The Gate Camera
Some people don't seem to see perspective correctly. I've zoomed in, and compared the two frames over and over - here is what I see as the airplane. I will repeat, however, that this is terrible evidence due to the horrible quality of the original images. I do believe, however, that the white smoke in the images is caused by one or more damaged engine from the impact with the multiple light poles on the way in (as seen in the above image).
I stuck in a 757 that was at relatively the same angle - except it's banking slightly to starboard instead of to port - hence the ONE wing is out of place. If it was banking slightly to port it would fit perfectly... However, once again - this is entirely subjective and the image quality from the released surveillance camera is not good enough to form a factual opinion.
The author's comment that "if it was banking slightly to port it (a 757) would fit perfectly" is really quite humorous. The fact is that you could "stick in" a tank or a bus or a large two-storey house and they would also "fit perfectly".
The facts are as follows:
There were at least four video cameras capable of recording the attack on the Pentagon. One was on the roof of the Sheraton Hotel, a second was at a gas station across the road from the Pentagon itself, the third belonged to the Virginia Department of Transportation and was stationed on route 27, which the aircraft flew over. The fourth was the Pentagon’s security camera stationed at the opposite one end of the façade from where the plane struck.
The footage from the cameras at the Sheraton, the gas station and on route 27 were confiscated by the FBI and have never been released. The only footage made available to the public was that recorded by the Pentagon’s security camera. According to the Washington Times however, both the DOJ and the FBI denied responsibility for releasing the footage from the Pentagon's security camera:
"The Pentagon has not released any video or any photos from security cameras from the terrorist attack of Sept. 11," said Pentagon spokeswoman Cheryl Irwin. A spokeswoman at the Department of Justice, which reviews taped and photographed evidence obtained by federal security cameras, said she could not comment on whether the photos are legitimate, adding that the photos "were not disseminated by the FBI or the Department of Justice."
Of course, a simple denial does not mean that someone within the DOJ or the DOD or the FBI did not release the footage to the public - after all, we are dealing with a massive 9/11 conspiracy and the footage is from the Pentagon's very own security camera. We can assume with a reasonable degree of certainty therefore, that someone within one of the arms of the American military/ political/ industrial complex released the footage and then denied that they did so, and for a very specific reason.
The above photo is the first still from the only video footage of the Pentagon attack that has been made available. It is alleged that it shows an approaching Boeing 757 in the upper right hand corner. Do you see a Boeing 757-200 in this picture?
If we think back to the images and video footage of Flight 11 and Flight 175 hitting the WTC towers, we remember that we all saw both large Boeing airplanes, as clear as day, even though they were flying at over 500 mph and were over 1,000 feet up in the air when they struck the WTC Towers. This provides us with an excellent guide on how such commercial aircraft appear at that distance.
The side of the Pentagon is 971 feet long and the plane in the footage is no more than 750 feet (250 yards) from the camera that is stationed near the opposite end of the Pentagon. Remember the indelible images of those huge planes flying into the World Trade Center towers? Even at that distance, even with the size of the WTC towers, the image and size of the aircraft that was burned into our minds from having seen the tapes replayed endlessly, is awe-inspiring.
Now, look again at the above image from the Pentagon Security camera of the plane approaching the building. Ask yourself the question: where is the Boeing 757-200 in this image?
Next
time you are at an airport, take five minutes and go and look at some planes on
the runway. Pick out a large passenger jet that is approximately 750 feet away,
preferably one in the process of taking off or landing. Take a picture of it.
Then look at this image from the Pentagon Security camera again and ask
yourself. Where is that Boeing 757?!
The fact is that
if a Boeing 757 really did hit the Pentagon, it would stick out like,
well… like a Boeing 757 in this footage, but the simple and obvious fact is that
there is no Boeing 757 there. In fact, there is no plane of any description in
the footage released by the Pentagon.
