From the "Underreported News" file: On November 22, 2004, a
Gulfstream III jet crashed on approach to Hobby Airport in Houston,
Texas, where it had reportedly been scheduled to pick up George H.W.
Bush and shuttle him off to Latin America (likely on some
drug-related business, but that’s not really the point here). The
jet crashed, curiously enough, after clipping a light pole! Here is
how the esteemed Los Angeles Times described the incident:
The Gulfstream III jet, descending in heavy fog, clipped a light
pole and slammed into a field south of downtown ... Authorities said
the Gulfstream III was 1½ miles from the runway when it hit a light
pole on Beltway 8, a toll road that encircles the outskirts of the
city. Part of the jet’s wing was sheared off by the impact; the pole
was bent in half. (Lianne Hart "Jet Bound for Bush’s Father Crashes," Los Angeles
Times, November 23, 2004)
That sounds kind of familiar, doesn’t it? I mean, except for the
part about a portion of the jet’s wing being sheared off ... and the
part about the light pole being bent in half (even though a Gulfstream III is a considerably smaller and lighter aircraft than a
Boeing 757) ... and the part about the plane crashing right after
the impact with the light pole (even though the Gulfstream was
presumably piloted by a professional crew, rather than a reject from
a Florida puddle-jumper school, and even though the plane only hit
one light pole, rather then five light poles, a chain-link fence and
a large generator).
None of that, of course, should cast any doubt on the official story
of what happened at the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Right?
In the previous post, I posed the following query: "How much thrust
do you suppose is required to get a fully-loaded, 100+ ton aircraft
off the ground and then propel it through the air at 500+ miles per
hour?"
It was largely a rhetorical question, but, as it turns out, reader
David had a ready answer:
"Each engine produces roughly 50,000
pounds of thrust, with exhaust gases ejected at mach 0.95 = 720
mph."
I can’t vouch for the accuracy of those numbers, and even if I
could, numbers are so coldly abstract. Luckily though, thanks to
alert reader Brad, we don’t have to rely on just raw numbers.
Instead, we have an actual video clip that illustrates, quite
dramatically, how much thrust is produced by jet engines. I’ll wait
while you cue it up ...
... So, how did you like the show? It appears that the correct
answer to the question of how much thrust is required to get a
passenger aircraft off the ground, presented in the most technical
terminology, is: "a shitload."
Now that we know the correct answer to that question, it is probably
safe to conclude that there might be a bit of a credibility issue
with any alleged eyewitnesses who recall an enormous airplane
passing so low overhead that it clipped light poles and car antennae
and caused survivors to duck to avoid being hit. And unfortunately
for the defenders of the official story, whose continuing line of
attack is that "the no-planers ignore all the witness testimony,"
most of their star witnesses fall into that credibility gap.
The problem here is that the official story - in order to account
for both the height of the alleged entry wound in the Pentagon, and
the path of the alleged damage within the building - requires that
the plane came in at an extremely low altitude. Therefore, those
witness accounts that generally support the official story
necessarily include sightings of a large airplane flying low enough
to convert Marge Simpson’s beehive into a flat-top. And the bottom
line, my friends, is that those witness tales cannot possibly be
true.
A funny thing happened during my long-delayed mission to get this
information posted: before its official debut, the simulation video
has already been commented on by researchers on both sides of the
Pentagon debate. A couple months ago, you see, in response to an
e-mail that found its way into my in-box, I sent out a link to the
video clip to the handful of researchers who were CC’ed the original
message. Jerry Russell, of
www.911-strike.com, seized on the clip to
lend weight to arguments that he had previously presented. And then,
quicker than you can say "damage control," Jean-Pierre Desmoulins
responded.
The following is an excerpt from Russell’s recent post (Eyewitnesses
and the Plane-Bomb Theory):
As we argued in "The Five-Sided Fantasy Island", the very survival
of star eyewitness Frank Probst is difficult enough to reconcile
with the "Official Story", since he was supposedly undisturbed by
wake turbulence as he stood near the heliport while the plane passed
over his head. Further evidence of the validity of our argument was
recently provided by David MacGowan [Editor’s note: it’s McGowan,
Jerry; think Irish, not Scottish], who posted this
above video,
which is a "staged demonstration" showing an automobile being blown
about like a tumbleweed by the blast of an aircraft engine exhaust.
