http://www.wyndom.net/xpentagon%5b1%5d.swf

it certainly causes me to think.

I remember the first reports that day coming from some random dude who had a window that faced in that direction and his account of the impact was much different than the later released official version. I don't now remember what it is he said, but I do remember that his account didn't sound much like the official one at all.

In addition, if it wasn't the jetliner that they said it was, what happened to that jetliner?

Got shot down under vice-presidential orders?

Please pardon my geographical ignorance here; assuming that AA flight 77 was shot down by "friendlies", what other likely target might the US government have realistically thought they were protecting?

I'll just paste my response to this from another site this came up on.

Wow. I'll just state one thing about the video...

They try to prove a plane crash leaves very visible remains when it crashes by showing pictures of other crashes. Well, guess what. Most crashes, and likely all shown had a trained pilot trying to guide the plane to safety. So if there is a way to slow the plane down, it will happen. If there is a way to level it out and try to prevent a direct impact, it will be done. These types of efforts result in less damaging crashes, and might (slim chance) allow for survivors.

The attack on the Pentagon was exactly that, an attack. No attempts to slow down, so the plane will not leave any big pieces behind. The planes in NYC left no huge chunks behind like what was shown in those photos, and they hit a softer building.

Thats just the biggest flaw I saw. Most others will probably be covered by others.

And they never attempt to answer why. Why would the Pentagon hide what happened? Where is the gain? And if it was a cruise missle, where did that come from? Where did the plane go that was still being tracked by radar up until the impact and visible to probably thousands of people, many not even part of the government. Radar and plane tracking systems for planes are monitored by many civilians across the US.

I also have a friend who worked IT at the Pentagon when it happened. Not that saying that will mean anything to the tin foil wearing folks, but getting his story was very interesting.

I also find such claims like this one being the equivalent of spitting on the graves of the people who died that day.

Maybe. But, at the very least, what happened to the wings and engines? There are no holes in the building to account for them and no apparent wreckage outside it.

Also, how does potentially pursuing the truth about the fates of those victims denigrate them?

Because the truth is, and has been known for almost 3 years now. Why the resurgence in this tin foil hat conspiracy theory? Of course the most degrading thing is to the people who died on that flight. Lets see, they recovered proof that all passengers minus one were in the Pentagon damaged areas. But someone is managing to get more and more people to believe these people never existed, and something other then a hijacked plane slammed into the pentagon.

This conspiracy has been around long enough to be completly debunked many times over.

Why did the plane not make a plane shaped hole in the building? Well, because it was being smashed to bits starting the instant the thin metal of the plane touched a building built with layers of limestone, brick, cement, and steel. For a more in depth explaination of the damaage, I'll quote one of the subsites from the link above:

Paul: The question and photos are misleading: Parts of the plane penetrated the ground floors of the second and third rings of the building. These photos show only their intact roofs. Eyewitnesses and news reporters have talked about the twelve-foot hole punched through the inside wall of the second ring by one of the plane’s engines.

More importantly, the question focuses on the plane’s size and weight, making it sound extraordinarily heavy, but leaves out the size and weight of the Pentagon – America’s largest office building with three times the floor space of the Empire State Building - as well as the difference in relative stiffness and energy absorption between a building and an airplane. Each side of the Pentagon contains over 100,000 tons of Potomac sand mixed into the steel-reinforced concrete under its limestome facade. There are nearly 10,000 concrete piles anchoring each side of the building. And in the wake of bombings in Oklahoma City and Saudi Arabia, that portion of the Pentagon had just been reinforced with a computationally modeled lattice of steel tubes designed to prevent it from collapsing after an explosion.

By contrast, the plane is only 100 tons of custom alloys stretched thin enough to fly. It’s not like a giant bullet; more like a giant racing bike. Even so, the plane knocked down 10,000 tons of building material - 100 times its own weight - in the crash and subsequent collapse. Another 57,000 tons of the Pentagon were damaged badly enough to be torn down. The Brobdingnagian scale of the Pentagon makes the total area of damage seem small, but it would hold several Silicon Valley office buildings, or an airport terminal.

