United Airlines Flight 175 and the South Tower (2WTC)

So, the plane flown by hijacker Mohammed Atta has crashed into the North Tower.  At this time, most people think this was just some sort of aviation accident, and nothing more.  There are some that think it was done on purpose because it was clear skies that morning.  Unfortunately, however, the thoughts of an accident will be put to bed about 17 minutes after the crash of Flight 11.

And just to get it out of the way immediately, here is the flight manifest that shows all of the hijackers were indeed on board UA175:

HOW DO WE KNOW THIS PLANE WAS REALLY A PLANE, MAN

The same skepticism for AA11 arose for UA175.  However, unlike AA11, UA175 was captured on cameras, camcorders, and TV cameras for the entire world to see.

Here is a still from one of those videos, less than a second before impacting the South Tower:

Now, here is United Airlines commercial airliner take note of the paint scheme:

As a bonus for you, here is the very same UA175 pictured in 1999:

Again the paint matches the object that is a split second from crashing into the South Tower.

The colors on the wings, engines, the split on the fuselage, and the tail markings are all consistent with a united Airlines commercial jet.  Now, let's take a look at the bottom of the plane.  This picture spawned conspiracy theories about a pod being attached to the bottom of the plane, and then shot a missile into the tower a split second before impact:

Truthers jump to the conclusion that this clearly shows something on the bottom of the aircraft, as noted with the break in the white stripe going down the middle of it.  Now, here is the bottom of another United Airlines jet:

Looks fairly identical, yes?  That's because this "pod" is nothing of the sort.  What they believe to be a pod is actually a housing compartment for the middle/rear landing gears for the plane.

For the TV fakery crowd, there are simply too many videos of the plane hitting the building, at too many angles, for it to be faked.

This one caught the longest showing of UA175, from a a news camera on top of one of the buildings:

Here are more angles, some from the news, others from random people on the ground:

Notice again that the paint scheme matches United Airlines.

This is a video from pretty far away, they were just filming driving down the street at the North Tower being on fire and catch the plane on tape hitting the South Tower.  Notice the delay in the camera picking up the plane engine sounds.  This is due to the delay of sound travel to that distance, and makes it even more believable that it is authentic.

I could go on with this, possibly with hundreds of different videos showing the same thing: United Airlines Flight 175 hitting the South Tower.

DAMAGE AND DEBRIS

Like with AA11, UA175 had ample debris survive the crash.  Here is a rather large chunk of the fuselage, found on the rooftop of WTC5:

One of UA175's engines found at the intersection of Church and Murray Street.  

Landing gear that apparently the evil government forgot to pick up years after the attacks, wedged between two buildings:

Other engine parts:

For the damage done, it is very similar to the North Tower, since they are both plane crashes with a full tank of jet fuel and traveling an an extremely fast speed.  The primary difference here is where it was hit.  This will explain why the South Tower was the second building hit but the first to collapse.

AA11 hit the North Tower pretty much right in the middle fairly symmetrical, between the 93rd and 98th floors.  UA175 hit the South Tower between the 77th and 85 floors.  It also hit towards the right corner of the building, causing more awkward stress on the building to redistribute the weight to non severed perimeter and core columns.  There is also more weight bearing down on the impact zone, having 25 floors above it, where as the North Tower impact area had 11 floors.

Again, it is a plane shaped hole, and goes inward.  I don't think it is necessary to go through this song and dance again from the North Tower.  

THERMITE THEORY

There is, however, one this I want to davel on from pictures of the South Tower burning: the thermite theory.  Truthers link to the video this still was taken from to make the conclusion that it was melted steel, and that the only way this could've occured is with thermite.

The thermite theory was created and pushed by BYU physics professor Stephen Jones.  His paper on the subject was never peer reviewed by any respected science journal, and when the BYU science department put him on paid leave so his peers could review his paper, he abruptly quit his tenured post at the university and took his paper with him. He then submitted his paper to the now infamous Bentham Science, who pretty much accepts any papers, n matter how full of jibberish and nonsense it has. There is probably good reason for this, since he most likely wasn't going to get the good marks he wanted from the process.  Probably to be expected from the man whose big claim to fame before thermite was writing a paper on how Jesus Christ visited the Americas.