As NASA explains at:
http://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/directline_issues/dl6_blast.htm
Before a crew can say "powerback," jet engine blast can up-root
trees, flatten building structures, shatter windows, lift and propel
heavy objects, weathercock braked airplanes, blow over lift trucks,
shift unbraked baggage carts, and create other havoc on airport
ramps, taxiways, and runways.
Although the diagrams don’t say so, jet blast can also injure or
kill crew and passengers who happen to cross its path.
Yet we are expected to believe that the 757 flew over a highway
overpass at about 10 feet altitude, clipping antennas with its
engines, passing near billboard-style highway signs, and passing
within 6 feet of Frank Probst, all without catching anything in the
blast of its turbine exhausts. We found ourselves wondering if
perhaps the forward speed of the plane might paradoxically have
mitigated the effects of the engine’s blast, by carrying the air
mass forwards around itself (relatively speaking). We can
investigate this further by using the engine modeling tool at:
http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/airplane/ngnsim.html
Russell then proceeded to debunk the notion that jet blast is
negated by the airplane’s forward motion. He also conducted a
revealing investigation into the nature of the purported eyewitness
accounts of the ’crash’ into the Pentagon:
Possibly the most important subset of witnesses consists of those
who provide explicit, realistic and detailed claims that a 757
crashed into the Pentagon after executing a high velocity, low
altitude approach. We believe that, contrary to Hoffman’s opinion,
these accounts can readily be interpreted in favor of our argument
that no such collision took place. This is based on the fact that
there is almost total disagreement among the eyewitnesses, about the
detailed physical description of the actual collision, as well as
severe disagreements with the "official story" of the 757 impact as
determined by the ASCE report.
Out of 27 witness accounts which we
classified as "explicit", we were able to identify substantial
errors or contradictions in 24 accounts, or 88% ... we [also] found
a very high prevalence of elite insider connections among the
witnesses who claimed to see the 757 hit the Pentagon, compared to
other witnesses whose perceptions were more indeterminate. Out of
the 27 explicit witnesses, 14 had what we would consider
"deep"
insider connections, while 24 of 27 worked for either the Federal
Government or the mainstream media. (more
>>>)
So, taking all that into consideration, let me see if I fully
understand the position taken by a number of 9-11 researchers:
despite the wealth of physical evidence to the contrary, we should
all defer to the Pentagon crash story told by the eyewitnesses, even
though there are only a relative handful of them, and even though
nearly 90% of them can’t seem to get the story straight, and even
though nearly 90% of them are either government operatives or their
media bedmates. And we should defer to them so that we do not offend
all the witnesses in the DC area who saw the plane -- which is to
say, so that we do not offend a handful of government hacks and
media whores. Do I have that about right?
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I always figure that if I haven’t
offended at least a few government hacks and media whores, then I
haven’t really put in a good day’s work.
Lest I forget, and for what it’s worth, Jean-Pierre Desmoulins’
semi-coherent attempt to marginalize the significance of the
simulation video can be found here:
Pentagon 2001 : The jet blast
effect
Astute readers may have noticed the reference to a "Hoffman" in the
excerpt from Jerry Russell’s missive. The Hoffman in question, of
course, is Jim Hoffman, who was at one time one of the more
prominent skeptics of the official Pentagon story -- he was, that
is, until he Kerried in a big way, penning a post that he subtly
titled: "The Pentagon No-757-Crash Theory: Booby Trap for 9/11
Skeptics."
Hoffman’s post is, for the most part, the same sort of
disinformational gibberish offered up by Pentagon spinmeisters
Jean-Pierre Desmoulins and
Eric Bart, who have busily polluted the
Pentagon waters with absurdities about self-destructing "plane
bombs" and unlikely (to say the least) chemical reactions.
The "plane bomb" theory, by the way, is an elaborately constructed
scenario that appears to be designed to reconcile the alleged
eyewitness statements with the lack of significant damage to the
Pentagon facade and the lack of aircraft debris on the Pentagon
lawn. What the "plane bombers" say, essentially, is that the plane
was packed with high-tech, synchronized explosive devices that were
detonated a split-second before the aircraft impacted the Pentagon.
This series of perfectly timed explosions purportedly reduced the
plane to confetti.
