The Official 9/11 Explanation is The Greatest “Coincidence Theory” Ever
In Brief
- The Facts:The evidence
around what happened on 9/11 suggests that either we are being lied to
when it comes to the official story or 9/11 contained events creating
the greatest coincidence of all time.
- Reflect On:Are you aware of the actual facts surrounding 9/11? Not unfound conspiracy theories, the actual facts that do exist...
On
September 11, 2001 I was completing my last year of training as an
Anesthesiologist at the University of Pennsylvania. That morning I, like
many of us, sat transfixed for hours watching the continuous television
coverage of the events that were unfolding in New York and Washington
D.C. I was scheduled to work the night shift. When I arrived at the
hospital most of the doctors and nurses who had worked during the day
were still at their posts. The hospital had instituted an emergency plan
of operation, expecting a possible mass casualty situation if and when
hospitals in the New York City area became overwhelmed.
It
turned out that not a single injured person was brought to Philadelphia
for medical attention that night. Tragically, very few in the buildings
managed to escape with their lives once the buildings fell. Nearly three
thousand innocent people perished in the sudden and unexpected collapse
of the twin towers. Some of these were first-responders in uniform or
street clothes who rushed towards
the buildings after they were struck by planes, fully expecting to lead
those inside to safety. A great many of these heroes suffered the same
fate as those who were trapped inside. These courageous men and women,
many of whom were police officers and firefighters, knew and accepted
the dangers inherent in their commitment to public service and safety.
What they did not know was that steel skyscrapers that are largely
undamaged with only isolated fires could instantaneously suffer a rapid
and global collapse, not just once but three times on the same day. It is understandable that they were caught off guard because such an event has never happened before or since.
Two
thousand, seven hundred and forty nine people died in the collapse of
the twin towers. Only three hundred whole bodies were recovered. Despite
a painstaking search lasting months, no others were found intact in the
rubble. However human tissue, in the form of bone fragments measuring
less than a centimeter were found upon neighboring rooftops hundreds of
feet way. One victim’s body, we had learned months later, was broken
into over 200 separate pieces:
Our bodies can be fragile, but is it
reasonable that falling building material can do these things? At the
time I gave it little thought. Now, after seventeen years of clinical
practice where I have personally seen what happens to a human body when
exposed to bullets, trucks, chainsaws, wood-chippers, falling debris,
industrial presses and chemical explosions, I have begun to wonder.
My life changed one evening in 2017 when
my wife showed me a thirty second video clip on youtube. After watching
it several times I felt, in the deepest of ways, that I had swallowed
the “red pill”, the one offered to Neo at the beginning of the movie
“The Matrix”. I include this often used reference here because Morpheus,
before giving Neo the pill, wisely made him understand that he was only
offering the truth and nothing more. With that sentiment, I offer it
here :
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I didn’t
recognize the building but I soon learned that it was another
skyscraper that fell to the ground on September 11, 2001. That was
building 7, a 47 story steel structured building in the World Trade
Center complex. I only became aware of its destruction sixteen years
after 9/11. I have since learned that most Americans still do not know
that three
buildings, not two, were destroyed in Manhattan that day. What was
initially puzzling to me was not only the manner in which Building 7
fell but that it was not hit by a plane. The official explanation states
that Building 7 came down, in under seven seconds, from the failure of
just one of eighty columns on the twelfth floor. It didn’t seem possible
that a steel structure could collapse that quickly, completely and
symmetrically from the failure of a single column. On the other hand, it
seemed just as improbable that the official explanation could be so
wrong. Wasn’t it all explained in the 9/11 Commission Report? Wasn’t
there something on public TV that proved the official explanation? What
was initially puzzling very quickly became deeply disturbing.
These
words are offered to those who have some curiosity about why a growing
number of people continue to maintain that the destruction of the three skyscrapers
in the World Trade Center in NY on September 11, 2001 were due to
controlled demolition events and not just plane collisions and office
fires.
Much has been written about this. Most
of what appears in print or on digital sources has not been written by
structural engineers or architects but by journalists or
non-professional citizens who have endeavored, to the best of their
ability, to present what “others” have discovered. Sadly, as is the case
with any potentially divisive issue, there are those who seek to spread
unverified data and use dubious lines of reasoning to solidify a biased
position. This is happening on both sides of the argument, and it is
having serious repercussions. How can anyone know who or what to believe
these days? The growing inaccessibility of the truth is extinguishing
our collective curiosity and in its place is growing a sense of
resignation when it comes to knowing such things as “facts”. When it is
unclear which way to proceed, it is only natural to make assumptions and
take the path of least resistance and go along with what we are being
told.
I have a background in Electrical
Engineering and Medicine. I do not claim to be an authority on how
buildings are to be constructed or razed. However I do believe that
anyone with an open mind and some basic understanding of how the
physical world reliably reacts to common forces of nature can easily
discern fact from fiction and likelihood from implausibility. I have
spoken to scores of people from all walks of life about this topic. I
have found that between an open mind and a basic understanding of the
physical world, the former is more important and, it seems, more rare.
At this time we live in a society where
people who either believe (or even consider believing) in an alternative
theory of events are labeled “conspiracy theorists”. This is
unfortunate because it carries the connotation that if a person believes
that the official narrative of ANY event is inaccurate or falsified
then they, by definition, believe that ALL official narratives are
inaccurate and designed for a hidden, ulterior motive. Because some
“conspiracy theories” are particularly absurd and in some cases
offensive, credibility is quickly lost among those who hear of an
alternative explanation, even if the explanation is cogent,
dispassionate and supported by scientific consensus. This is very
dangerous. By heaping all “conspiracy theories” into the same pile it is
very easy to miss the signal in the noise.
In order
to approach the vast topic that is 9/11 it is best to first take a
moment to acknowledge that everyone has biases. Biases are prejudgements
that arise from putting the cart in front of the horse. In other words,
if a piece of evidence is offered, it will often not be considered
objectively if its veracity implies something highly improbable. After
all, how is a reasonable person supposed to accept something that leads to an unreasonable
conclusion? This is how bias arises in a quick but untrained mind. In
order to avoid this misstep it is imperative to first establish what is
unreasonable and what is impossible.
