering the building. So this doesn’t prove that there was a gas laser used to cut through the steel walls. The technology, however, existed at the time, so it remains a possibility. I then wondered if something similar could be seen in the film of the plane hitting the North Tower.
flight 11 frame 7flight 11 frames 7,8,9flight 11 frame 9flight 11 frame 10
The images are blurry, but in frame 7, the shadow of the plane has straight edges. In frame 8, it seems to be obscured. In frame 9, something that looks like a plume of black smoke appears to be rising. In frames 10 and 11, it forms a black ball, and in frame 12, it dissipates. Some have said that it is a shadow, but in frames 10 and 11, if it is a shadow, it seems to be detached from whatever is casting it. Bear in mind, all the photos I’ve used have been taken off the Internet. They are of uncertain provenance, they have been uploaded and downloaded many times, and blowing up pictures can create strange effects. Therefore none of this necessarily constitutes proof that would convict someone. I enlarged a still from this film taken by the French Naudier brothers who were doing a documentary on New York firefighters. It is the only film of the impact with the North Tower.
naudet flight 11 enlarged 700 (2)
It doesn’t appear to have side engines, but it does seem to have a large exhaust portal in back. There looks to be a smaller exhaust portal below, perhaps for the laser exhaust. The D-shaped hole somewhat resembles that of the Global Hawk surveillance drone which has a wingspan comparable to a Boeing 737.
global hawk d-shaped exhaust
If that is an exhaust port in the North Tower plane, it indicates a centrally-located engine. Someone spotted this in the hole in the North Tower:
tower 1Torres tower 1enlarged (2)
It’s hard to understand how a plane with two engines, one on each wing, ended up depositing one engine in the center of the hole. These images appear to be too detailed to be merely imaginary. This from the South Tower. They may be subliminal images added in real time or Photo-shopped into the still picture later. Again, anyone could have faked the pictures, but if 9/11 was a plot, it was a psy-op, a psychological operation intended to induce a population to do something, like the big image of Allah in the sky over Iraq. These would be intended to provoke fear and anxiety in viewers. Subliminal images register subconsciously and so bypass the conscious mind, provoking emotions that the conscious mind can’t account for and ascribes to the action on the television.
tower 2 smoke (2)
These are some more that I believe to have been inserted for the benefit of people searching the Internet. The only Viewpoint.com I could find was a firm selling architectural and engineering software, including a graphics program, perhaps used to create the images.
175 front view enlarged (3)
Some more from a still from a South Tower impact video.
ghost plane enlarged (2) labeled
There are videos on YouTube where you can view these. At normal speed, they go by faster than the eye can see. They’re just blurs. At super-slow motion, they appear to be flying at the normal speed for birds. That is, when everything else is moving in slow motion, these “birds” appear to be moving at normal speed. Someone estimated they must be moving at supersonic speed — a bit fast for your ordinary New York pigeon. Apparently, the military has developed drone birds for surveillance that are so realistic, they even flap their wings. There appear to be whole flocks of them around the World Trade Center on 9/11.
Drone birds enhanced 2 (2)
An Australian man spotted this and posted it on YouTube:
bunker buster 700 labeled
It appears in at least one other video of the South Tower impact. It flies past the towers just a moment after the explosion in the South Tower.
Tower 2 new video enhancedTower 2 new video
The white spot is debris from the tower. The Australian man believes it is a bunker-buster bomb headed for Building 6. Compare the silhouette with that of the Paveway II bunker-buster. The tail fins unfold in flight.
Paveway-II-Plus-Laser-Guided-Bomb
wtc6-aerialinside wtc6
The bottom picture is the interior of WTC Building 6. Although it was supposed to have been destroyed by falling debris from the towers, there are no large pieces from the towers to be seen . Compare to this:
u boat pen.
This is a German U-Boat pen destroyed by a British bunker-buster bomb in World War II. Notice the similarity in the way everything is hanging down. The upper picture appears to show that something exploded from within. In the interior, there were no furnishings to be seen, no wallboard, and no doors left — odd if it were only destroyed by falling debris.