Imagine, if you will, an enormous, invisible force-field surrounding
the Pentagon, such that the plane actually hit the invisible wall,
rather than the Pentagon itself, and was thereby almost completely
destroyed before even hitting the building. That, in a nutshell, is
basically what the "plane bomb" theorists are selling. In other
words, the eyewitnesses really did spot a large passenger plane
screaming towards the Pentagon, and that plane really did blow up
right outside the Pentagon facade, but it did so, you see, before
actually hitting the building, thus explaining the lack of an
airplane-sized hole in the Pentagon. And the explosions, of course,
were so perfectly placed and synchronized that they completely
obliterated the plane, explaining, conveniently enough, the curious
absence of aircraft debris.
This theory provides a fascinating illustration of the extreme
lengths that some ’theorists’ are willing to go to explain away the
overwhelming amount of evidence that suggests that a 757 did not hit
the Pentagon. As convoluted as this theory is, however, it still
leaves a considerable amount of evidence unexplained, including the
300-foot path of destruction carved through the building complex.
How, after all, could an aircraft reduced to confetti before the
actual impact still generate so much destruction within the
building?
I suppose it could be argued that the Pentagon was damaged with a
separate series of synchronized explosions, but one has to wonder
what the point would be of blowing up both the plane and the
building in separate explosive events when the same effect could
have been achieved by simply slamming the plane into the building,
especially since, according to the "plane bomb" theory, that was a
split-second away from happening anyway. Why then bother to stage
such an elaborate spectacle when there was nothing to gain by doing
so?
Anyway, the point that I set out to make, before getting
sidetracked, is that there was one particular passage in the Hoffman
piece that immediately caught my attention. That passage reads as
follows:
Using the JFK assassination as an analogy, the no-757-crash theory
is like saying that Kennedy was not shot at all, whereas the towers’
demolition is like saying that there were additional gunmen beyond
Lee Harvey Oswald.
That’s a nice analogy, isn’t it? I mean, sure, it’s clumsily worded
and all, and misapplied to boot, but the basic idea is a good one.
And I’m sure that Hoffman came up with it all by himself, rather
than, say, stealing it from a post that went up two months before
his own. Granted, it does bear more than a passing resemblance to
the following excerpt, but I’m sure that that is just a coincidence:
The effect is the same as if, in the years following
the Kennedy
assassination, while skeptics were presenting the case for Kennedy
having been shot from the front rather than from behind, a group of
researchers suddenly began arguing that he wasn’t actually shot at
all!
I’d just like to make one simple request here: in the future, if Mr.
Hoffman (or anyone else) finds himself feeling the urge to steal my
work, just steal it outright. Don’t bastardize it in an inept effort
to disguise the theft. It’s not copyrighted material, after all, so
as long as ethics and integrity aren’t a concern, and they certainly
don’t appear to be, then just copy and paste as you see fit.
Does anyone see anything wrong with these photos? Because, all
things considered, I really don’t see how anyone could objectively
review the evidence and reach any conclusion other than that this
infamous taxi scene was staged. Recall that what we are supposed to
believe is that the light pole in the picture was uprooted by the
impact of a 100+ ton aircraft traveling at hundreds of miles per
hour. Such an impact would likely have sent the steel pole
cartwheeling off at an extremely high rate of speed. That rapidly
moving pole was then purportedly struck a second time, by a moving
taxi.
And yet, remarkably enough, the twice-impacted pole appears to be
largely undamaged, the airplane that allegedly hit the pole was
presumably undamaged, the surface of the highway appears to be
undamaged, and the taxi escaped with no visible damage other than a
broken windshield. Nothing unusual about any of that, I suppose.
More from reader David:
"Responding to your Newsletter #68A... I
found your analysis of the Light Poles knocked down in the alleged
flight-path is acceptable except for one minor distinction ... the
plane (or whatever it was) probably didn’t physically hit the poles.
Each engine produces roughly 50,000 pounds of thrust, with exhaust
gases ejected at mach 0.95 = 720 mph. I know the numbers, but
they’re not the real problem. Light aircraft pilots all know the
real hazard of low-flying jumbo jets is wingtip vortex. These vortex
have such extreme power that a light aircraft, such as a Cessna,
would be violently flipped over and slammed to the ground if it met
up with one of these vortexes. This can happen during landing,
takeoff or simply taxiing on the ground.
Many such accidents occur
every year, and are often fatal. We’re talking about forces strong
enough to throw a Ford Explorer across a tennis court. I did a
Google search for a website that provides some factual data as well
as some graphic indicators. Obviously there are many sites, but I
stopped after finding one that seemed adequate. Although I think
wingtip vortex is a much more likely explanation than wings clipping
poles, I do not know what really happened that day. Like you, I am
convinced that no 757 hit the Pentagon, so I don’t think it much
matters ’what’ knocked down the poles... we already know the ’who’
wasn’t 19 hijackers based out of Afghanistan."