The
purpose of this piece is not to dictate what is impossible, nor is it to
explain what other people (“experts”) claim to be impossible. The
purpose is to accurately describe what is required of the conventional
explanation of the events of 9/11 in order for it to be true. What may
seem impossible to one person may be possible to another. Ultimately, we
make our own choices about what we believe is possible. All the
pictures and video footage from space will not be able to convince
“flat-earthers” that we live on a planet that is spherical because the
idea that the ground they walk on is not flat would be impossible from
their point of view. To them, it is more likely that the evidence has
been forged. If a person cannot entertain the possibility that they may be wrong there is no room for their view to evolve.
Those
who maintain that the World Trade Center Buildings 1 (the North Tower), 2
(the South Tower) and 7(the 47 story skyscraper one hundred yards from
the North Tower) were demolished from explosive demolition events (as well as planes
with regard to the North and South Tower) had to first acknowledge that
the likelihood of this possibility was extremely small, but not
impossible. The implications of such a theory are disturbing and
far-reaching. It would imply that the event had been planned, months or
possibly years in advance by individuals that had access not only to
advanced explosives but to the buildings themselves. It would also imply
that there were far more than 19 terrorists involved. The most
disturbing implication is that news sources that we rely upon have been
grossly inaccurate in reporting the facts or were complicit in hiding a
horrible lie. This possibility would shake the very foundation of our
idea of freedom. Before dismissing this possibility immediately it is
worthwhile to weigh what is being risked by considering it objectively
and what is at risk by not. I did. This is why I did not dismiss it at
the outset. This also why I found it absolutely necessary to trust no
one other than myself and why I personally believe others should too.
We who believe that explosives were used
on 9/11 are very aware that many regard our position not only as
flippant but destructive, unpatriotic and disrespectful of those who
suffered or lost their lives from the aftermath of this event. I am able
to understand that. If you feel that way are you able to understand why
a person who is completely convinced that the established position is
wrong is doing the most patriotic thing they can by trying to
respectfully explain their position? Both sides are fighting to preserve
our freedom and honor those that lost far more than we, yet having a
fair and open exchange of ideas is nearly impossible these days. I and
many who share my view are endeavoring to change this.
At the
outset of my research into these events I acknowledged that the
possibility of this version of events was extremely unlikely but not
impossible. If you believe that this scenario is impossible at the
outset I suggest that you read no further. On the other hand, if you are
able to regard it as an extremely unlikely yet possible scenario, I invite you to read on and make up your own mind.
The “Official” Explanation From Gov’t Mainstream Media Is Impossible
Many
claims have been made about what did and did not happen that day. There
is a considerable amount of eyewitness testimony from citizens and
first-responders that directly challenge the official narrative. There
are also independent organizations of pilots, fire-fighters, architects
and structural engineers that publicly state that the official narrative
is inaccurate or inconsistent with the laws of nature. If you are aware
of these organizations you may find them to be believable and
trustworthy. But why should you? Because I cannot absolutely verify that these organizations and witnesses are truthful or knowledgeable I will exclude their opinions and only rely on information that has appeared on mainstream media
or in the “official” explanation of the events of that day, the 9/11
Commission Report and the extensive supporting technical discussion
provided by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
What did the 9/11 Commission actually say?
Before
we explore any inconsistencies of the official explanation it is
important to clarify what the “official” explanation states. The 9/11
Commission was organized by the Bush Administration in response to the
pressure placed upon it by the families of the 9/11 victims and the
concerned public to explain why and how the buildings came down. The
9/11 events also represented the three biggest structural failures in
modern history. Because this also directly impacts public safety, the
9/11 Commission tasked the National Institute for Standards and
Technology (NIST), a branch of the Department of Commerce, to perform a
technical investigation into the cause and mechanism of the failures.
NIST is a body of engineers, scientists and applied mathematicians that
are responsible for establishing and enforcing standards for industry in
the interest of public safety. NIST was responsible for explaining why
and how the twin towers and World Trade Center Building 7 were destroyed
on September 11, 2001. It is their report which stands as the
“official” explanation that I will be examining.
Few have
actually read the thousands of pages of the body of the report and the
numerous technical attachments provided by the National Institute for
Standards and Technology (NIST). Most people believe that NIST explains
how those three buildings came down. It does not. Instead it attempts to explain how those three buildings could have come down from plane strikes and (or in the case of Bldg 7, only) office fires. This may seem like a minor technicality but it is in fact a major oversight. The investigation presupposes that the planes and/or fires were the only cause and disregards the possibility of other causes. Every possibility was not considered. In fact, only one was.
Prior to September 11, 2001 a steel-framed building has never collapsed from any event except a planned demolition.
Why didn’t the official explanation explore this possibility as well?
For some people this may seem like an inflammatory attack on the
official report. Afterall, millions of people watched the planes hit the
buildings on TV. Why should any other explanation be entertained? To a
scientist, or any organization interested in due diligence (e.g. NIST),
it is grossly negligent to not explore all conceivable possibilities
before arriving at any conclusion. Even an eleventh grade chemistry
student must address other possibilities that may explain the results of
their experiment in their lab report.
Putting all geo-political ideology
aside, we must agree that a diligent, scientific approach to
understanding the structural failures of these massive buildings is
required for the interest of public safety alone. On 9/11 our world
suffered the three biggest structural failures in the history of modern
skyscraper design and yet only one hypothesis was ever considered.
There
are two ways to disprove NIST’s hypothesis. One way is to prove an
alternative one is absolutely true. I believe that the alternative
explanation, controlled demolition, has been proven, but ultimately it
requires that some faith be placed in the opinion or findings of someone
else. For this reason I exclude any discussion of it here.
