9/11 Pentagon Conspiracy

Memory Hole

I've been meaning to give this a serious going over for a few weeks now. Someone received athe above powerpoint show in their email the other day at our office. The basic gist of this idiocy was that there was no attack on the Pentagon by terrorists that day. They claim it was the Military firing on itself for whatever political gain that might be expected to reap with a missle. The recurring theme in the presentation was that there was no wreckage of the plane at the Pentagon. They showed countless plane wrecks with debris spread all over the ground and said there should be more evidence of a crash at the Pentagon if it really was a plane. Where are the wings? it asks... Where's the plane?

OK, two immediate problems with this approach. First is that the plane crashes used as a control are all crashes which ocurred when a plane moving at 300+ MPH hits the ground (a horizontal plane nearly parallel to the plane's path. The key force at work... shear. Think of running a block of cheese along a cheese grater... you get lots of debris. The crash at the Pentagon is a plane travelling at full speed 450+ MPH into a masonry wall which is nearly perpendicular to the flight of the plane. Think about throwing a block of cheese against a wall. You get very different results. The second problem with this line of thought is that the author seems to not know much about airplanes. Airplanes are constructed of lightweight aluminum... like the soda cans. The wings are also the fuel tanks. Wings are not designed to handle head on forces against the wing edge... the wing of a plane works in lift... that is, the up and down direction. In a head on impact the nose of the plane and the fuselage will punch a hole in the masonry and when the wings reach that fuselage sized hole... they'll snap and fold back... releasing aviation fuel and exploding... though most likely, inside the building. Because an airplane is a hollow aluminum tube, the impact might punch one hole in a masonry wall but the force will largely be absorbed as the tube accordians up so it has much less forward force for a second impact.

Why did so much damage occur at the World trade Center and not at the Pentagon? Well, because they are two different buildings. With different weaknesses. There's plenty of documentation about the WTC collapse, you can look at that on your own time. The main thing to note is that the Pentagon is nothing like the WTC in construction. So you may be asking yourself, that's all well and good in theory, how can I be so sure? Many people do not know that this isn't the first time a New York icon has been hit with an airplane. On the morning of Saturday, July 28, 1945 a USAF B-25 bomber:



This crash resulted in 14 deaths including the crew of the plane. The Empire State Building was full on this Saturday morning because of the war. The US had gone to a 6 day workweek to increase productivity. The whole story and details can be found here Note the details of the crash: wings exploded, fire, one engine (on the wings) went into an elevator shaft, the other exitted a window (not a second wall.) And if you think a ten ton aircraft should leave a bigger hole in a building made of stone and brick and steel... here's the picture of the damage done by the B-25:



While researching my architectural thesis, I looked at tons of pictures of buildings in conflict with vehicles (planes, cars, trains, etc.) I have seen nothing in the 9/11 pictures that makes me suspicious at all. The neat little hole in the presentation is labeled punch out in the picture and is likely the exit hole for an engine... in the films own images you can see fire damage in vast areas of the Pentagon where aviation fuel ignited and spread flames throughout the building. In my opinion there is easily 8 times the damage at the Pentagon as there is the above Empire State Building crash picture... which adds up to the difference between an eighty ton modern airliner and a ten ton WW2 bomber. Please also bear in mind that the Pentagon is a military building. Look at it... it's no regular office building (although it is the LARGEST office building in the world,) it's a fortress. I also think the authors of this fantasy have about as good an idea of how fast 350 MPH is as they do about the physics of an airplane crash. So, if anyone gets this stupid powerpoint presentation, forget about the X-Files feel and the angst of the music during the fast paced collage editing... You can dip a turd in sugar and make it look pretty, but that doesn't mean it's OK to eat it. The whole thing is bunk... period.