The link that David sent was to a post entitled "Wake-Vortex
Hazard," which begins as follows:
When an aircraft wing generates lift, it also produces horizontal,
tornado-like vortices that create a potential wake-vortex hazard
problem for other aircraft trailing. The powerful, high-velocity
airflows contained in the wake behind the generating aircraft are
long-lived, invisible, and a serious threat to aircraft encountering
the system, especially small general aviation aircraft. Immediately
behind the wake-generating aircraft is a region of wake turbulence
known as the roll-up region, where the character of the wake that is
shed from individual components (wingtips, flaps, landing gear,
etc.) is changing rapidly with distance because of self-induced
distortions.
Farther away from the generating aircraft is an area of
the wake known as the plateau region, where the vortices have merged
and/or attained a nearly constant structure. Even farther downstream
from the generating aircraft is a wake area known as the decay
region, where substantial diffusion and decay of the vortices occur
due to viscous and turbulence effects. Depending on the relative
flight path of a trailing aircraft in the wake-vortex system,
extreme excursions in rolling motion, rate of climb, or even
structural load factors may be experienced during an encounter with
the wake. If the encounter occurs at low altitudes, especially
during the landing approach, loss of control and ground impact may
occur.
Fair enough. But if we accept that wake-vortex could conceivably
uproot a series of steel light poles, then we are left with the
problem of explaining why it is that the cars of witnesses, and
the
witnesses themselves, weren’t literally blown off the road. We are
also, of course, left with the problem of explaining how relatively
lightweight wooden spools were left entirely undisturbed as the
alleged plane’s engines passed over them with, quite literally, mere
inches to spare.
Digging deeper into the mailbag, we find this question from reader
Brian:
You wrote: "You would think that if a 100+ ton metal object
traveling at hundreds of miles per hour impacted a steel light pole,
it might, at the very least, maybe dent the pole, or perhaps bend it
a little bit. In other words, you would think that there would be
some kind of impact scar visible on the toppled pole..."
The pictures you illustrated this statement with appear to me to
document dented and bent poles, especially the picture on the left.
Since I don’t believe a plane hit those poles any more than you do,
I wonder what, and who, did uproot, dent, and bend those poles, and
when did they do it.
I assumed that the slight curvature of the downed pole was by
design. Perhaps that is not the case, but the curvature visible in
the photos surely was not caused by the traumatic impact of a 757
traveling at a high rate of speed. The slight bend in the pole
appears to be perfectly smooth and uniform, with no sign of crimping
or denting. That is certainly not the way that metallic tubing bends
due to sudden impact. You can verify this at home by attempting to
put a smooth bend in a length of metallic conduit by whacking it
with a hammer, rather than using a pipe-bender.
As to who and what did uproot those poles, and when it was done -- I
haven’t got an answer for that.
This next missive, sent in very recently by reader Mark, is typical
of a several e-mails that I have received. I have also seen this
claim made on a couple of 9-11 websites:
Most of the metal street light standards in this country are
especially designed and built to break away cleanly at their bases
after only modest impacts. This is so that they don’t kill people
who hit them with their cars. I don’t know whether the poles would
break away before altering the course of a plane/missile/whatever,
but it seems possible that they might. They’re pretty much ready to
lay down and die right from the factory as I understand it. (I’m no
expert, but have been around this stuff a little on the construction
side.)
Sooner or later you’ll see the aftermath of a
car-versus-street-light collision on the road, and you’ll probably
see a relatively straight-looking street lamp pole laying down with
a clean break at its base, like the ones in the Pentagon pictures.
I don’t think this detracts from your point, I’m mostly writing in
case you did not know that such poles are specifically made to snap
off clean if you hit them very hard. And of course, I have no idea
whether the Pentagon poles were breakaway.
Personally, I am a little skeptical of this claim, primarily because
it makes little sense to me. First of all, there are any number of
objects that, if struck, will tend to bring an automobile to an
abrupt stop (e.g. - telephone poles, trees, concrete or steel guard
rails, buildings, parked vehicles, etc.), and many of these objects
are plowed into far more frequently than light poles. Why then would
this supposed safety feature be built into light poles? What makes
them any different than any other roadside obstructions?