The
other way to disprove the official explanation is to find any
assumptions they made to prove their version of events and demonstrate
these assumptions to be false. Recall that NIST did not explain how and
why the buildings fell, they attempted to explain how the Twin Towers might have fallen from plane strikes and office fires. Is there anything required of their explanation that is impossible?
Where did the Buildings go?
Each of
the Twin Towers was 110 stories, about 1300 feet tall. At the end of the
collapse of each one there was a pile of rubble and steel on the ground
that was on average 1-2 stories tall. In other words, the pile of
debris from a 110 story building made from hundreds of thousands of tons
of steel and concrete, its contents of office furniture, electrical
generators, HVAC components and plumbing was reduced to a pile 2% of its
height. Proportionally, if a ten story building falling upon itself did the same thing it would leave a pile about 2 feet high.
The question is, what happened to all the building material and its
contents? George Pataki, then Governor of NY was struggling with the
same question soon after he visited Ground Zero a few days after 9/11.
Here he is on CNN:
The
Governor was mystified at the absence of concrete at the base of the
building. He plainly states that lower Manhattan was covered with 1-3
inches of pulverized concrete dust. There were hardly any blocks of
concrete to be found. We can understand how any structure can fall; even
a steel structure can be brought down if key components of its
structural integrity were compromised. The building would presumably
lean to one side or another and come crashing down upon adjoining
buildings leaving enormous piles of twisted girders and material
everywhere. That is not what happened to the twin towers. They fell straight down leaving relatively little material at their base.
Imagine a
wrecking ball knocking a building apart. Swinging a wrecking ball back
and forth until a building is leveled takes a lot of energy. How much
energy would be required to not just knock the twin towers down but to
crush all the concrete in the buildings to dust?
NIST’s explanation proposes that no added energy was needed to bring
the buildings down and pulverize the concrete and dismember its steel.
They posit that gravity alone caused each twin tower not just to fall
but to crush itself. We can all imagine a building falling down, but crushing itself entirely? It would be impossible to construct a building that could pulverize all of its concrete and rip apart all of its steel from its own weight. How could such a structure stand to begin with?
The twin towers had been standing for thirty years. Of course something could
knock them over, but why would we accept that on that particular day
they were heavy enough to pulverize the very concrete they were made of
into billowing clouds of dust that spread over lower Manhattan? If you
are not careful your mind will rationalize that this could indeed happen
because the buildings were “extremely heavy”. NIST in fact refers to
“the enormous weight” of the top portions of the buildings crushing the
bottom portions through a collapse sequence that was “inevitable” once
the supporting columns and lateral trusses were weakened. NIST, however,
suspiciously omits any discussion of the behavior of the building
during the collapse in their discussion.
The
top portions of the building were indeed “heavy” but heavy compared to
what? By suggesting that their weight was enough to crush the bottom
portions of the building within a few seconds how then can one explain
why the building could stand in the first place? The vast majority of
the steel skeleton of the building was undamaged from the plane strikes.
Why would it break apart suddenly and uniformly from a weight it was
designed to hold indefinitely?
An Example To Illustrate
Consider
a different situation. Imagine a very tall stack of bricks. There is a
limit to how many bricks can be stacked one atop another because at some
point the weight on the bottom brick will be enough to crush it. In
engineering terms, the compressive strength
of the brick on the bottom will be exceeded if the stack is too tall.
Let us say that the bricks are stacked as high as they possibly could be
without crushing the bottom brick. We then strike the stack near its
top hard enough to damage some of the bricks or even displace them out
of the stack. We can all imagine the bricks ending up in a pile on the
ground. Why would we predict that they would all end up crushed into a pile of dust? If the bottom brick was able to withstand all of the weight upon it before we destabilized the stack, why would the entire stack, including the ones at the top, be pulverized by its own weight? That would be impossible.
NIST does not address this conundrum directly but simply states that it must be possible because that is what we “observed”. This is a reasonable conclusion only if no other explanations are entertained.
In fact, even if we choose to ignore other possible mechanisms of
collapse this theory requires another impossibility to work. In order
for the top portion of the building to crush the lower it must be stronger than the lower portion.
Take a
simpler example involving bricks again. Let us say that you needed to
crush a single brick into dust. The only tool that you have available is
a pickaxe. Would it work? Maybe. But what if the pickaxe itself was
made of brick too? Every time you struck the brick hard enough to make
it crumble the axe would necessarily break apart as well. In physics
this is described by Newton’s Third Law of Motion, which dictates that
objects acting upon each other must be subject to equal and opposite
forces from each other. By proposing that the upper portion of the
building (approximately 14 floors in the North Tower for example) could
completely crush the lower portion (96 floors) while remaining intact we
are introducing another impossibility. The upper and lower portions of
the building were made of the same
building materials! In fact, the upper portions of the building were
lighter and less sturdy than the lower portions because they were
designed to hold up less weight. If the upper portion was in fact
crushing the lower portion why isn’t it getting crushed itself? Newton’s third law dictates that whatever force the upper portion is imparting upon the lower must be imparted to the upper portion as well.
Getting the top to drive itself through a more heavily designed
structure by dismembering and pulverizing it on its way down while
remaining intact itself is impossible.
What Does The Speed of Collapse of The Twin Towers Tell Us?
Calculations
have been made about how much energy it would take to pulverize all of
the concrete in the buildings and it turns out that it is more than
twice as much as the gravitational potential energy of the standing
building. In other words, even if all the energy of the falling building
was converted into crushing the concrete and dismembering its steel
frame there would still be a large deficit of energy. For the purposes
of this discussion, forget about the calculations. I have seen them and
believe them to be accurate but why should you agree with me? Let us say
that the weight of the building could pulverize itself. That is already
impossible as was mentioned above. But, if we suspend rationality and
continue with NIST’s logic yet another impossibility arises.
If the
concrete is being pulverized, energy is being expended. The only source
of energy in the official explanation is the kinetic energy of the upper
part of the buildings. Kinetic energy is the energy possessed by a body
in motion, in this case, the upper part of the building which was put
in motion by gravity. If the kinetic energy is being used to pulverize
the concrete, the fall of the building should have been slowed.