Note that the time stamp displays a date and time of September 12th at 5.37:19 pm. The DOD has offered no reason for this discrepancy, which is understandable since they claim to have no knowledge about who released the images. In the footage, the progression of seconds jumps from 19, where it starts, to 21 and then on to 22 and 23 where it ends, meaning that one second and an undetermined number of frames have been cut from the film. No explanation has ever been offered by any official sources as to why this video footage has clearly been “doctored”, why one second and several frames have been removed – frames that would likely show just what it was that struck the Pentagon. Of course, this is very convenient for exponents of the official story. The footage shows something flying into the Pentagon and exploding, and since we were all immediately told that that "something" was a 757, the case is closed, right?
Not really.
Quite apart from the fact that the doctoring of the video strongly suggests that someone released this footage in an attempt to provide "evidence" to the public that a 757 hit the Pentagon, while at the same time removing the incriminating frames and denying the public the right to actually see what it was, in the images above we see a stream of white smoke that is entirely inconsistent with a commercial jet aircraft at ground level and much more in line with the trail left by a missile launch. Please note however that I am not saying that only a “missile” struck the Pentagon.
Note also the picture of actual impact and explosion.
Have you ever burned oil, or car gas or diesel? It burns with a dense black smoke, as does oil (see above picture of claimed truck bomb). The flame is predominantly red, which, I am told, is due to the low burn temperature of oil-based fuel (see picture of flames from plane explosions at WTC).
While there are few bomb or explosive experts willing to weigh in, there have been a few who claim to know about bomb detonations who affirm that this white flame is clear evidence of explosives detonating. In fact, several eyewitnesses to the attack made it very clear that they knew that the explosion involved explosives, not a mere aircraft full of fuel.
Eyewitness to the Pentagon attack and Pentagon worker Don Perkal, was on the scene within minutes:
“Even before stepping outside I could smell the cordite. Then I knew explosives had been set off somewhere.”
He also stated:
“Hundreds of F.B.I., Secret Service and Defense Department plainclothes investigators were deployed in the parking lot, recording witness statements.”
Another eyewitness, Gilah Goldsmith said:
“We saw a huge black cloud of smoke”, adding that it smelled like cordite, or gun smoke.
Witnesses inside the
Pentagon, mostly military men, described a shockwave and a
blast.
The Washington Post ran a
story where it was stated:
Air Force Lt. Col. Marc Abshire, 40, a speechwriter for Air Force Secretary James Roche, was working on several speeches this morning when he felt the blast of the explosion at the Pentagon. His office is on the D ring, near the eighth corridor, he said. “It shot me back in my chair. There was a huge blast. I could feel the air shock wave of it”, Abshire said. “I didn’t know exactly what it was. It didn’t rumble. It was more of a direct smack.”
Donald R. Bouchoux, 53, a retired Naval officer, a Great Falls resident, a Vietnam veteran and former commanding officer of a Navy fighter squadron, was driving west from Tysons Corner to the Pentagon for a 10am meeting. He wrote:
“At 9:40 a.m. I was driving down Washington Boulevard (Route 27) along the side of the Pentagon when the aircraft crossed about 200 yards (should be more than 150 yards from the impact) in front of me and impacted the side of the building. There was an enormous fireball, followed about two seconds later by debris raining down. The car moved about a foot to the right when the shock wave hit.”
John Bowman, a retired Marine lieutenant colonel and a contractor, was in his office in Corridor Two near the main entrance to the south parking lot.
“Everything was calm”, Bowman said. “Most people knew it was a bomb. Everyone evacuated smartly. We have a good sprinkling of military people who have been shot at.”
Stars and Stripes reporter Lisa Burgess was walking on the Pentagon’s innermost corridor, across the courtyard, when the incident happened.
“I heard two loud booms - one large, one smaller, and the shock wave threw me against the wall”, she said.
Anger and guilt still sear Lieutenant Colonel Michael Beans who shakes his head ruefully and asks himself why he survived: "Why you, not them? Who made that decision?" (…)
Inside the Pentagon, the blast lifted Beans off the floor as he crossed a huge open office toward his desk. "You heard this huge concussion, then the room filled with this real bright light, just like everything was encompassed within this bright light," said Beans. "As soon as I hit the floor, all the lights went out, there was a small fire starting to burn."