Another problem that I have with the breakaway scenario is that I
fail to see how this would be considered an effective safety
feature. A pole designed to break free on impact would become,
following that impact, a fast-moving, unpredictable, and highly
lethal object. A large and heavy steel pole propelled into the path
of oncoming traffic, for example, would probably not be considered
very safe by other drivers or passengers. Pedestrians in the
vicinity of the crash may not find such breakaway poles to be very
safe either.
Yet another problem with the breakaway pole concept is that light
poles, predictably enough, have high-voltage electrical wires
running through them. So the question that naturally arises is: what
exactly is supposed to happen to those live electrical lines when
the pole snaps off its base? They would, I presume, stretch and
break, thereby exposing anyone in the area of the crash to the very
real possibility of electrocution.
For these reasons (and others that I could probably come up with if
I had the time), I am not at all convinced that these alleged
breakaway poles are, in fact, widely used. Until I see some
definitive documentation, I will remain skeptical of these claims.
Remember this graphic? ... the one that purports to document the
damage to the interior of the Pentagon? An alert reader pointed out
something that I failed to grasp the significance of the first time
around: near the center of the path of destruction is a large
section of floor slab - measuring perhaps 20’ by 40’ - that was
"deflected upward."
This naturally raises the question of what could
have caused an upward deflection in that section, and only that
section, of the floor slab? Since the aircraft debris that allegedly
caused the internal building damage would have been moving in a
horizontal direction, the official story doesn’t provide much of an
explanation for an extreme upward force in one particular portion of
the building.
The most reasonable explanation, it seems to me, is that someone got
a little carried away with the explosive charge that was placed in
that particular portion of the building. As further evidence of an
explosive event at that particular location, note how the columns
ringing the deflected portion of the slab suffered significantly
more damage, for the most part, than did other columns in the
surrounding area. Notice also that a bit further along the alleged
path of travel lies an area where an opening was blown through the
second-story roof. Interestingly, the columns near that opening were
also more significantly damaged than the surrounding columns,
indicating the probable location of another explosive charge. And
the "Hole in wall," needless to say, was almost certainly caused by
yet another explosive charge.
While we are on the subject of the alleged exit hole, a few readers
thought that I was too quick to dismiss the possibility of
additional exit holes in the back wall of C-ring. Some researchers,
as it turns out, have been promoting the notion that there were
actually three exit holes. These theorists have used photos such as
those to the left and right to purportedly prove their point.
If it could be conclusively established that there were actually
three exit holes in the back of C-ring, then that would obviously be
a very significant piece of evidence, since it would not only cast
further doubt on the official story, but also thoroughly discredit
the preceding damage report, which not only doesn’t identify the
additional exit holes, but also fails to explain them, since there
is no path of damage leading from the alleged entry wound to at
least one of the alleged exit holes (hole #1).
As provocative as this evidence may at first appear to be, however,
photographs reveal that there weren’t two additional holes blown in
the back wall of C-ring. In fact, an enlarged version of the very
same photo used above reveals that ’hole #1’ is nothing more than an
existing door opening. Specifically, it appears to be a mirror image
of the double-door arrangement that can be seen on the exterior wall
of B ring, just to the right of the firefighter in the photo below. At
least one of the two doors is still hanging, and a portion of the
louvered grill that had been above the doors can be clearly seen
lying in the foreground.
(click image to
enlarge)
’Hole #2,’ viewed head-on in the photo below, appears to be a
roll-up door, alongside of which is a service door, which is a
pretty standard set-up in commercial and industrial buildings.
Unlike ’hole’/door #1, these doors appear to have been added
sometime after the initial construction of the building, as is
evident from the fact that a header was obviously installed above
the opening that was cut into the wall for the service door. To
create the opening for the roll-up door, it appears that an entire
section of the wall was removed up to the existing concrete beam. In
any event, it is clear that these were existing openings into the
building, not ’exit holes’ created by the events of September 11.
(click image to
enlarge)
And yet more from the mailbag, this time from reader Sandra:
FYI - no biggie, but I thought you might want to know it’s Olsen
(with an "e") for Theodore or Barbara.
You mean to say that, after two attempts, I still got it wrong? I
hate it when that happens -- particularly in this case, because I
certainly do not want to show any disrespect to a fine, upstanding
family like the Olsens. I’ll try to do better in the future.