Both twin towers fell at approximately 6.3 meters per second squared,
or approximately two-thirds the acceleration of gravity. If that doesn’t
make sense to you, look at any collapse video. The top of the building
is accelerating
towards the ground at more than 64% of free-fall. If you were to have
jumped off the top of the tower as it began to fall you would have hit
the ground just two seconds before the top of the building did. You
would have barely beaten hundreds of thousands of tons of reinforced
steel and concrete designed to do one thing: remain standing while
supporting the structure above it.
The
towers, like all modern buildings, were built to exacting standards
which demanded three to five times the strength to hold up the building.
This is an extremely large safety tolerance, yet we watched them
crumble to the ground under their own weight. It would have been impossible for
such an over-designed structure to come down that fast through itself
from nothing but gravity. Each tower took about 12 seconds to fall. On
average, 9 floors per second are being destroyed.
I am not
denying the buildings came down quickly. They did. We have ample,
undisputed footage of both collapses. But are we observing buildings
crush themselves or are we actually watching buildings fall because the
very material they are supported by is being destroyed by another source
of energy? Is it possible to know? It is.
The
buildings are falling at rates that dictate that the concrete and steel
are putting up a fraction of the resistance they were designed to
provide. Yet the materials, by virtue of their dismemberment (steel
frame) and pulverization (concrete) are behaving as though they are
meeting extreme force. Materials do not get destroyed unless they are
meeting extreme force. We must conclude that the integrity of the
materials must have been or were being
compromised at the time of collapse. There was not any “crushing” going
on. We have been in fact watching buildings falling because the very
materials holding them up are being synchronously pulverized and ripped
apart by a source of energy not acknowledged by NIST but clearly present.
You cannot “see” energy, you can only infer its existence by the
behavior of the system you are examining. The behavior of the buildings
as they fell prove that there was another massive source of energy at
work. Collapses with the rapidity that we witnessed, leaving only
pulverized concrete and dismembered steel, would have been impossible from gravity alone.
Fires Cannot Burn Without a Source of Oxygen
It took three months to put the fires out at the World Trade Center. Here is the CNN news report that documented that :
It is
well reported that the FDNY flooded ground zero with millions of gallons
of water, completely submerging the basement fires. Ground zero was
covered with water for months. Fire can only exist if an oxygen source
is present. The media reported that the fires continued to burn because
of heat from the friction of the fall. That is impossible.
I am not suggesting the fires were not burning for three months I am
only pointing out the basic truth that the only way fires can burn
underwater is through a chemical
reaction that has an oxygen molecule as a reactant. Heat itself does
not provide oxygen for a fire to burn. There must have been an oxygen
source in or on the material that was burning.
Gravity Cannot Throw Things Laterally
It is
well documented that hundreds of four and eight ton steel frame members
were thrown 600 feet away from each of the Twin Towers at speeds clocked
by physicists of 80 mph. Gravity works in only one direction. If the
only force acting on the building was straight down it is impossible
for structural members to be thrown perpendicular to the force. This
necessitates the presence of an explosive, or expulsive, force perpendicular to the force of gravity.
NIST Proves That Building 7 Could Not Have Fallen From Fires Alone
Finally,
there is the problem with building 7, the building referenced earlier.
It was a modern steel structured skyscraper 47 stories high that
suffered isolated fires on several floors. It was not hit by a plane. Watch the collapse again:
Even today many Americans do not know that a third building
was destroyed on 9/11. It occurred about seven hours after the second
twin tower was destroyed. Building 7 fell in under 7 seconds. The
building fell uniformly through the path of (what should have been the)
greatest resistance into its own footprint. Unlike the twin towers, this
building fell at free-fall. If you were standing on its rooftop when it
started to collapse you would have hit the ground at the same time if
you jumped off the building. This means that not one of the 80 columns
in the building gave any resistance to the fall. Once again, if the
structure put up no resistance to the fall, why did the columns get
crushed? NIST took seven years
to come up with their analysis of the fall of Building 7. They used
computer simulations to attempt prove their theory that it was caused by
the failure of a single column from isolated fires that lead to the
type of collapse we witnessed. No matter how much they tweaked their
model, they could not get it to fall in the way we observe in the video.
Their conclusion : The entire building suffered a complete and sudden
collapse from a single column (Column 79 on the 12th floor) that failed
as a result of normal office fires.
An isolated column failure cannot cause a steel building to fall at free-fall acceleration – or symmetrically. That is impossible. Using their own computer model, NIST has effectively disproven their own hypothesis.
If a new, four hundred foot wide, 47 seven story building can fall at
the speed of gravity through its own supporting columns from the failure
of a single column on just one floor, why do demolition teams need to
painstakingly set up hundreds of explosive charges on multiple floors to
demolish old buildings? NIST spent seven years trying to explain what
happened and couldn’t. Why didn’t they look for another explanation
after they proved themselves wrong? What exactly was their mandate?
Could These Really Just Be Coincidences?
In the previous section are listed five
impossibilities that NIST would require you to believe could happen in
order for their explanations of the destruction of these buildings to
suffice. Perhaps I am wrong about what is possible and what isn’t. At
this moment, however, I cannot accept that buildings can pulverize the
concrete and dismember the steel that they are constructed from, or that
gravity can throw things laterally or that fires can burn underwater
without a source of oxygen or that a steel skyscraper can collapse
symmetrically from isolated office fires at free-fall acceleration.
If that were not enough one must still
contend with the numerous inconsistencies and incredible coincidences
that the 9/11 Commission and NIST insist upon. I have chosen the
following five to demonstrate.
A Plane “vaporizes” Yet a Passport Survives
United
Airlines flight 93 was the fourth plane that was hijacked that morning.
