- 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 unfounded 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: NY Times: Medical Examiner’s challenge
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 :
The Red Pill
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, firefighters, 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. After all, 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 geopolitical 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 which documented that:
http://edition.cnn.com/2001/US/12/20/rec.athome.facts/index.html
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 freefall. 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-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 freefall 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 9/11 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 of the Twin Towers 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: “Why did the World Trade Center collapse? A simple analysis”
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: Twin tower elevator renovation
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.
This article was sourced from Collective Evolution.
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