Anyways, his paper's thesis is that the dust samples he collected from various points of origins(last time I read it he never established a solid chain of custody, a big nono) that are claimed to be from the WTC site from the 9/11 attacks contained traces of thermate, which is thermite with sulfur deposits and barium nitrate.  Some problems with this analysis occur.  First, with the sulfur, the WTC towers used sulfur drywall.  So of course sulfur is going to be found in any dust of the WTC.

Chemist Frank Greening argues that with the drywall and all the fires, then after the collapses and water/other chemicals brewing under the rubble, that sulfur would be abundant there.

Jones also claims to cite an EPA report by Erik Swartz that states there was a presence of 1, 3 diphenylpropane, would suggest the presence of thermite.  What Jones fails to mention, though, is that Swartz says that the reasoning for the presence of these ingredients is from the burning plastic of all the computers in the buildings.

He also cites a post-9/11 government report on dust samples in lower Manhattan, and feels it also concludes to his findings of thermite.  What he fails to mention is that the report states that the presence of manganese, aluminum, and barium are consistent with their presence in building materials.

So far his claims aren't holding much water if the levels of said items are normal for the area and what was in the buildings.  If thermite was used those levels would be much higher.  But let's put thermite to the test.  Let's look at a video or two of thermite on a steel beam, shall we?

The following two videos are by Van Romero, an explosives expert at new Mexico Tech.  In the first video is just regular thermite placed on a steel beam.  The second one is with thermite painted onto a steel beam:

Both look pretty violent, right?  But did it burn hot enough, and even more importantly, long enough, to do any real damage to the beam?  Van Romero gives his conclusion:

Short and sweet?  "Nope."

Now, maybe that just wasn't enough thermite to be able to do anything to the steel beam.

James Millette, then executive director of MVA Scientific Consultants, with a bachelors in physics and a master's and PhD in environmental science, elected to either refute or confirm Jones' findings.  The problem?  Jones and his associates refused to hand over their dust samples.  So like a boss, Millette went to NYC and got his own.

His findings are not quite as fanatical as Jones.  The red/gray chips that Jones touted as proof of thermite, Millette claims, is this: the grey side is consistent with carbon steel.  The red side contained elements for essentially primer paint.  His conclusion:

"The red/gray chips found in the WTC dust at four sites in New York City are consistent with carbon steel coated with an epoxy resin that contains primarily iron oxide and kaolin clay pigments.

There is no evidence of individual elemental aluminum particles of any size in the red/gray chips, therefor the red layer of the red/gray chips is not thermite or nano-thermite."

Link to the paper here:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/64959841/9119ProgressReport022912_rev1_030112webHiRes.pdf

So no evidence of bombs, no evidence of thermite, damage consistent with that of a plane crash and footage/photos/stills that show a consistency with a United Airlines jet.  SOunds like the official story is winning again.

AND I'M FREE, FREE FALLING (AGAIN)

Just to be absolutely sure about the lack of a controlled demolition, let's look at the time it took for the South Tower collapse.  Again, for it to be free fall, the entire building would have to collapse in less than ten seconds.

From ABC News:

Collapse starts at about 1:59.  You can see the collapse still going after 2:09 has elapsed.  The building as a whole doesn't even get all the way behind WTC7 until 2:16.  So it's at least 17 seconds.

Here's another view:

Collapse starts at :04.  By 0:14, there is still a good amount of the core and perimeter columns still collapsing.  I guestimate here that it stops at 0:26, or 22 seconds.

One more, this one has the collapse starting right at the start:

As you can see, by 11 seconds, the camera turns back and you can still see at least forty stories of the building still in tact.

So again, this building didn't fall at free fall speeds, either.  Sorry truthers.