It never struck a building like the other three. It crashed into a
grassy field in rural Pennsylvania. The official report states that much
of the plane and its passengers vaporized
on impact. I cannot say that this is impossible, I can only say that
this has never happened before. Unless a plane ends up at the bottom of
an ocean, plane crashes leave debris fields and passenger remains that
can be analyzed. Very little was found at the site, yet this plane
crashed into a field on American soil on a sunny Tuesday morning. The
coroner claims that only bits and fragments of human remains were found.
There was no fuselage or luggage. However, two Saudi Passports managed
to escape unharmed. This is “improbable”.
This story brings up another glaring
inconsistency with the official explanation. Two planes can tear through
steel and concrete yet this one vaporizes when striking dirt?
Passengers Make Phone Calls From Their Cellular Phones in Flight
The 911
Commission report states that over a dozen cellular phone calls were
made from passengers in both of the planes that struck the twin towers.
Time logs indicate that the calls were made while the planes were in
flight. The recordings of the passengers can be heard. The passengers
clearly state the planes have been hijacked. They sound distracted but
calm. Several of the calls lasted more than a minute. Is it possible
that the hijackers would have permitted those calls? Absolutely. It is
also possible that the calls were made quietly without their knowledge.
The problem with the story is that some of these calls were made on
personal cellular phones while in flight. This is nearly impossible
today, eighteen years later. The idea that this could have been possible
in 2001 is difficult to accept. Cell phone towers are designed to
detect and transmit signals laterally, not upward. Even if a connection
could have been made momentarily the tower would have had to immediately
hand the signal over to another station rapidly due to the speed of the
plane. There were no breaks in coverage on the recordings. As of this
year, 2019, I have not been able to get consistent cellular phone
coverage on a plane flying at more than a few thousand feet of altitude.
What does this mean? One cannot
definitively know; one can only conjecture. I only offer it as another
glaring inconsistency of the official explanation. What would be the
benefit of including this in the official report?
The Military Conducts Four Separate Exercises on The Morning of 9/11
It is
customary for NORAD (the North American Aerospace Defense Command) to
deploy fighter jets when an airline hijacking is in progress. No fighter
pilot ever made visual contact with any of the planes that were
hijacked on 9/11. There have been some explanations for this including
the fact that the airliners’ transponders were turned off by the
hijackers and couldn’t be tracked. What is not as generally known is
that very few fighters were scrambled that morning. Most of our Air
Defense system was engaged in flight exercises over the midwest and
Canada that very morning. Operation Vigilant Guardian (among others) was
a live exercise involving fighter squadrons and military bases that was
conducted on the morning of September 11, 2001. The terrorists happened
to have picked the very morning that most of our assets were
unavailable to protect even the most defended building on Earth, the
Pentagon.
How are
we to know that these exercises actually took place? Here we have a link
to then Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld and General Richard
Meyers (Joint Chiefs of staff Chairman) answering questions about this
exercise. At approximately 7 minutes into the clip General Meyers
confirms that in fact four exercises involving our air defenses were
happening while the hijacked planes headed to their targets. Moreover he
reveals to us that the exercises were designed to simulate hijacked planes being used as weapons to fly into buildings:
Is it possible that the terrorists knew
about this opening in our air defenses? Yes. Is it possible that they
just got extremely lucky with the timing? Yes. Neither of these
possibilities can be deemed impossible. It is the improbability of this
“coincidence” that is striking.
NIST Does NOT Explain What Happened to the Twin Towers Themselves
NIST
does not explain definitively how either twin tower fell so quickly.
They propose a possible explanation involving trusses weakened by jet
fuel and office fires that eventually sagged and gave way allowing the
concrete floors they supported to fall but more importantly causing the
peripheral columns to bend inward allowing the upper sections of the
building to fall upon the lower. The calculations which should describe
the tensile strength of the columns and estimated weight of the building
that would allow such a collapse to progress are not given. Instead NIST references a research paper that was written just 48 hours after 9/11 by an engineering professor (Zdenek P. Bažant) from Northwestern University and his graduate student. You can read their paper here:
In this paper the two authors propose a
mechanism that they believe could explain a progressive collapse. If you
choose to examine it you will find it to be a technical paper and
largely uninterpretable unless you are a mechanical engineer. However,
there are a few points that the curious among us will find unmistakably
puzzling. First is that on page 4 the authors state :
“The energy dissipation, particularly
that due to the inelastic deformation of columns during the initial drop
of the upper part, may be neglected, i.e., the upper part may be
assumed to move through distance h almost in a free fall …”
This assumption should strike you as mysterious. The author is assuming that when the top of the building began to collapse all of the columns on the damaged floors failed completely and synchronously.
Why would they make that assumption and what does it matter? It has a
direct bearing on what would happen next. The authors are trying to
prove their hypothesis that the top of the building had attained enough
downward velocity at the beginning of the collapse sequence that a
progressive collapse was inevitable. Whether or not this is true cannot
be known by you or I without trusting another’s opinion, but does it
make sense that every column (287 in all) would suddenly give way at precisely the same time and offer no resistance?
The other glaring inaccuracy that can be
readily interpreted by the lay reader is the estimate of the weight of
the upper portion of the building. The weight used in the paper:
“…mass of the upper part (of North Tower) ≈ 58·106 kg”, is exaggerated by nearly a factor of two.
But how
are you or I to know what the actual weight of the upper portions of the
buildings were or what the column strength actually was? I admit that
we the public, cannot know without trusting another source. However
shouldn’t we expect that NIST would, at the very least, demand that
those crucial values be consistent with their own? They didn’t. In fact,
the paper NIST references doubles the weight of the upper portion of the building and reduces the column strength by a factor of three compared to their own estimates!
In other words, if you use NIST’s own
estimate of the weight and strength of the building in the model they
reference, a progressive and complete collapse would be impossible. NIST
did not verify this professor’s calculations but merely stated that
because another party claims it to be possible it must be so. As
astonishing as it seems, this is as far as NIST goes to address the
incredible mystery we all witnessed when the twin towers unexpectedly
fell to the ground.