Light-colored smoke could be seen rising from the area of Building 6 at the time of the South Tower’s collapse. Plumes of light smoke and dust were rising from underground many yards from the South Tower. If it came from Building 6, the light color may be due to the fact that it is composed mostly of wallboard.
tv building 6Building 6 plumes Biggart
Finally, there is this from a group of pictures released by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). They are photographs taken during 9/11 by a detective in a helicopter. This is from photo number 39.
gjs-wtc039
NYPD helicopterNYPDHelicopterNumber2 mystery object (2)
In the original photo, the object is tiny and could be easily overlooked. Nevertheless, someone spotted it, enlarged it, and posted it online. Whatever it is, it resembles the object seen within the South Tower plane. It’s heading south after both towers have come down. I speculate it is heading to Building 4. The white square may be a target for a laser and it may have been cloaked by a laser projection earlier, but in the smoke from the buildings, it would be neither possible nor necessary to continue to cloak it.
The dark, rounded object in front could be a kind of battering ram. In the South Tower this may be the object that emerged from the opposite wall.
Some people say that is a landing gear. Some say it is the nose of the plane, proving that it was no ordinary plane. It looks like a bullet. It also seems to be detached. It seems to bear a resemblance to the object at the front of the craft in photo 39. If it was much smaller than the nose of a plane, it could explain why there isn’t much of a hole where that object emerges. It may have broken through where the arrows are pointing and the steel beams are broken and bent.
6-30_wtc2-north-face-exit.0
Lastly, there is building five:
wtc-building-7-map_2
It appears comparatively less damaged than Building 6, but there is a large round hole in the roof. Could that have been made by an incendiary bomb?
So let’s put together an alternative narrative for what happened in New York on September 11. Whether the planes even took off from Boston is yet another contested question. Either way, what hit the North Tower was a modified Global Hawk. Simultaneously, explosives went off in parts of the upper stories and some material was ignited that burned through the steel creating the parts of the hole supposedly made by the wings. It may have had explosives on board which detonated, ensuring there was nothing identifiable left, besides the engine. Then the strange flying vehicle, cloaked by laser projection, hit the South Tower. For what it’s worth, there is a video taken from across the East River and somewhat north of the WTC. There is alarm at the smoke billowing from the North Tower. Suddenly, a young woman screams, “What the (expletive) is that?” She screams it twice. Now, New Yorkers are quite familiar with airplanes. Why did she not say something like, “Look there’s another plane”? Why does she sound genuinely baffled by what she’s seeing. Is it because the projection didn’t appear at that angle and they saw what hit the South Tower, the vehicle without its cloaking?
In any event, almost simultaneous with the impact in the South Tower, a bunker-buster was launched from the air and struck Building 6. It had a delayed fuse which was set to explode at the time the South Tower was demolished, thereby hiding the explosion in Building 6. At some point, an incendiary might have hit Building 5, setting it on fire. When the North Tower was brought down, the second flying vehicle, similar to the one that hit the South Tower was sent to destroy Building 4. At 5:20PM, pre-planted explosives brought down Building 7, completing the destruction of the World Trade Center, and causing very little damage to surrounding buildings.
The implication is, of course, that explosives were planted in the towers well in advance, as well. 
It would have been a daunting task for a cell of twenty Arab terrorists to gain access to the towers, and, posing as workmen, plant enough explosives in two towers and a 42-story building. Plus, it would take expertise possessed by few people in the world. Viewed from that perspective, it is implausible that the explosives would have been planted by the alleged hijackers. There is a lot of circumstantial evidence that others gained access to the towers, sometimes at night after the cleaning crews had left, and sometimes, perhaps during the day, on empty floors. There are also “squibs”, so-called — puffs of dust and smoke — emerging down the building ahead of the collapse. If they were the result of air-pressure, they were powerful enough to blow sections of the tower walls, each weighing tons,  as far as five-hundred yards, and with enough force to cause them to stick into the sides of buildings.