So we see that several witnesses, both inside and outside the building, described a shockwave that knocked them to the ground. Several described it as a concussion. Such a shockwave cannot be explained by the impact of an aircraft or the combustion of jet fuel, and indicates the detonation of an explosive. Explosive detonations produce blast pressures thousands of times stronger than hydrocarbon fireballs because explosives are oxidized by chemicals intrinsic to them whereas hydrocarbons rely on oxygen in ambient air for combustion. Consequently the chemical reaction proceeds at a much higher rate in an explosive.
Hydrocarbon fireballs can produce detonation waves if the fuel and air are mixed prior to ignition, but such detonation waves are comparatively weak. The violence of most plane crashes precludes such pre-mixing. In the Twin Tower jet collisions, the columns of the curtain walls diced the fuel tanks in the wings, assuring fuel and air mixing about as optimally as could be imagined in a collision, and yet there were no reports of detonation shockwaves from any survivors from the floors below the impact point.
Cordite is an explosive compound used in aircraft gun ammunition. Several witnesses with the benefit of military experience recognized the smell of this compound. Cordite N consists of three main explosive compounds: nitroguanidine, nitrocellulose, and nitroglycerin. It is cool-burning, and produces little smoke and no flash, but, like other explosives, produces a strong detonation wave.
Back to ATS forum post:
Lets look at the physics involved
Here CatHerder takes us off on a tangent that is wholly irrelevant to the task of analysing the likely physical impact of 80 tons of metal and other solid matter on the Pentagon and therefore to answering the question of whether or not Flight 77 hit the Pentagon, because, despite the above heading, the only physics that is employed by the people at Purdue University is that pertaining to the physics of liquid, i.e. the fuel in the wings of the plane and its hypothesised effect on the Pentagon facade and interior.
It therefore has little to do with the job of ironing out the problems of the claim that an 80 ton Boeing aircraft hit the Pentagon. We can only assume that it is an attempt to confuse the reader and detract from the main issue - that the totality of evidence at the Pentagon crash site is entirely inconsistent with a Boeing 757 having hit the Pentagon that day.
Engineers, computer scientists and graphics technology experts at Purdue University have created the first publicly available simulation that uses scientific principles to study in detail what theoretically happened when the Boeing 757 crashed into the Pentagon last Sept. 11
Using simulation software called LS-Dyna (watch below video), the smart folks use the physically accurate simulation results as input to animations and visualizations to produce a vivid reenactment of the impact of the aircraft on the Pentagon building and provide the larger team with the necessary data to construct these using 3D Studio Max, AutoCAD, and research tools.
Again the author is being less that transparent and omits to specify that the referenced research looks at the impact of the liquid in the fuel tanks and its effect on the Pentagon. In fact it is a testimony to the fact that even those that hold to the official version of events have had to resort to the idea that, in their own words:
"a basic hypothesis, informally confirmed with engineers knowledgeable in this subject, is that the bulk of the impact damage is due to the body of fuel in the wing and center tanks."
And why? Because the damage to the Pentagon, including the 8 feet wide circular hole punched out in ring C is ENTIRELY inconsistent with the impact of an 80 ton 757 jetliner.
The Purdue folks further state that:
"The purpose of this simulation is to understand the response of a reinforced concrete column subjected to high-speed impact of the fuel in the aircraft tanks."
But CatHerder conveniently leaves the details out.
Now we can see, through a very competent and valid simulator, what happened in the attack on the Pentagon. Click here to view a video generated by the simulator. Or, click here to read the white paper.
Again, this simulation does not show us "what happened in the attack on the Pentagon"; it shows us the hypothesized effect of the FUEL in the wings on the Pentagon and is an example of the desperate attempts to find an explanation, ANY explanation, for why the impact damage is NOT consistent with the impact of a 757 when the government says it was a 757. In fact, the study above is contradictory if one wants to stick with the "13 ft cylinder" and "confetti-ized" wings theory. You can't have it both ways.