The “Pancaking” Floors Model is Not Supported By NIST, Only The Public
This
glaring omission was initially the source of skepticism in the
scientific community. Later an article in the magazine Popular Mechanics
was published to explain a possible collapse sequence. A similar
explanation appeared in a documentary on NOVA. Neither the Popular
Mechanics article nor the documentary reflect NIST’s official
explanation. The Popular Mechanics article and the NOVA documentary both
attribute the collapse to “pancaking” floors, falling one upon another.
They both suggest how one floor falling upon another could hypothetically
cause a chain reaction, yet neither addresses how the central and
peripheral columns, the steel skeleton that held the floors and building
up could have been destroyed.
These
simplistic explanations also fail to explain how concrete floors can
create a “pancaking” collapse while at the same time be blown out of the
building in massive dust clouds. Many of us picture of a stack of
floors falling upon a single floor high up in the tower, dismantling it
from its supporting trusses and slowly speeding up as each successive
floor adds to the momentum of the falling mass. Once the first floor
goes, we have been told, the rest is history because now the falling
weight is even larger. However, it is clear from every video of the
destruction of the two towers that all the concrete is blowing out in
huge clouds as the top of the building is descending.
We also have the physical evidence of pulverized concrete blanketing
lower Manhattan. If all the material is being blown outwardly, what then is doing the crushing?
These popularly cited explanations are markedly incomplete and do not
actually reflect the official explanation, yet they live on in people’s
minds as an adequate representation of what happened.
NIST and the research paper above
explain that the collapse of each twin tower was initiated on the floors
that were struck by the planes. The columns on these floors failed,
they hypothesize, because the weight of the upper portion of the
building exceeded their strength when the lateral trusses that connected
the peripheral and central columns sagged from the heat of the office
fires burning on those floors. The upper portion dropped on to the lower
and the rest is history. NIST claims that the upper portion, having
fell the height of a single floor had enough momentum to sequentially
overcome the next 95 floors of reinforced steel and concrete. As
mentioned earlier, NIST did not consider whether this was mathematically
possible. It must have been, they state, because the building fell to
the ground and thus, they say, the details are not relevant or within
the scope of their analysis. A closer examination, for those interested,
is given in the paper by Dr. Bazant.
NIST Makes Entire Floors Vanish to Explain Their Theory
Perhaps
this seems reasonable to you, but is it scientific? It is not. Dr.
Bazant’s explanation, when examined more rigorously, requires a number
of highly improbable events to have occurred. First, his model requires
that every single column on the floors damaged by the plane collisions failed completely, simultaneously and synchronously
in order for a collapse to be initiated. Additionally, his model
ignores the energy required to bend, buckle and twist the columns as the
upper portion began to “fall” upon the lower. NIST, by supporting Dr.
Bazant’s model, chooses to assume that these columns effectively
vanished. This is the only way
enough momentum from the falling sections might have been delivered to
the lower sections to initiate a potential collapse. Recall as well that
Bazant uses an estimated weight of the building that is twice what NIST
calculates.
It is
very clear from all of the footage of the towers burning before the
collapse that the fires were not equally distributed across the damaged
floors. There were 240 peripheral and 47 central columns in each twin
tower. Does it seem reasonable that every single column on that floor
would suddenly fail at precisely the same instant without offering an
ounce of resistance?
The
improbabilities continue to mount as the collapse progresses. In his
model, the upper section of each building falls through and annihilates
each floor below successively. As it does so, all 287 columns on each floor had to have failed at precisely the same instant in exactly the same way.
This is the only way the buildings could have fallen straight down.
This happened 80 times in a row in the South Tower and 95 times in a row
in the North tower. In his model, once the upper sections of each
building bulldozed their way down unaffected, they then crush themselves
when they hit the ground. This is the official explanation.
Interestingly
one could look at this entirely differently. Having every single
support column fail simultaneously, some suggest, may actually be
something common. We would know this, they say, because it happened
twice on the same day (tower 2 followed by tower 1). I think it points
in exactly the other direction. The fact that something that unlikely happened twice essentially assures us that some other mechanism was in play in both instances.
NIST Says All The Jet Fuel Burned in 10 Minutes
Much
debate has taken place over the temperature of jet fuel and the melting
point of steel. It is true that the melting point of steel is
significantly higher than the temperature of burning jet fuel (2500 F vs
1500 F). However, supporters of the conventional story maintain that
over time, the heat would have weakened the steel to the point of
collapse. It is difficult to prove they are wrong. This is often central
to the argument of many “debunkers”. It has been demonstrated that
given enough time, steel weakens near the temperatures of burning jet
fuel. However, even if the strength of the steel had been compromised,
steel does not fail from heat in the way that Dr. Bazant requires. As
steel gets hot and begins to approach its melting point it will begin to
bend and distort gradually from the load it is bearing. It does not
snap apart instantaneously like a pencil.
It is
also difficult to believe that so much of the fuel would have remain
ignited for so long. It is obvious that most of the fuel exploded when
the plane struck the building. Huge fireballs erupted which burned a
great deal of the fuel at the moment of each plane collision. NIST
themselves confirm that most of the fuel erupted at impact and that the
fuel that had entered the building had burned completely in the first
ten minutes. Does it seem likely to conclude that those massive structures would have entirely collapsed from a ten minute burn?
Even if
much of the fuel did not ignite immediately but found its way inside the
twin towers how hot could it have been? Video clearly demonstrates that
the smoke billowing from the fires was black, indicating that they were
oxygen starved (and thus cooler) for most of the time they were
burning. NIST’s explanation requires the temperature around the
supporting columns be at or near 1500 degrees where the plane hit in
order for the steel trusses to sag and a collapse sequence to begin. If
that were the case, how can we explain the unfortunate people in the
building that appeared at the periphery on the very floors that were hit
waving and exhorting others to help them? If it were 1500 degrees on
those floors they would have been incapacitated in a few seconds. The
columns on these specific floors
were required at some point to catastrophically and instantaneously
buckle for the collapse to be initiated. It is highly improbable that
the steel was as hot as NIST states.