Patrick: Watch the videotapes of the planes hitting the World Trade Center. They were traveling at approximately 400 mph, and they hit an aluminum and glass building. An entire plane went in, and hardly anything came out the other side, 208 feet away.

Here we have a plane traveling at nearly 250 mph (just over 1/2 the velocity of the WTC planes, meaning just over 1/4 of their kinetic energy), hitting the ground (which would absorb much of that energy), and only then sliding at a much slower speed into a steel-and-kevlar-reinforced concrete and brick building. Obviously, it's not going to go very far. Still, parts of the plane penetrated into the C ring.

Uh, you rang? I know there are other Pauls on the board, but I don't think any are (well, were) involved in this thread. Just a clarification.

He was pasting from another site. And I guess that one has a Paul too!

I think this theory popped up here before right after 9-11. Some French guy came up with the idea that the US and Isreal planned the whole deal and even piloted the planes ourselves. Fits right into the ripe anti-Semitic atmosphere in France now.

Tom's post is correct. The Pentegon is huge and is massive and the plane that hit it was light, slow and hit the ground first. Still, the Pentagon suffered severe damage and death. I imagine the burning fuel on board took care of whatever remained of the plane.

What sickens me is that this video, which is dishonorable to the people that died there, is simply being brought up because the election is nearing. "To hell with the people that died, George W. Bush and anyone that supports the Jews must go."

I still don't understand how this is "dishonorable". There's compelling evidence in that video. It may be explicable, but it's not obvious. As far as I know, no one has ever really come out to say it's not true. And, to be honest, as anti-Bush as I am, I never connected this with any anti-Bush sentiments. My first thought was that the terrorists had some sort of missile that, for some reason, the government didn't want us to know about. Of course, that probably flies in the face of them going out of their way to scare us at every possible opportunity.

From a site linked from that about.com site that is actually trying to debunk, it says:

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Eyewitnesses and news reporters have talked about the twelve-foot hole punched through the inside wall of the second ring by one of the plane’s engines.

Then later on says:

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Since the plane hit the ground and skidded into the building, enough energy was lost by the initial impact and friction with the ground that the engines probably did not penetrate the building.

So which is it? Of course, this isn't proof that their entire explanation is wrong (although they debunk a different, if similar, set of evidence and doesn't mention some of the things brought up in this presentation), but it does make you wonder if they're stretching just as far to explain it as being an airplane hit as the makers of this video are stretching to make it appear not to be.

I'm not saying that this is an answer. In fact, it's not answering anything. It is, however, raising, I think, legitimate questions that have never been answered, including by the debunking sites referenced.

to quote someone else that i am discussing this with:

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Hmmm... I would probably go along with the theory that the planes in Pennsylvania and DC were both shot down before they hit their intended targets. It's possible someone then decided to fire a missile into an unfinished and therefore mostly empty wing of the Pentagon to disguise the fact that our planes killed our people.

However, I'd need to see alot more verifiable facts before I began stating one scenario or the other is true. Until then, I am comfortable with saying, "I'm not sure what exactly happened, but I am sure it was a horrible tragedy."

I don't think there is much compelling evidence in the video.

For example, the fact that they have found a couple of dozen people who think they saw a small jet rather than a airliner means nothing. People are terrible at being eye witnesses.

When I was watching the second NYC attack live (and seeing recordings of the first) the newscasters kept repeating that the planes were small jets when it was very clear from the pictures I was seeing that they were airliners.

Also, how many of the thousands of people who must have seen the Pentagon plane thought it was an airliner ? Unsurprisingly the video doesn't show any of their witness statements...

Somewhere in the video a statement says something like "it was travelling so fast, it couldn't have been a plane". Well duh, planes do travel very fast. Even if this plane was only travelling at 250kts, that is nearly 5 times the speed of most US auto traffic and as it was flying very low it would have seemed much faster than planes people are used to seeing at height.

The pristine lawn does look a little odd, but I'm sure I saw pictures nearer the time showing an impact trail along the grass ?

Yeah, the eyewitness (and random joe) accounts are easily the weakest point of the presentation. But one set of bad evidence doesn't contaminate the rest.