This is all speculative, of course, but there are many anomalies. Like that unidentified flying object from the NIST photos. Like the collapse of Building 7. And, of course, there is the collapse of the towers. There is evidence of high-explosive material found in the dust of the towers. Independent analysts are sure it is a high-tech explosive called nano-thermite,  but government representatives disagree. Only an independent inquiry will settle the matter.
The Pentagon
The Official Story
At 8:20AM, American Airlines Flight 77, a Boeing 757, took off from Dulles Airport, west of Washington, D.C., and headed for Los Angeles. There were supposed to be 64 people on board, although according to the manifest published on CNN’s website, there were only 52. It was nineteen minutes late taking off. At almost 8:51 AM, Flight 77 radioed its last communication. It was 285 miles west of the Pentagon. At 8:56, the transponder stopped transmitting. It begins a 180 degree turn over southern Ohio and heads back in the direction of Washington. At 9:05, West Virginia air traffic control spots an unidentified blip with no transponder signal. At 9:33, Washington flight control sees a fast-moving blip inbound. Minutes after the FAA grounded all takeoffs nationwide, a C-130 cargo plane was dispatched from Andrews Air Force Base to Minnesota. Air controllers at Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington ask the pilots to see if they can locate Flight 77. They report seeing it, and, by their own account, turned around and followed until it was too far away to see where it had gone down. Then they proceeded on their original course. That was at 9:36. One minute later, the plane hits the western side of the Pentagon.
There are numerous problems that arise here. One glaring one is that the alleged pilot of the hijacked Flight 77, Hani Hanjour, is supposed to have been a terrible pilot, according to the flight instructor at the school in Florida where they were supposedly learning to fly. Nevertheless, he did what professional pilots call a very difficult maneuver, turning 270 degrees while descending, then avoiding  highway signs, crashing the plane into the first floor of the Pentagon, all without harming the lawn. There are questions about why that part of the building was chosen by the terrorists to crash the plane. Not only were Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the top brass on the other side of the building, the side that was hit was recently refurbished and almost empty. For a group of super-terrorists who launched the biggest and most complex terrorist attack in history, they seemed to make some critical mistakes. Not only was that section of the Pentagon nearly empty, but part of the refurbishing included reinforcing the walls and windows to guard against truck bombs and other forms of attack.
There is also the fact that the airspace over the Pentagon is protected. Commercial airliners aren’t allowed to fly over, and military aircraft have special transponders identifying them as friendly. Pentagon defenses should have been engaged, but apparently they weren’t. There is a good deal of confusion, some say deliberately sown, about military exercises being carried out that day. Adding to the confusion for military air traffic control, there were a good many false blips on radar, supposedly associated with the exercises. 
There is also confusion on the part of eyewitnesses. Some said it was an airliner like a 757. Others said it looked more like a 737. In addition, there was a Citgo gas station across the highway from the west wall of the Pentagon. The official story says Flight 77 approached along a flight path that took it south of that gas station. But several credible eyewitnesses, including two Pentagon police officers, claim they saw an airliner flying low past the north side of the station. The owner and his son also claimed to have seen or heard it flying to the north of the station. Someone who was a pilot described the plane as being no bigger than a Gulfstream 300 private jet. Another said it looked like a humpback whale! How to make sense of all these conflicting accounts? Then there are the pictures released by the Pentagon in 2002. They were taken by two security cameras a good distance away. They also took a picture only once every second, so there is a good deal of missing information. The footage was released in 2006. They’ve added fuel to the debate rather than settled it.
pentagon cctv with boxescctvframe1cctvframe2planecctvframe3impactcctvframe4fireball
911plane-video (3)
The picture on the right is my attempt to enhance a frame of the film. The front A of the American Airlines logo can be seen clearly while the rest can’t, indicating the vehicle is angled away, approaching the Pentagon at obliquely from the south as the official story says.