American Airlines Flight 11 and the North Tower (1WTC)

September 11, 2001 was just like any other fall day in New York City.  People were driving into the city or riding the subway in for work, chatting with co-workers and friends, and just carrying on.  Then, at 8:46am, hijacker pilot Muhammed Atta would change that, along with history on board American Airlines flight 11.  Or did he?

Truther would like to convince you of otherwise.  Many of whom believe that AA11 did not hit the towers at all.  They believe this footage from the Naudet brothers documentary simply called "9/11" was fake:

Yes, there are several within the 9/11 Truth Movement that believe that no planes hit the World Trade Center towers that day, and that it was all an elaborate hoax and TV fakery.  I for one, think they give the government WAY too much credit here.  They may have an argument with AA11, if it was the only crash that day, as this and maybe one or two other videos caught the crash happen.  However, several TV cameras and personal hand helds caught United Airlines Flight 175 crash into the South Tower, in what is possibly the most recorded single event in history.  We'll talk about UA175 and the South Tower in another post.

PLANE WRECKAGE AND DAMAGE TO THE NORTH TOWER

Truthers will often make the false claim that there was no plane wreckage recovered at the World Trade Center site.  Though it is true that much of the remains of the planes perished in the ensuing fires, since the majority of them were made of aluminum, there were still pieces of fuselage, engine parts and passenger items recovered.

One such item was a passport from the hijackers.  Truthers find this to be ridiculous, and feel that the government is treating us like idiots to think a paper passport would survive a plane crash, fires, collapse (if it even stayed in the towers immediately following the crash, that is).

However, that isn;t the only artifact that survived the crash of Flight 11.  Here is passenger Waleed Iskandar's bank card:

This was returned to Waleed's parents a year after the attacks. 

Noted truther, that for some reason people take the word of, because he is a theologian by trade, David Ray Griffin makes another false claim about the hijacker passport, stating that it was found in the rubble in cleanup, so it must've survived the crash and fires, and since he deems that impossible, that it must've been planted.  It was actually found before the tower collapsed, recovered by NYPD Detective Yuk H. Chin.  

Here is a picture of the passport, from AA11 hijacker Satam Al-Suqami:

No worst for the wear, right?  Well, being as the explosion from the crash could've pushed it out, just as it did with a whole lot of other paper materials from inside the towers, sure.  Passports also have a thin plastic film on the one page that matters, which is the one with the picture and personal information on it.

The cover of the passport looks a little bit more beat up, but still solid condition:

Here is a picture that shows more paper that escaped the tower from the crash, seemingly untouched.  Also, some people are examining an airplane seat that also escaped the tower after the crash:

But how can this be?  It should be impossible for something like an aircraft see and paper to escape the towers after the crash and ensuing explosion/fires!

Here is a piece of AA11's fuselage:

Part of a landing gear and wheel:

An inflatable life vest that survived the crash and explosion to be found outside of the tower on the rooftop of another building:

So there is ample evidence of a plane in fact, hitting WTC1.  But were the men who did it really there?

THEM HIJACKERS ARE ALL IN YOUR HEAD, MAN

Another common claim, which originated again from David Ray Griffin, is that there were no Arab names on any of the flight manifests of the allegedly hijacked flights.  He makes the conclusion that either this was a set up to blame al-Qaeda automatically, or those flights never existed.

This claim often irks me the most.  If these flights never existed, then where did the passengers go?  I mean, the most prominent passenger on board Flight 11 was David Angell, creator of the TV shows Frasier, Cheers and Wings.  Seth MacFarlane, creator of Family Guy, was supposed to be on that flight but missed it per a scheduling error by his assistant. Mark Wahlberg was also supposed to be on that flight but elected to go with friends to Toronto instead for a film festival.  What, did they all just buy imaginary plane tickets?

Anyways, here is a copy of the flight manifest that shows hijackers Muhammed Atta, Satam Al Saquami, Waleed al-Shehri, Wail al-Shehri, and Abdulaziz al-Omari, along with David Agnell and his wife Lynn:

So his claim is debunked already.  And just for reference, here are the manifests for Flights 77, 175, and 93:

All of the hijackers are on those manifests.  All of them.