Conclusion
Perhaps
these points don’t make you reconsider the official story. I cannot look
away. If there were no other way to explain these impossibilities I
would shrug my shoulders and go with the official explanation. The
difficulty is that there is a simple alternative explanation for all of these impossibilities and inexplicable observations.
What Exactly is a “Controlled Demolition”?
Controlled demolition involves rigging a
building with charges designed to first cut the supporting columns so
that other charges, when detonated, will destabilize the structure. This
is precisely how steel framed buildings are demolished. If timed
correctly, the building can be blown up from the top down (twin towers)
or bottom up (building 7). The collapse will be very fast and sudden. If
it is demolished from the bottom up the building will fall at or near
the acceleration of gravity (building 7). Depending upon the energy
density of the explosive used, concrete will indeed be pulverized and so
too can large fragments be thrown laterally.
One explosive that is being suggested as
the one that could have been used is nano-thermite. Nano-thermite is a
variant of a well-known chemical combination known as thermate
(essentially elemental Aluminum and Iron Oxide). When heat is added to
these reactants, the oxide molecule leaves the Iron and bonds with
Aluminum releasing a great deal of energy in the form of heat. Within a
few seconds this reaction produces temperatures that exceed 4000 degrees
F, easily enough to melt and cut steel. This reaction is impervious to
water because the oxygen is provided in the Iron Oxide reactant. It
would explain why metal continued to burn for three months despite being
doused with water continuously.
Three independent teams have confirmed
the presence of nano-thermite in thin red flakes that were found in and
near ground zero. How do we know that this material was really found? We
cannot know, we must trust another party, yet this would explain what
the conventional narrative cannot. By dismissing independent researchers
that claim to have found proof of explosive material we are, by
default, trusting NIST and their opinion that searching for such
evidence was unnecessary. However if we accept that material was
actually found we arrive at an explanation of what we are observing : a
massive source of unexplained energy, lateral expulsion of materials,
pulverized concrete, dismembered steel, chemical reactions that took
months to complete and a coherent model of what happened that day.
What Does a Demolition Look Like?
The
following is a video of the collapse of the North Tower, WTC 1, the
first tower that was hit and the second to collapse. It is in slow
motion. It is narrated by David Chandler, a professor of physics. You
can choose to dismiss his narrative comments. I cannot vouch for him. He
may not be an unbiased investigator but examine the details of what is
in front of our eyes :
Does
this seem like a building collapsing under its own weight to you? If it
does, how should it look like if it were instead being blown to bits
from explosives? If you aren’t sure how that should look close your eyes
for a moment and use your imagination and then look at the sequence
again. Large building components are being thrown outwardly leaving
debris in a circle 1200 feet in diameter around its base. Is this
building falling down or blowing up?
If this
footage doesn’t bring up any questions for you I invite you to look
again closely and focus on the corner of the building closest to the
camera. You can easily see that this corner column with surrounding
concrete is crumbling as the “wave of collapse” passes down the
building. That column was undamaged from the 96th floor (where the plane
hit) all the way to the base of the building. Keep your eyes on the
corner column as the wave passes through it. What forces are acting upon
it? There are no fires burning near that column. It was not supporting
any more weight than it had been for the past 30 years. In fact, because
the upper portion of the building was falling at ⅔ the rate of gravity
all the columns in the lower part of the building would necessarily be
holding up only ⅓ the weight they had been previously. Why then is this (and all the other columns) getting crushed?
Why Didn’t NIST Consider a Controlled Demolition?
Interestingly,
the NIST addressed the possibility of a controlled demolition in just
one paragraph of thousands of pages of technical explanations and
discussion. They decided not to investigate that possibility because,
they claimed, no explosions were ever witnessed. Yet there are numerous
accounts from first responders unequivocally stating that they witnessed
explosions in the buildings. In fact 156 firefighters reported that
they heard or witnessed explosions in the twin towers prior
to their collapse. If you don’t believe their accounts we still have
the mainstream media on that day reporting that explosions were
occurring before the buildings fell:
If explosions were taking place in the buildings before
the collapses, they must be considered to be causative factors in their
destruction. Despite the eyewitness testimony and extensive mainstream
media coverage of explosions in the buildings NIST believed it was
unnecessary to examine the remaining steel or the ubiquitous dust for
explosive residues.
Was It Negligence or Something More?
Why didn’t they? Did they have some incentive to not look?
If so, what could it have been? Let us say that they did decide to
examine the debris for explosive material. What if they ended up finding
some? Why couldn’t they simply conclude that the terrorists rigged the
building? What would be the danger in that? After all it wouldn’t be the
first time a terrorist organization attempted to blow up the World
Trade Center with explosives. Everything would have still played out the
same way, right? Not exactly. It would have led to the conclusion that
security in the three buildings was so shoddy that this happened under
their watch. It would have taken demolition experts months to set this
up. It would be hard not to accuse the WTC security of being in cahoots
with the terrorists. Suddenly things would start to point to a
“conspiracy”.
If
evidence of explosives were found they would also have to explain why
the terrorists needed to fly planes into the buildings if the buildings
could have been detonated at anytime. That would be extremely difficult.
This is why some refute the possibility of a controlled demolition. If
terrorists rigged the buildings with explosives, why would they
sacrifice themselves by flying planes into them when they could have
just pushed a button? It is a compelling argument, but what assumptions are we making when using it?
When we dismiss the idea of controlled demolitions because planes were flown into the buildings we are assuming that whoever orchestrated this wouldn’t care if their identity would be revealed.
Terrorists wouldn’t care if planes or bombs were involved. They would
only want to be given full credit for the atrocity. It would be
illogical for them to fly planes into the buildings when they could have
detonated the buildings at anytime. If evidence of explosives were found it would necessarily point to a conspiracy because planes
were flown into the buildings too. Hijacking a plane on a given morning
is one thing. Rigging explosives up and down three Manhattan
skyscrapers is a feat far more involved. The plane collisions would have
been immediately identified for what they really were: red herrings.