In layman's terms the crash dynamics worked like so: A large hollow tube, with a belly full of luggage, a passenger bay with 60 people, and wings full of fuel smashed into the side of an almost solid object while moving at a tremendous speed (somewhere around 350-400mph). When the 225,000lb+ plane hit, it smashed apart with such force from the crash that it became like one massive column of liquid (no, the plane didn't melt or turn into liquid, it just acted like one physically - mountainslides act the same way, a million tons of rock acts like a large field of liquid during a landslide even if no water is present).
All the small parts, luggage, people, seats, and all the tens of thousands of pounds of fuel acting like a massive river came crashing into the wall of the Pentagon. This force burst through the outside wall and flowed through the inside to the next wall, and momentum carried this mass until it finally ran out of inertia at the 3rd ring.
Plane hitting WTC - watch above video (another example of crash fluid dynamics) - RealAudio Required - note how the 767 "liquifies" and flows through the WTC tower.
Please do read the information on the Perdue website yourself - I don't do it justice with my one paragraph of paraphrasing!
Pentagon photo taken by satellite on 9/07/01 Pentagon photo taken by satellite on 9/12/01
Indeed, not only does the author's paraphrasing and selective use of data not tell the truth about the real nature and reason for this "simulation", it attempts to distract and confuse the reader by suggesting that an 80 ton solid aircraft was little more than a column of liquid! Again, you can't have it both ways. If you are going to include the wings and fuel tanks, and twin 6 TON engines, then the hole is way too small for all of this together to have created it.
For anyone to try and compare the effects of an 80 ton aircraft crashing into a building at 400mph to the effects of a landslide of rocks and soil is far-fetched at best, yet it is testimony to the extreme lengths that CatHerder must go to to try and prove that a 757 hit the Pentagon when there is simply no evidence to stand on.
If a 757 really did hit the Pentagon then there should be no need for outlandish theories about columns of water. The evidence SHOULD be all there, and it should be a breeze to present facts that would quickly dismiss any attempts to suggest otherwise.
But we see that this is not the case - in fact the exact opposite is true! CatHerder is finding it very difficult to prove something that should be easily provable if the evidence was there for ALL to see.
Please read again his/her claim that the plane:
"smashed apart with such force from the crash that it became like one massive column of liquid (no, the plane didn't melt or turn into liquid, it just acted like one physically) [....] all the small parts, luggage, people, seats, and all the tens of thousands of pounds of fuel acting like a massive river came crashing into the wall of the Pentagon. This force burst through the outside wall and flowed through the inside to the next wall, and momentum carried this mass until it finally ran out of inertia at the 3rd ring"
It is amazing to observe CatHerder suggesting that, on impact with the Pentagon, all of the parts of a 757 broke into pieces - flew everywhere as confetti - then somehow formed themselves into a 9 foot wide 20 feet tall concentrated column of energy (or water-like substance) that broke through 5 walls of the Pentagon leaving a neat 8 ft by 12 ft round hole in the final 6th wall. Understand also that it is to such outlandish lengths that anyone, not just CatHerder, must go to if they want to make a 757 "fit" as the object that struck the Pentagon on September 11th 2001.
(Removed two aerial images of Pentagon before and after impact due to a lack of any stated reason for inclusion. See ATS website to view them.)
Eye Witness Testimony
Lets look at some eye witness testimony sticking only to people who saw a plane hit the building, and not look at people who saw an airliner, but didn't see an airplane hit the building because they looked away or were too far away (behind a hill, behind a building, etc) to see it actually hit the building.
"Aydan Kizildrgli, an English language student who is a native of Turkey, saw the jetliner bank slightly then strike a western wall of the huge five-sided building that is the headquarters of the nation's military. 'There was a big boom,' he said. 'Everybody was in shock. I turned around to the car behind me and yelled "Did you see that?" Nobody could believe it.'"
- "Bush Vows Retaliation for 'Evil Acts'." USA Today, 11 Sep 2001
Note that in the above, the statement that this eyewitness saw an "airliner" is made by the USA reporter who wrote the story, not by the eyewitness himself who only heard a "big boom".