And if you want more proof that specifically, Atta was at the controls of Flight 11, here he is caught on tape:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/16/Mohamed_Atta_to_ATC-1.ogg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/Mohamed_Atta_to_ATC-2.ogg

And here he is making his way through airport security:

NORTH TOWER DAMAGE

Now for the meat and potatoes of this thing.  The no-planers claim that no planes actually hit anywhere on 9/11.  As you will see here, and as you saw in the Pentagon post, the impacts all made holes that were very much plane shaped.  And in regards to the towers, you can see that the holes are plane shaped and also bending inwards on the edges of the holes, meaning something from the outside of the tower forced its way in and made the hole while coming to rest (mostly) inside the building:

Here you can better so how the hole goes inward, and can even see that the win tips were not strong enough to sever the columns, but managed to make an indentation:

So that rules out the theory of using explosives to form the hole, as it would then be an outward shape on the edges, and not inward.  Then, there are the special kind of crazies that think it was laser beams from outer space.

No, I'm not kidding.  They believe that the Reagan Star Wars program was seen to fruition (it wasn't) and ultimately used on thee twin towers to cause collapse.  Mmhmm.  Their so called proof that this occurred?  They believe that the lasers caused all the steel to turn to dust upon collapse.

Just look at all this dustified steel:

Those little black specs in the middleish bottom of the picture?  Those are people.  First responders to help clean up the chaos after the buildings collapsed, and to hopefully find survivors.

Speaking of survivors, they were found in the rubble.  Which also contradicts the death laser theory, as well as another just as crazy one that a mini-nuke was used at the towers.

Here's some more of that dustified steel:

JET FUEL CAN'T MELT STEEL BEAAAAAAMMMZZZ

Another common truther fallacy turned internet meme.  Not because that statement is false, it is true that jet fuel does not burn hot enough to melt steel.  The part they get wrong is thinking the official account, and debunkers, say that steel melted on September 11th.  It did not.

While a temperature of 1,370 degrees Celsius is needed to melt steel, only a temperature of 538 degrees Celsius is needed to make the steel begin to soften.  So less than half the heat needed to melt it will cause it to start losing its strength.  To be specific, according to Farid Alfawak-hiri of the American Institute of Steel Construction, structural steel loses half of its strength at 593 degrees Celsius.

NIST notes that parts of the first in the towers hit as high as 1,000 degrees Celsius which would cause the steel in that are to lose more than 90% of its strength.  You can clearly see in photographs of the buildings an inward bowing on the outer structure, which means the steel trusses that helped keep the structural integrity of the buildings by connecting itself to both the perimeter columns and the steel inner core beams.

You can see here in the gif showing perfectly this bowing which ultimately led to complete structural failure:

It appears at this very moment that the sagging trusses became too great to bear on both the perimeter columns and the core, and thus the collapse begins.

Here is another photo clearly showing the inward bowing:

Steel didn't need to melt to cause the collapse of the towers.  

AND I'M FREE, FREE FALLING

Lastly I wanted to address the claim that both towers fell at free fall speeds, clearly showing it had to be a controlled demolition.  I will address the North Tower here, and the South Tower in another post.

Here is a video of the collapse of the North Tower:

The collapse begins at around 0:29 in the video.  The collapse, some would say, ends at around 0:45 making the collapse last 16 seconds.  That alone dispells the theory of free fall collapse because for that to be true it'd have to all come down in less than 10 seconds.  But in my humble opinion, it doesn't end at 0:45.  See that bit of structure still standing after the rest of the building fell?  That is either part of the outer perimeter steel columns or part of the inner steel core.  If this were a controlled demolition, those portions would have gone down with the rest of the building.  So in my opinion, the collapse ends at around 1:02, which would time it at 33 seconds.

Still need more proof it didn't fall that fast? Alright.

Look at this:

Notice how debris that is falling independently from the building is at least 20-30 stories ahead of the collapse itself.  Those portions are falling with zero resistance.  The North Tower, however, is showing plenty of resistance to the collapse.  You can also see at the top right portions of the structure just now starting to fall, so now I'd put that estimation of how far the independently falling debris is at over 40 stories.  This building came down at a much slower rate than free fall speeds.