Terrorists would not need both bombs and planes, only conspirators would.
Once that is established, attention
would come to the sheer complexity of the effort required to bring three
separate buildings straight down, synchronizing the charges so that the
demolition will appear to be a gravitational collapse and not simply
the detonation of explosives. This kind of endeavor would require more
than 19 terrorists armed with box cutters. The magnitude of the possible
conspiracy would begin to emerge. The forces behind such an act would
clearly wield influence beyond what we consider possible in a free
society. Entertaining such a thing is uncomfortable. It is no surprise
that many wish to look no further. But do the governmental agencies that
are entrusted with public safety have that luxury too? Perhaps they
have been unwillingly doing someone else’s bidding all along.
There is no proof of any of this as
reported in any mainstream media source. It is a hypothesis that would
explain all the impossibilities that exist. It would also allow us to
dispense with the absurd collapse sequence proposed and not require the
fires to have been burning so hot.
How Could This Have Been Orchestrated?
Putting
speculation about dark, hidden forces aside let us return to the
practical aspects of how this could have been accomplished. The
engineers that designed the twin towers insist that in order for the
buildings to fall, the central
columns had to have been compromised, not the peripheral columns that
the planes struck. Indeed, if you closely examine the initiation of
collapse in the North Tower, it is perceptible that the massive antenna
on the roof begins to shift and fall simultaneously with the rest of
the building. This slow motion video captures this at approximately
seven seconds from the start :
The
antenna is directly supported by the central columns. There is no video
that captured the extent of the damage inside the tower but it is clear
that the plane, which is essentially a hollow tube of aluminum and
fiberglass, had to first go through concrete and reinforced steel 14
inches thick. It is possible that a plane’s fuselage can severely damage
concrete and steel columns if the energy of the collision was high
enough. It would be impossible, however, for the plane to remain intact
after encountering the peripheral columns. Again, this is Newton’s third
law of motion. If the steel on the outside of the building was
destroyed, so too was the plane. There would have been little left to
damage the more sturdy central columns.
How
could anyone have accessed the central columns of the twin towers for
months, setting up the explosives? It seems preposterous that buildings
of that size could have been rigged for demolition, even if there were
enough conspirators involved. How could it have been secretly arranged
in buildings that house tens of thousands of employees and visitors
every day? Surely somebody must have seen something. How could this have
been accomplished under the public’s nose? It seems impossible. Then we have this interesting piece of information:
This is a
cover from Elevator World, a publication about elevator technology. In
the spring of 2001 they reported that all of the elevators in both twin
towers underwent a major renovation over a period of several months. The
elevator renovation has been confirmed by people who were working in
the twin towers before 9/11. The elevator shafts are surrounded by the
central columns. There is no proof that the elevator renovation in both
buildings was a cover for the rigging of the central columns, but is it possible?
Is There a Bright Side?
The
controlled demolition hypothesis only attempts to explain the observed
physical behavior of the buildings on that day. No perpetrators can be
identified. No motive can be known. If conspirators set up the
demolition who then was flying the planes? Science will never be able to
answer these very salient questions. On the other hand, the 9/11
Commission and NIST, the authors of the “official” explanation, do not
even attempt to explain how basic laws of physics can be violated yet
they were able to establish the identity of the perpetrators and what
their motives were before the third building even fell to the ground. Nonetheless, it is their explanation that has continued to dominate the narrative for the last eighteen years.
Rather
than reflexively labeling the controlled demolition theory as a crazy
idea held by “9/11 Deniers” so that it can be conveniently packaged as a
“Conspiracy Theory” and dismissed on moral and intellectual grounds, it
is more apt to focus on all the absurdities of the official
explanation. Hundreds of thousands of tons of steel breaking apart in
seconds synchronously? Fires burning in Manhattan for three months? Four
massive military exercises occurring on the same morning as the attack?
A fourth plane vaporizes yet a passport is found intact at the crash
site? The official explanation is the greatest “Coincidence Theory” ever conceived.
The most important next step is to pause
and consider what has been offered here. Ultimately each must decide
what is true for themselves. Even if one chooses to instead defer to
others’ opinions, that is a decision made individually. Truth is a
function of how deeply and how objectively one looks. I would urge
everyone to not only look for what must be true but also for their own
biases.
In our personal search for the truth we
are well advised to examine what our motivations are. For many, the
possibility that we have been misled and duped into supporting costly
wars that have indelibly changed the political landscape of the planet
seems too ghastly to entertain. Why look further if it leads to such
conclusions?
This is
indeed a delicate matter and requires a certain presence of mind to look
beyond knee-jerk reactions. The controlled demolition of the buildings
in Manhattan on 9/11 does not dishonor the brave first responders, the
innocent people who lost their lives that day or the hundreds of
thousands that have died and suffered in the eighteen years since. In
fact it may shed light on the possibility of a profound truth about
humanity. Instead of a world where no-fly-zones and walls separate good
from evil perhaps we live on a much different planet. A planet where the
vast majority of its inhabitants are actually peace-loving and
cooperative, but have been taught
to be afraid and angry by the tiniest fraction of us who would benefit
from such a climate of antimony and adversity. Is it possible that this
has been the case all along? Was 9/11 actually a “glitch in the matrix”
and not the proof of terror around the corner that we have been told?
How many more years will pass before we are ready to acknowledge that we
may have always been a peaceful people?
We may never absolutely know who was
ultimately responsible and why they felt it necessary to not just damage
the buildings but to dismember them and spread their remains over all
of lower Manhattan while sacrificing and endangering thousands of
innocent lives. At this time the only blame that can be justly placed is
that upon the 9/11 Commission and NIST. Their explanation violates
basic laws of physics and principles of engineering. Furthermore, by
refusing to examine all possible explanations they have been grossly
negligent in their task as scientists and as servants of the public. The
next steps forward surely must include a diligent investigation of why
NIST failed so spectacularly as an entrusted agent of public safety.
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