"Frank Probst, an information management specialist for the Pentagon Renovation Program, left his office trailer near the Pentagon's south parking lot at 9:36 a.m. Sept. 11. Walking north beside Route 27, he suddenly saw a commercial airliner crest the hilltop Navy Annex. American Airlines Flight 77 reached him so fast and flew so low that Probst dropped to the ground, fearing he'd lose his head to its right engine." - "A Defiant Recovery." The Retired Officer Magazine, January 2002
Again, the comment that this eyewitness saw a "commercial airliner" is made by the reporter, not the eyewitness. In any case, an information management specialist working on the Pentagon Renovation Program is hardly a credible witness.
"Omar Campo, a Salvadorean, was cutting the grass on the other side of the road when the plane flew over his head. 'It was a passenger plane. I think an American Airways plane,' Mr Campo said. 'I was cutting the grass and it came in screaming over my head. I felt the impact. The whole ground shook and the whole area was full of fire. I could never imagine I would see anything like that here.'"- "Pentagon Eyewitness Accounts." The Guardian, 12 Sep 2001
As I have said, I am not suggesting that no plane hit the Pentagon, I am suggesting that no 757 hit the Pentagon. I believe a plane did hit the Pentagon, because there is evidence of aircraft debris, (however scant that debris might be) and that it was dressed up in American Airline colors, complete with fake windows, in which case, it is possible that eyewitnesses may have concluded it was a passenger plane. Of course, a passenger plane is also the description of an aircraft the size of a twelve or twenty seat private jet, or something about the size of such a jet painted with AA colors.
"Afework Hagos, a computer programmer, was on his way to work but stuck in a traffic jam near the Pentagon when the plane flew over.'There was a huge screaming noise and I got out of the car as the plane came over. Everybody was running away in different directions. It was tilting its wings up and down like it was trying to balance. It hit some lampposts on the way in.'"- "Pentagon Eyewitness Accounts." The Guardian, 12 Sep 2001
This testimony is consistent with an aircraft hitting the Pentagon, but not necessarily a 757. The comment that a "huge screaming noise" was heard is contradicted by other testimonies (below)
"Henry Ticknor, intern minister at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Arlington, Virginia, was driving to church that Tuesday morning when American Airlines Flight 77 came in fast and low over his car and struck the Pentagon. 'There was a puff of white smoke and then a huge billowing black cloud,' he said." - "Hell on Earth." UU World
This eyewitness did not explicitly say that he saw AA Flight 77. His actual testimony is prefaced with the comment by the reporter that "American Airlines Flight 77 came in fast and low over his car". What the eyewitness actually saw was a "puff of white smoke", which is very interesting. One naturally wonders why the reporter did not quote the witness entirely instead of putting words in his mouth that he may never have said.
"We were the only people, we think, who saw it live," Dan Creed said. He and two colleagues from Oracle software were stopped in a car near the Naval Annex, next to the Pentagon, when they saw the plane dive down and level off. "It was no more than 30 feet off the ground, and it was screaming. It was just screaming. It was nothing more than a guided missile at that point," Creed said. "I can still see the plane. I can still see it right now. It's just the most frightening thing in the world, going full speed, going full throttle, its wheels up," - Ahwatukee Foothill News
If this testimony is truthful, then there is little doubt that this eyewitness saw a plane, but was it a 757? Notice that he never says that it was a Boeing 757. More "selective quoting."
Gary Bauer former Presidential candidate, "I looked at the woman sitting in the car next to me. She had this startled look on her face. We were all thinking the same thing. We looked out the front of our windows to try to see the plane, and it wasn't until a few seconds later that we realized the jet was coming up behind us on that major highway. And it veered to the right into the Pentagon. The blast literally rocked all of our cars. It was an incredible moment." Massachusetts News
If this testimony is truthful, then there is little doubt that this eyewitness saw a plane, but was it a 757? Having said that, we note that Gary Bauer was a presidential candidate in 2000 and is an avowed right-winger and Bush supporter, for what it's worth.