There is a smoke trail there that some believe is coming from an engine on that aircraft who’s tail is visible. However, it pretty clearly has come straight across the image from the right, while the aircraft is coming at an angle.
pentani
I took a closer look at an image from the other camera.
pentegon object on right enlr
In this frame, the smoke trail appears, but there is no aircraft to make it. I tried a number of things in a photo editor. Finally, I inverted the colors and got this:
plane77_contrast_adj cropped enl pixlr (4)
There is a dark shadow in front of the smoke trail in the original picture. In the inverted colors it seems to be a solid object.
plane77_contrast_adj cropped enl pixlr (2)
This is cropped, enlarged, and filtered through a sepia filter. Some more views:
plane77_contrast_adj cropped enl pixlr (5)pentegon object on right cropped paint.net 1
It seems to be solid and stand out from the background. I maintain that the pointed object in front is a depleted uranium dart, which is what one would want to break through the Kevlar-reinforced wall of the Pentagon. There is circumstantial evidence that depleted uranium might have been used. A scientist was using a Geiger counter outdoors and downwind from the Pentagon and saw a momentary spike in the reading a little while after the crash. Also, when repair work was being done on the Pentagon, crushed gravel and sand was put down, ostensibly to protect the lawn, but it would have the benefit of keeping down radiation. It may not be a coincidence, also, that when the surface for the 9/11 Pentagon Memorial — located by the wall that was struck — was chosen, they chose stabilized gravel. As for the aircraft that is approaching from the south, it is hard to believe that an entire 757 would be entirely hidden by the box in the foreground, even if it were at an angle. The thing that stood out for me was the person who said the aircraft he saw looked like a humpback whale. That’s an odd description for an airliner but a good one for a Global Hawk drone.
Global hawk in flightglobal hawk front view.
Modified and painted to look like an American Airlines jet, it might fool most people. With its wingspan comparable to a 737 and moving at a high rate of speed, people would be hard-pressed to say what else it could be. The pilot who said it was no larger than a private jet was also an EMT. He rushed over to see if he could help victims, but, of course, there were none to be seen. What he did see were thin shards of aluminum and small bits of a black, fibrous material. The Global Hawk is made of light aluminum and its wings are made of a Kevlar-carbon composite. The wreckage was small and light enough to be picked up by hand. Who these men are and why they’re removing evidence from a crime scene is unknown to me.
picking up wreckage
So we have credible eyewitnesses that saw an airliner flying toward the Pentagon on a route different than the one in the official report. We have conflicting descriptions of what flew toward the building via the official route. We have a smoke trail heading toward the wall that doesn’t appear to belong to the aircraft in the Pentagon closed-circuit video images. And we have eyewitness evidence of wreckage that could match that of a Global Hawk. So I speculate that it could have gone like this. A Global Hawk drone was modified and painted in the American Airlines colors. (The military says it lost two in Afghanistan. Counting the one that may have hit the North Tower in New York, that might account for the missing drones.) 
A Tomahawk cruise missile was equipped with a depleted-uranium dart on the front. And an empty 757 or 767 was in the air, either piloted or unmanned. That was the plane eyewitnesses at the Citgo station saw fly past, north of the station. The Global Hawk followed the official route. And a cruise missile was probably launched by air from somewhere. A number of witnesses say they saw a C-130 cargo plane flying close behind the jet. One person who was a reporter for USA Today said he thought it was an electronic warfare plane. The Pentagon said it was the C-130 that had been sent from Andrews Air Base, but the pilots of that plane said they didn’t get close enough to Washington to see where the plane hit.
1200px-EC-130J_Commando_Solo
The EC-130 has distinctive antennae on its tail. If someone were familiar with aircraft, he couldn’t mistake it. It has various roles, but one is jamming electronic communication. Was it jamming Pentagon electronics to defeat its defenses and allow the airliner to penetrate Pentagon airspace? Could it have also launched a cruise missile?