American Airlines Flight 77 and the Pentagon

I'll start with one of the biggest theories that the 9/11 Truth Movement.  The theory that American Airlines Flight 77 did not hit the Pentagon, but in fact, a missile did.

Conspiracy theorists make numerous claims on the event.

1. There was no recognizable plane wreckage.

2. There is no video footage of AA77 from any of the security cameras at or around the Pentagon.

3. The hole in the Pentagon is too small for a plane of that size.

4. There was no damage to the foundation of the Pentagon.

5. The plane shot the missile, and then flew over the Pentagon to Reagan International Airport (often cited as "Pentacon") and was on a different flight path from what the official story says.


AA77 CAUGHT ON CAMERA

Many truthers try to claim that there is no footage in known existence that has American Airlines Flight 77 on it.  To that I quote the popular football analyst Lee Corso "NOT SO FAST MY FRIEND!"

In the first videos released by the group Judicial Watch from a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the government about said tapes, shows one frame on each of them with what looks like a large plane.  The cameras were a fish bowl lens variety, and were more of a photographic camera rather than a video camera, taking a picture once ever second.  They both get part or all of the object that struck the Pentagon.

Here is the scene with no object in it.

And now here is the shot with the "object" in it.

A closer look of said object, pointing out the characteristics of a plane.

Notice the color on it, the shape (clearly visible on the back what looks like a large tail fin), and the smoke billowing out of it, which is consistent wit the official account of one of the engines getting damaged when it clipped one of the light poles.  None of it looks to have characteristics of a cruise missile.

The other released footage, the Doubletree Hotel, and the Citgo gas station (more on that with Pentacon) have cameras that either were not pointing at the Pentagon (gas station) or had the highway obstructing the view (Doubletree).

PENTAGON IMPACT HOLE

This is a picture that truthers will often cite for their claim that a plane couldn't possibly have hit the Pentagon.

Notice that this picture is from sometime after the portion hit had collapsed.  Notice immediately to the right of the collapsed area more damage, however.

Now, here is a picture of the Pentagon damage BEFORE the area collapsed.

Notice how it looks like the shape of a plane, and not a missile.

Truthers also like to claim that the lawn was undamaged, and no damage to the Pentagon foundation occurred.  Though it is true that precious green grass was unhurt (until all of the debris splatters all over it), the foundation was indeed damaged:

Notice the round shape of the damage, indicating it was struck by one of the plane engines.


BONUS:

Here is the overhead view of what AA77 looked like flying in via the official flightpath in regards to the light poles.

Notice how AA77 would just have to go straight to clip those light poles, where as a missile would have to bob and weave like Floyd Mayweather avoiding Pacquiao like the plague.  A cruise missile cannot do this.

As a counter argument, truthers claim that the light poles, in front of hundreds of witnesses on the interstate that day, popped off each pole from the base.

That wiley government will stop at nothing!  However, there is one more part to the story of damage before Pentagon impact.  That would be the Pentagon generator.

So what 9/11 truthers would like for you to believe is that a cruise missile zig zagged back and forth to knock over light poles (or the government agents popped them off), hit a fairly large generator without exploding, THEN hit the Pentagon, and blew up.  Seems pretty far fetched, doesn't it?

But bring this up to them and they will then rebuttal with a lack of...

AA77 DEBRIS

Yes, they believe that there are little, or many of them will say, no, debris at the Pentagon that looks like it would have come from American Airlines flight 77.  They will often cite this photograph as proof:

Why would they cite this, you ask?  They believe that this shows little to no debris on the Pentagon lawn.  Loose Change I believe was the first to make this claim.

They seem to ignore the red lettering on the piece of debris closest to the camera having red lettering on it, which is consistent with American Airlines.  You can also see in the background closer to the Pentagon a whole heaping lot of debris on the lawn.

More debris that was outside of the Pentagon:

Quite a bit of debris from a plane that hit at over 500 mph, right?  There's more on the inside:

I'll talk about the flight data recorder and the data it holds a little later.