The pentagon yard is pretty clear in those photographs. Where else do you expect a debris or impact trail to be? I suppose it's possible that the airplane hit precisely, like a drop shot in raquetball. Maybe that's why there's no debris anywhere. It all fell into the corner.

To me, the lact of any indication of wings is the biggest problem. Also, given the fact that there's no apparent entry point for the engines on the outside of the building, what's the twelve foot or so high hole in the interior? If someone with authority could come along and say that it's easily feasible for the wings to have folded up and followed the fuselage into the building via the same hole, I'd be satisfied, but right now, I don't see how that could be the case. There doesn't even seem to be any dent in the building where they might have hit in order to collapse.

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I still don't understand how this is "dishonorable". There's compelling evidence in that video.

I think it's dishonorable because I don't think there is any compelling evidence to support it, so, to me, it is clearly frivolous. If you think the evidence is that compelling, then I can see how you would see nothing dishonorable. To me, it's just a conspiracy theory. I'm sure we never landed on the moon either.

I think that if you don't see anything there that's worth considering, even if it's to immediately dismiss it, then you've been brainwashed hard.

I didn't mean that it's bad to look at this stuff and talk about it, I was directing my comments at its creator because anyone who took the time to investigate this would have realized that it wasn't true and would have not gone through making and distributing it. I dismissed this when it came out several years ago.

So what happened to the plane carrying the people? What happened to the people? Am I supposed to believe that first they shot down the plane down somewhere between Dulles and DC (not very far), then launched something, anything else at the Pentagon, all this over a metropolitan area and the biggest roads in Virginia?

First off, I have no idea. I'm not saying that this is true. I'm just saying that there's something there, even if it's answerable in an intelligent manner. So far, however, nothing I've seen has done so.

Second, to be fair, while the takeoff and crash points were not very far from each other, flight 77 had made it to about the KY/WV/OH border before it turned around, or they lost radar contact, or whatever.

I'll admit that this is far-fetched, but it's conceivable that the plane was shot down by US military and that the Pentagon attack was something else, say a missile. And then the government covered it up for some reason, transporting the dead from the Appalachians to DC. Now, I don't believe that for a minute, but it's feasible.

This thread prompted me to find out more info and found this

It's times like this that I turn to the ever-reliable Snopes -- http://snopes.com/rumors/pentagon.htm

Well, I don't know that I'd call Snopes ever-reliable. However, it does have a plausible explanation for the wings that I hadn't seen before:

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As the front of the Boeing 757 hit the Pentagon, the outer portions of the wings likely snapped during the initial impact, then were pushed inward towards the fuselage and carried into the building's interior; the inner portions of the wings probably penetrated the Pentagon walls with the rest of the plane. Any sizable portions of the wings were destroyed in the explosion or the subsequent fire.

It also shows a picture of what they claim to be wing damage to the Pentagon, which shows, essentially, the building's fascia scorched and blackened on either side of the impact point. If you assume that the wings did mostly snap off, it's possible that there was an immediate explosion of the fuel in the wings that disintegrated them. And I suppose it's possible that an engine could have gone in with the plane.

To be honest, both Snopes' theory and the not-a-plane theory are a little too convenient and hopeful of coincidence. However, given that we know other planes definitely did hit buildings that day in similar ways....

I still don't know what that tiny thing is in the first frame of the Pentagon time-delay camera.

While I understand your point, the Pentagon photo provides a pretty clear sense of scale. I mean, we have something equally the same distance away in the picture, and the plane seems incredibly small. I know that the pentagon is a big building, but assuming that each of its five stories is 20 ft. high, then the plane appears to be like fifteen feet tall.

Actually, there was a report somewhere that listed the height of the Pentagon and the height of a 767 and it didn't seem to match what was in the photo.

Of course, I could be wrong.

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I think it looks exactly as big as I would expect it to look, given the angles involved, and given the fact that it was skidding along the ground without its landing gear.

Not too mention that at a bazillion miles per hour, the fuselage was probably already compressed vertically by 27 percent as soon as it touched the turf.

But I have another agenda! This thread is now *Mine*!