The airliner, the drone, and the missile arrived almost simultaneously, with the missile arriving first, just a little ahead of the others. The explosion obliterated the Global Hawk, which might have had on=board explosives of its own. This pushed the blast in the direction from which the Global Hawk was flying, explaining why most of the damage inside the Pentagon, follows the flight path, but a significant amount is spread straight through in the direction the missile hit. At the same time, the airliner pulled up and flew over the roof of the Pentagon. A worker going to his car saw an airliner fly over the roof and the parking lot. However, someone checked it on Google Earth and could see no airliner over the Pentagon for that day and time. Yet we have recently learned that both the CIA and NSA developed hacking tools to gain access to various devices and media. Could they have hacked Google Earth and wiped the image of the plane out?
This explains better the conflicting witness accounts, the damage pattern within the building, and the lack of damage without. It explains the strange wreckage outside the Pentagon and the lack of identifiable wreckage inside. And it explains how an apparently inexperienced and inept pilot was able to do what professional pilots can only do on a flight simulator after many tries. Because he didn’t do it at all.
As for the damage pattern in the facade of the Pentagon, there is some question about whether that damage pattern was visible immediately after the “crash”. For some time after, a fire engine was fighting a fire from a suspiciously long distance away:
fire engine
The water effectively concealed the view of the lower part of the wall. Low-grade explosives might have been used during that time to blow out the walls in a pattern resembling that of damage done by airplane wings. At some point, well after the crash, a loud explosion was heard which may have been a pre-placed explosive that brought the roof down, concealing any tell-tale evidence that might be seen from outside.
NOBLE EAGLE
So this is an alternate scenario for the Pentagon. Again, there is little solid evidence. Just circumstantial evidence that the official story is full of problems, much like New York. The last crash was in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, a rural area with far few witnesses than New York and Washington. Nevertheless, it may be the Shanksville crash that has the most convincing evidence of a plot. And an interesting link between the Pentagon and Shanksville is, curiously enough, the C-130 that was sent from Andrews Air Force Base to Minnesota.
Shanksville
The Official Story
United Airlines Flight 93 was ready for take off at 8:01 that morning. It was bound for San Francisco. There were forty-four people on board, although the CNN count is thirty-three. There would be a forty-one minute delay. At 9:00, Flight 93 was over Pennsylvania. United Airlines sent out a system-wide warning of a cockpit invasion in United 93. Flight 93 responded, “Confirmed.” At 9:28, there is the sound of scuffling in the cockpit. At 9:35, it turns to the southeast over Cleveland, presumably headed for Washington. At 9:40, the plane’s transponder stops. At 9:58 passengers, who have apparently been alerted about the events in New York, attempt to storm the cockpit. At 10:00, a man flying a private plane near Shanksville reports seeing a plane with United Airlines colors about three miles distant. He says the wings rocked back and forth for a few minutes. He thought afterward the hijackers were trying to throw the attacking passengers off balance. At 10:03, the cockpit voice recorder stops and Flight 93 crashes into the field in Shanksville.
As with the other two attacks, there is a good deal of confusion surrounding eyewitness accounts. And, as with the Pentagon, the field in Shanksville doesn’t look like the typical crash site. There is no large wreckage. The engines, which are basically indestructible, are nowhere to be seen. The authorities said that the soft ground absorbed most of the plane while the rest was blown to small bits.
shanksville-911
Shanksville crater.view of crater with wing marks
There are numerous eyewitnesses who were on the ground and saw an airliner flying at fairly low altitude. Some saw a small jet like a private jet. One described it as a scout plane. At least one person saw a small aircraft that didn’t look big enough to hold people. And one woman saw a white, cylindrical object fly over her van while she was driving north in the direction of the crash site. She said it didn’t have wings but, rather, something like the spoiler on a race car on the back and that it was no longer than her van. It went under power lines and over the trees, banking right to the northeast and headed in the direction of the field where the plane allegedly crashed.
spoiler
People have shown her pictures of numerous aircraft of all descriptions, but they have yet to find anything that matches what she saw. She says she also saw a triangular plane that she thought was a fighter at a high altitude and flying rapidly away. And, along with all those aircraft, the C-130 that took off from Andrews was seen seventeen miles from Shanksville. The route from Washington to Minnesota took it close enough to Shanksville for the pilots to see the smoke from the crash. So there was a lot of air traffic that morning for a small spot in rural Pennsylvania.