Now, here is another portion of the landing gear assembly.  Note the area in the yellow circle:

And now here is an undamaged landing gear assemble.  Notice the area inside the yellow circle.  Also, notice the wheel design and then look at the wheel in the debris above:

How much of this debris looks like it came from an airplane?  All of it.  How much of it looks like it came from a cruise missile?  None of it.

Ya'lls Just a Bunch of Puppets!

Now comes to the weird theory of the event.  A duo that calls themselves the Citizen Investigative Team (CIT for short) came up with a theory that is often ridiculed by debunkers and truthers alike.  I elected to include it because a lot of people surprisingly believe in it.  This theory is called the "North of the gas station" theory.

They interviewed a 13 eyewitnesses that claimed they saw American Airlines Flight 77 fly over the Citgo gas station.  They all believe that the plane did in fact hit the Pentagon.  The main argument made here?  It disagrees with what has been deemed as the official flightpath.

Here are all of the eyewitnesses' accounts of how the plane flew in.  The red line is the botched reading of the flight data recorder data, and the light teal line is the official flight path:

Notice how almost all of these witnesses disagree with how AA77 got to the gas station.  Some claimed it came in from the Naval Annez in the lower left corner.  One said it came in from Arlington Cemetary.  However, they all agree that it flew by on the left )north) side of the Citgo gas station.

CIT takes these accounts and makes a theory of their own: that the plane may have indeed existed.  And it shot a missile from its underbelly and then flew over the Pentagon and landed at Reagan International Airport.

There are a few problems with this so-called theory, to put it bluntly.

First, they use the botched reading of the flight data recorder from the group Pilots for 9/11 Truth as proof that the plane did indeed fly over the Pentagon.  The data Pilots revealed ended before impact and showed an elevation too high to strike the Pentagon.

The problem with this?  That isn't what the FDR displays.  In a paper by Warren Stutt and frank Legge, To make it a TL;DR (though I highly recommend you read it), they read it wrong.  

Note that this paper was published in the Journal of 9/11 Studies, which is run by another CT nutter Kevin Ryan.  Seems to me that even they have accepted that AA77 did indeed impact the Pentagon.

http://www.journalof911studies.com/volume/2010/Calibration%20of%20altimeter_92.pdf

Another problem with their gas station theory? The security footage shows no evidence of AA77 coming anywhere close to it.  No shadows, no nothing.

Also, AA77 was tracked on Radar all the way to it's crash at the Pentagon.  Here is the footage from Reagan:

BONUS:

HANI HANJOUR

The last thing I will davel on when it comes to the Pentagon is the belief by truthers that Hani Hanjour could not make a certain maneuver before he made his final approach to the Pentagon.  

The maneuver:

Same maneuver from an altitude point of view:

Hanjour was 2500 feet above the ground when he started the maneuver.  He was around 1000 feet above the ground when he B-lined it for the Pentagon.  Notice that he apparently had enough knowledge to know he should probably go up more altitude to begin the maneuver.

I really don't see how hard it is for someone who doesn't really care about the safety of the plane or the passengers on board to pull a maneuver like this off.  In fact, it really isn't even that hard, because amateurs have duplicated in in a Boeing flight simulator (pretty much the very same that the hijackers used to flight train, mind you):

He manages to duplicate, the very same maneuver that truthers deem only military professionals could pull off, three times.

CONCLUSION

So here are the pieces of evidence I lay out to counter the truther argument that American Airlines Flight 77 did not hit the Pentagon:

There is a large plane shaped hole in the side of the Pentagon that is seen before the area collapses.

There are several pieces of debris that are consistent with an American Airlines commercial jet crashing there.

The maneuver that AA77 hijacker pilot Hani Hanjour pulled off was not nearly as difficult as you think.

The flight data recorder shows that AA77 hit the Pentagon.

There is zero evidence of a cruise missile hitting the Pentagon.

There is zero evidence for, and serveral amounts of contradictory evidence against the north of the gas station/Pentagon flyover theory.