I can blame this thread for triggering a memory..... Some years ago, I read a mass-market spy novel....maybe one of the Gardner James Bond series, I can't remember. The fact that I can not remember, though, is bugging the hell out of me.

The scene that sticks in my mind, the denouement more or less, was when about 100-200 junior spy agency employees were loaded onto a jet airplane under false pretense with a couple of the main "good guy" characters standing on the tarmac chatting in hushed tones about how the jet was going to be purposefully crashed/destroyed (ummm, killing all those junior analysts) just to tie up a few loose ends of the story's main struggle.

So, does anyone remember this? Can you put me out of my misery?

Wow, well I didn't *really* mean to kill this thread as dead as I did. Maybe I didn't. Maybe it was already played out. I have to admit part of me was looking to inject a little distraction. I'm actually a bit surprised at lengthy discussion about Flight 77. I mean where *else* did it go? There's some philosophical construct that comes to mind...Occam's Razor?...no, not really....hmmm.

It also occurred to me as I was about to hit the "Submit" button that I was employing a hijacking....metasimile?...in my post (without any particular initial intent) as we approach the 3rd anniversary of 9/11. So I thought "Should I take that out?" but then just hit submit. That was conscious and maybe a little hangover from reading "Imperial Hubris". This probably isn't making *too* much sense, but if I start another semi-incoherent thread about yellow ribbons, that's what that is all about.

Perhaps there was a carmera pointed right out the window and it was destroyed.

The point is, you need to line up about 20 "what ifs" to make this theory "something to think about" rather than going for the simplest explaination. It's human nature and ever since JFK was killed, Watergate and Roswell, we're always going to look at things this way. I guess it'd be a good episode for the XFiles.

From my perspective, this (and all other conspiracy theories out there) all come down to three things: truth, trust and belief.

Truth: I was not there. I did not witness it happen. Even if I did witness it, I would have had to be on the plane to see what happened there, on the ground to watch the impact or in the building watching the approach. Fortunately, I was not. I will never really know the complete truth from any of those perspectives because I was not there.

Trust: Because I was not there, I must take into account other sources of information about what happened. I have to listen to witnesses, read reports, view media. But I must gather this (potentially conflicting) information and form judgements. What do I trust? Does this make sense? Much of the blind faith that was formerly put into both governments and media has been replaced today by distrust. Just or unjust, trust needs to be earned and is easy to break.

Belief: Eventually, I will formulate my own personal understanding of what happened. This is as a result of filtering the data from the "trust" phase and connecting what I know to be "truth" from my own perspective. This result can and does change over time based on changes in the underlying facts. Because this is a unique process for each individual, one person's belief will be another's fantasy.

Excellent post.

Thanks!

I agree 100%.

True, but what about if the glass was really 1" thick polycarbonate?

Hmm. Hadn't considered that. I suppose it well could be. I'd still think that there'd be more significant fracturing of the concrete layer above the reinforcing bars.

But that's the kind of stuff I'm talking about. Personally, it offends me more to hear "don't talk about it because you'll offend the dead" than "hey, I don't see how it could have happened that way" followed by a "well, here's a possible explanation".

I heard that we have the cure for cancer but (insert current president's name) won't release it because the medical health system makes more money from treating cancer victims than it does curing them.

I heard that we have the cure for cancer but (insert current president's name) won't release it because the medical health system makes more money from treating cancer victims than it does curing them.



And I have invented a carburetor that will make your Humvee get 80 miles per gallon and cut pollution by 90% at the same time. I'd tell you how it works, but the Big Oil Companies (tm) have paid me a lot of money to keep it off the market.

tanstaafl.

Security cameras also have horrible resolution and contrast. Because of the cheap lenses, the focal depth is shallow and some have wide angle lenes that further distort. A blurry focus plus fast moving object plus too high of a contrast setting can cause some weird effect that are magnafied when you have few lines of pixels.

Oh I like it! Kinda like the one where the government wanted us to beleive in UFO's so we'd pay less attention to their fleet of spy planes and test aircraft.

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Oh I like it! Kinda like the one where the government wanted us to beleive in UFO's so we'd pay less attention to their fleet of spy planes and test aircraft.

Area 52.