People also say they heard two or three thumps like distant explosions. Part of one engine was found in a nearby pond, a good distance from the crash site. Debris, such as personal papers and letters bound for California, was found in the local area, but also at Indian Lake, two miles to the southeast, and New Baltimore, eight miles southeast.
Some people at Indian Lake say the heard or saw an airliner go over, flying low and trailing debris. The mayor of Indian lake says he heard a low, fast-flying plane go over. He and others report that lights flickered and cell phones and satellite TV were interrupted prior to the explosion.
People in the vicinity say the saw an airliner, but it was on a flight path and an altitude that conflicts with the official story. In addition, seismic stations in the Shanksville area recorded a signal indicating some sort of explosion at 10:06 rather than 10:03 but no signal for the earlier time. The plane hit, according to the official story, at a forty-degree angle. But witnesses say the angle was much steeper, perhaps as much as eighty degrees or more. The crater and wing marks as well as the official flight data indicate the plane was headed from the northwest to the southeast. Yet blast damage is in the direction of the southwest.
No blood was found, nor was any jet fuel found. There was no need for an EPA cleanup, though the plane was carrying thousands of pounds of fuel. The woman who saw the flying craft above her van was interviewed by the FBI. They said it was a 757. She said it was no airliner. They said she really didn’t know airplanes. She became indignant at the insinuation that she wouldn’t recognize an airliner flying fifty feet above her van. They then became more polite and said that a private corporate jet had been asked to descend to view the crash site. She asked, “Before the crash?” At which point they abruptly stood up and said they had to be going. No one has ever come forward to say they were on a corporate jet in the Shanksville area that day.
So there are conflicts with the official story. I think a plausible alternate scenario would go like this. Flight 93 was delayed in Newark for forty minutes. During that time, mail and luggage was taken off. Personal papers and the mail were put on another 757. It took off right after Flight 93 and followed close behind so as not to be seen by radar. Near Cleveland, United 93 continued on. The other 757 turned and headed southeast. At some point, it was joined by a small corporate-type jet. It was piloted by two of the purported hijackers. There is some evidence that a few at least got real flight training at various military bases around the country. When air traffic control tried to contact Flight 93, the pilots of the small jet answered in a distinct Arab accent. They faked an attack by passengers for the benefit of the cockpit voice recorder.
Meanwhile, a fighter jet had launched a drone armed with a self-destruct mechanism. Target drones used for artillery practice have explosive, remotely-controlled self-destruct systems to destroy the drone if it should go astray. The drone passed over the woman’s mini-van, banked to the northeast, circled around and embedded itself in the ground without exploding. Having come from the northeast, it was pointing toward the southwest. Witnesses say they saw their lights flicker and cell phones and satellite TV were interrupted. Apparently, when a plane launches a missile, it “lights up” the area with radar. It causes lights to flicker and an interruption in electronic devices. This may be the explanation for that.
North of Shanksville, the 757 departed from the official route and began descending. The small jet continued on the official route. The 757 descended to a low altitude, perhaps two hundred feet, flying over hills and heading east to rejoin the official flight path. The small jet meanwhile had rocked its wings back and forth, then descended at a forty-degree angle toward the field. Thirty seconds before the “crash”, they turned on the transponder, which was set to identify it as Flight 93, to make sure air traffic control knew it was hijacked plane. Near the ground, they shut off the flight data recorder, the cockpit voice recorder, and the transponder, and flew off. The time was 10:03. They stayed in the area waiting for the 757. The 757 had added about twelve miles and three minutes to its route. It rocked its wings back and forth, as well, for the benefit of eyewitnesses. 
Near the field, a pre-planted explosive blew off the fan and part of one engine, which landed in or near the pond. It then banked hard to the right as seen by several eyewitnesses, and went into a steep dive. As it neared the ground, a second charge blew a hole in the fuselage and the letters and papers began streaming out. The only sizable piece of a plane found, besides the engine part, was a piece of fuselage. It pulled out of its dive and, when it was a safe distance away, the drone was exploded, creating the crater in the field. At this point a woman who heard the explosion and was an amateur photographer ran out and got a picture of the smoke cloud rising from the field.
