Popular Mechanics (South Africa)
HOW YOUR WORLD WORKS
PM examines the evidence and consults the experts to refute the most persistent conspiracy theories of September 11.
There’s a lot of concern about keeping the spacecraft warm, but a much larger issue is how you reject heat, from both your electronics and the Sun.
FROM THE MOMENT the first aeroplane crashed into the World Trade Centre on the morning of 11 September 2001, the world has asked one simple and compelling question: How could it happen?
Three and a half years later, not everyone is convinced we know the truth. Go to Google.com, type in the search phrase “World Trade Centre conspiracy” and you’ll get links to an estimated 12 300 000 websites. Thousands of books on 9/11 have been published; many of them reject the official consensus that hijackers associated with Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda flew passenger planes into US landmarks.
To investigate 16 of the most prevalent claims made by conspiracy theorists, Popular Mechanics assembled a team of nine researchers and reporters who, together with PM editors, consulted more than 70 professionals in fields that form the core content of this magazine, including aviation, engineering and the military.
In the end, we were able to debunk each of these assertions with hard evidence and a healthy dose of common sense. We learnt that a few theories are based on something as innocent as a reporting error on that chaotic day. Others are the byproducts of cynical imaginations that aim to inject suspicion and animosity into public debate. Only by confronting such poisonous claims with irrefutable facts can we understand what really happened on a day that is forever seared into world history.
No stand-down order
No fighter jets were scrambled from any of the CLAIM:
28 Air Force bases within close range of the four hijacked flights. “On 11 September, Andrews had two squadrons of fighter jets with the job of protecting the skies over Washington, DC,” says the website emperors-clothes.com. “They failed to do their job.” “There is only one explanation for this,” writes Mark R Elsis of Standdown.net. “Our Air Force was ordered to Stand Down on 9/11.”
On 9/11 there were only 14 fighters on alert in the FACT:
contiguous 48 states. No computer network or alarm automatically alerted the North American Air Defence Command (NORAD) of missing planes. “They [civilian Air Traffic Control, or ATC] had to pick up the phone and literally dial us,” says Major Douglas Martin, public affairs officer for NORAD. Boston Centre, one of 22 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regional ATC
facilities, called NORAD’S Northeast Air Defence Sector (NEADS) three times: at 8:37 am EST to inform NEADS that Flight 11 was hijacked; at 9:21 am to inform the agency, mistakenly, that Flight 11 was headed for Washington (the plane had hit the North Tower 35 minutes earlier); and at 9:41 am to (erroneously) identify Delta Air Lines Flight 1989 from Boston as a possible hijacking. The New York ATC called NEADS at 9:03 am to report that United Flight 175 had been hijacked – the same time the plane slammed into the South Tower. Within minutes of that first call from Boston Centre, NEADS scrambled two F-15s from Otis Air Force Base in Falmouth, Massachusetts, and three F-16s from Langley Air National Guard Base in Hampton, Virginia. None of the fighters got anywhere near the pirated planes.
Why couldn’t ATC find the hijacked flights? When the hijackers turned off the planes’ transponders, which broadcast identifying signals, ATC had to search 4 500 identical radar blips criss-crossing some of the country’s busiest air corridors. And NORAD’S sophisticated radar? It ringed the continent, looking outward for threats, not inward. “It was like a doughnut,” Martin says. “There was no coverage in the middle.” Pre-9/11, flights originating in the States were not seen as threats and NORAD wasn’t prepared to track them.
As each tower collapsed, clearly visible puffs of dust CLAIM:
and debris were ejected from the sides of the buildings. An advertisement in The New York Times for the book Painful Questions: An Analysis of the September 11th Attack made this claim: “The concrete clouds shooting out of the buildings are not possible from a mere collapse. They do occur from explosions.” Numerous conspiracy theorists cite Van Romero, an explosives expert and vice president of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, who was quoted on 9/11 by the Albuquerque Journal as saying, “There were some explosive devices inside the buildings that caused the towers to collapse.” The article continues: “Romero said the collapse of the structures resembled those of controlled implosions used to demolish old structures.”
Once each tower began to collapse, the weight of all FACT:
the floors above the collapsed zone bore down with pulverising force on the highest intact floor. Unable to absorb the massive energy, that floor would fail, transmitting the forces to the floor below, allowing the collapse to progress through the building in a chain reaction. Engineers call the process “pancaking,” and it does not require an explosion to begin, according to David Biggs, a structural engineer at RyanBiggs Associates and a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers team that worked on the FEMA report.
Like all office buildings, the WTC towers contained a huge volume of air. As they pancaked, all that air – along with the concrete and other debris pulverised by the force of the collapse – was ejected with enormous energy. “When you have a significant portion of a floor collapsing, it’s going to shoot air and concrete dust out the window,” National Institute of Standards and Technology lead investigator Shyam Sunder tells PM. Those clouds of dust may create the impression of a controlled demolition, Sunder adds, “but it is the floor pancaking that leads to that perception.”
Demolition expert Romero regrets that his comments to the Albuquerque Journal became fodder for conspiracy theorists. “I was misquoted in saying that I thought it was explosives that brought down the building,” he tells PM. “I only said that that’s what it looked like.”
Romero, who agrees with the scientific conclusion that fire triggered the collapses, demanded a retraction from the Journal. It was printed 22 September 2001. “I felt like my scientific reputation was on the line.” But emperors-clothes.com saw something else: “The paymaster of Romero’s research institute is the Pentagon. Directly or indirectly, pressure was brought to bear, forcing Romero to retract his original statement.” Romero responds: “Conspiracy theorists came out saying that the government got to me. That is the furthest thing from the truth. This has been an albatross around my neck for three years.”
Flight 77 debris
Conspiracy theorists insist there was no plane CLAIM:
wreckage at the Pentagon. “In reality, a Boeing 757 was never found,” claims pentagonstrike.co.uk, which asks the question, “What hit the Pentagon on 9/11?”
Blast expert Allyn E Kilsheimer was the first structural FACT:
engineer to arrive at the Pentagon after the crash and helped co-ordinate the emergency response. “It was absolutely a plane, and I’ll tell you why,” says Kilsheimer, CEO of KCE Structural Engineers PC, Washington, DC “I saw the marks of the plane wing on the face of the building. I picked up parts of the plane with the airline markings on them. I held in my hand the tail section of the plane and I found the black box.” Kilsheimer’s eyewitness account is backed up by photos of plane wreckage inside and outside the building. Kilsheimer adds: “I held parts of uniforms from crew members in my hands, including body parts. Okay?” PM