Mclatchey photo
The 757 continued on to Indian Lake, where it was seen strewing debris, and on to New Baltimore, where more debris was found. The small jet took a couple of turns around to see that everything looked good, and flew off in the direction from which it had come. It was seen flying low enough to blow leaves off the trees by a woman who had also seen the 757 flying low over her house toward the field. And what of the other small aircraft, the one that looked to small to hold people? I believe that was an MQ1 Predator drone, used to oversee the whole operation. The ground control station for the Predator is contained in a box, somewhat like that for a tractor-trailer
Q1 Predatorground control for predator
The ground control system can be transported in a number of ways, including in the cargo hold of a C-130. So this is perhaps why the C-130 was dispatched with such urgency from Andrews Air Base. Calculating the distance to Shanksville and the cruising speed of a C-130, the plane would have been arriving at exactly the time the 757 was in the area. The pilot and co-pilot said they hadn’t been informed about the New York attack. It’s possible they were unaware of the nature of their cargo.
The 757, meanwhile, was flying southeast. A line drawn from Shanksville to New Baltimore and extended, ends at Washington. However, there is a recording of NORAD controllers giving the latitude and longitude of Flight 93’s last known position. The coordinates put it over a small town in West Virginia called Paw Paw, across the Potomac from Maryland. At that time it was 8200 feet, high enough to not attract attention and low enough that oxygen and temperature wouldn’t be a problem for a plane with a hole in it. Paw Paw, however, is considerably south of that line drawn from Shanksville to Washington. If it turned at New Baltimore, a line drawn from there to Paw Paw extends to Quantico, Virginia with its air base. A little farther, and farther south, is Langley Air Base near Hampton, VA. That happens to be the home of the 363rd Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Wing. And, at that time, one of the planes assigned to that wing at the time was the C-21A, the military version of the Learjet 35.
c-21c
Painted white and unmarked, it might have been the jet seen flying low around Shanksville.
The photo of the smoke cloud has been subject to some scrutiny. Whether that looks like the smoke from an airliner crash is one question. One eyewitness said even at the time that it didn’t look like enough smoke for an airliner. Another problem is that it doesn’t seem to line up with the crater in the field. It appears to be too far south, leading some to accuse the woman of faking the photo for profit.
There may be a good explanation, however. If the drone was in the ground at an angle facing southwest, when it exploded most of the blast would have gone in that direction and the cloud would have risen southwest of the crater. Seen from the east, and obscured by trees, the cloud would appear to be rising in the wrong place.
aerial view of crater with burned trees.
The burned trees point like an arrow to the southwest, though the plane was supposed to have impacted going southeast.
I said the Pennsylvania operation was more convincing because it didn’t require any exotic technology beyond the Predator drone and whatever it was that landed in the field and exploded. The entire thing is a work of mind-boggling complexity. That makes it hard for people to believe it could have been brought off. Yet it’s also hard to believe that a small numbers of hijackers, armed only with box-cutters, overpowered pilots on four airplanes and held the passengers at bay. It’s hard to believe that hijackers who were indifferent flight students at best, could have hit the towers at the speed they were estimated to be going. It is hard to believe the hijacker pilot of Flight 77 brought off that difficult maneuver at the Pentagon. It’s also peculiar that, looking at the satellite photo, the hijackers in Pennsylvania seemed to have chosen the one place in the area to crash the plane that wouldn’t involve the loss of life or damage to valuable property. For ruthless terrorists, they seem to have been at pains to minimize casualties. They attacked the World Trade Center in the early morning when there were fewer people in the buildings than there would have been later in the day. They picked the one section of the Pentagon that was largely empty. It’s hard to credit the fact that terrorists clever enough to plan the attacks and bring them off, could have been so inept in certain areas of planning. A simple question would have been, “What do we do if passengers attack and try to retake the plane or crash it before we reach our target?” Yet there doesn’t seem to have been any contingency plan.
Beyond the complexity of the operation is the enormity of the act. Whatever the motive, killing approximately three thousand of your fellow countrymen seems beyond the pale. We might expect fanatical jihadis to conclude that the end justifies the means, but we don’t expect people in our government to think that way. That is the biggest stumbling block for most people. Even if they could, they wouldn’t. However, I liken it to the fighter pilots who are scrambled to intercept a hijacked plane. If they can’t make contact by radio or visually, they have the authority to decide to shoot the plane down. The principle is that it is the lesser of two evils. Killing two hundred people who are almost certainly going to die in a crash, is better than letting two thousand, plus the passengers die when the hijackers crash the plane into a city. If you were in a position of power and what kept you up at night was the specter of Saddam Hussein getting a weapon, and the vision of a mushroom cloud rising over New York or some other city, then something that provoked a war that removed Saddam might begin to look like the lesser of two evils.
And it’s hard to argue with the idea that Saddam would have been capable of it. With his oil money, he might have acquired a weapon or weapons, despite the best efforts of the UN inspectors. Who could say for sure that he might not have wanted to go down in history as a hero to the Arabs by striking a blow against the oppressive West and the State of Israel? He had a demonstrated willingness to use weapons of mass destruction, using gas in the Iran-Iraq War and against the Kurdish people in the north of Iraq. So it was never clear that Saddam, especially as he got older and felt he had nothing to lose, would not launch a surprise attack, killing an untold number of people. It is even possible that he might have teamed with al Qaeda, much as they despised each other. Al Qaeda has ships and might have transported a weapon to New York where it could have been transferred to a truck and detonated in midtown Manhattan.
Still, it’s probably not wise to tell your government, “Go ahead and suspend our rights and liberties. Arrest anyone you think to be an enemy of the state, including those who don’t agree with you and are critical of you publicly. Keep people under constant surveillance. Listen in on their calls and read their correspondences. Anything, as long as you keep us safe.” It would probably make one safe to fortify one’s house and never leave, but most people don’t want to live that way. We take risks when we get up in the morning. We take risks when we get in our car. We ask government to keep risks to a reasonable level. But to ask government to eliminate risk entirely is to ask for a police state.
Prior to 9/11, Americans were probably too complacent about the possibility of terrorism. In spite of the bombing of the battleship Cole, and the African embassy bombings, we were still fairly unconcerned about terrorism on our shores. Our airport security was lax compared to other countries. For the most part, the majority of us thought of terrorism as something that happens elsewhere. Some people thought we would need something really big on American soil to wake us up and be willing to do what it took to fight terrorism. The September 11 attacks were that event. Did they come out of the blue, planned for months by al Qaeda terrorists living in Afghanistan? Or was the plan far more complex and technologically sophisticated than Osama bin Laden and his cohort could have ever brought off, and planned closer to home?
Many may not be persuaded by the disparities between the official story and certain facts. They may believe there are other explanations for the discrepancies. They may refuse to believe that members of the United States government would launch an operation this size and with as many casualties as there were, no matter what the motive. Perhaps. Perhaps there are good explanations for the contradictions with the official story. Perhaps the whole 9/11 Truth movement has been on a wild goose chase. Still, the facts remain. Steel frame buildings don’t collapse from fire. The Twin Towers were built to withstand the impact of a 707. Flakes of a high-tech explosive have been found in the dust of the World Trade Center. Why were cars near the Trade Center flipped on their sides and on their roofs? Why were so many cars burned, even a block away?
There seem to be strange flying objects in the air in New York that day. The same goes for the Pentagon and Pennsylvania. What is the explanation for all these flying craft? Why do credible eyewitnesses say they saw an airliner heading toward the Pentagon on a different route than the official story says? Why was a C-130 sent from Andrews Air Force Base, minutes after the FAA had grounded air traffic, to Minnesota on a route that took it right by Shanksville at the exact time of the alleged crash of Flight 93?
To get answers, one has to ask questions. So long as we are willing to not question the official story of 9/11, we will continue to be without real answers.