Sean Boger, Air Traffic Controller and Pentagon tower chief - "I just looked up and I saw the big nose and the wings of the aircraft coming right at us and I just watched it hit the building," Air Traffic Controller and Pentagon tower chief Sean Boger said. "It exploded. I fell to the ground and covered my head. I could actually hear the metal going through the building." dcmilitary.com November 16, 2001
CatHerder must be completely unaware of what constitutes a credible witness. Perhaps it escaped him/her that we are dealing with a government conspiracy to murder and the testimony of a Pentagon official can hardly be called impartial.
"The only way you could tell that an aircraft was inside was that we saw pieces of the nose gear. The devastation was horrific. It was obvious that some of the victims we found had no time to react. The distance the firefighters had to travel down corridors to reach the fires was a problem. With only a good 25 minutes of air in their SCBA bottles, to save air they left off their face pieces as they walked and took in a lot of smoke," Captain Defina said. Captain Defina was the shift commander [of an aircraft rescue firefighters crew.] NFPA Journal November 1, 2001
Captain Defina may well have seen pieces of a nose gear, or some aircraft part that looked like a nose gear, but to which aircraft did these pieces belong? Having said that, it is somewhat surprising that the nose gear from any aircraft would be visible inside the Pentagon if we are to believe that the nosegear took the full force of the initial impact.
After all, the nose gear is one of the most fragile parts of a Boeing aircraft, being made out of carbon rather than aluminium, and would undoubtedly be destroyed beyond recognition by the time it reached the interior of the building. Of course, if the nose gear of the plane that struck the Pentagon was not the first thing to impact, then it is possible that some nose gear debris might be found inside.
That's just a small smattering of people who have gone on record as seeing the plane, and the plane hit the Pentagon. I could have included the dozens of people who saw the plane, but didn't see it hit (because it went behind a bridge, a hill, or some trees), but I choose only to post the ones that sounded the most valid and actually saw the plane hit the building. (I included the one firechief who states he saw some plane wreckage during firefighting/rescue attempts.)
There are most likely twenty times more that either haven't been publicly recorded as seeing the crash, or simply don't want the attention. You can't honeslty sit there and deny the witnesses, the photographs, the facts, the science, and the reality that there was a terrorist attack on the Pentagon if you look at everything available and not one single tidbit of information at a time.
If that's the best CatHerder can do in assembling testimony, it simply proves our point about the overly anxious and desperate efforts being made to prove something that, if it were true, would not require such efforts.
Notice the subtle suggestion that CatHerder's analysis includes "everything available". Notice also that the two testimonies from Pentagon employees are included in those that CatHerder believes to be the "most valid". Also, having presented us with some dubious and inconclusive eyewitness testimonies, we are told that we cannot deny that these testimonies are proof conclusive that a 757 really did hit the Pentagon! What is true, as CatHerder states, is that there are indeed many more eyewitness testimonies that he/she could have included. However, once you read some of them, you will understand why he/she did not include them.
For example:
Lon Rains, an editor of Space.com, was also an eyewitness to the Pentagon attack. He commented:
“In light traffic the drive up Interstate 395 from Springfield to downtown Washington takes no more than 20 minutes. But that morning, like many others, the traffic slowed to a crawl just in front of the Pentagon. With the Pentagon to the left of my van at about 10 o’clock on the dial of a clock, I glanced at my watch to see if I was going to be late for my appointment.
At that moment I heard a very loud, quick whooshing sound that began behind me and stopped suddenly in front of me and to my left. In fractions of a second I heard the impact and an explosion. The next thing I saw was the fireball. I was convinced it was a missile. It came in so fast it sounded nothing like an airplane.”
Allen Cleveland of Woodbridge Virginia looked out from a Metro train going to National Airport, to see a jet heading down toward the Pentagon. "I thought, 'There's no landing strip on that side of the subway tracks,' " Before he could process that thought, he saw "a huge mushroom cloud. The lady next to me was in absolute hysterics."" . . a silver passenger jet, mid sized"
Steve Patterson, 43, said he was watching television reports of the World Trade Center being hit when he saw a silver commuter jet fly past the window of his 14th-floor apartment in Pentagon City:
“The plane was about 150 yards away, approaching from the west about 20 feet off the ground, Patterson said. He said the plane, which sounded like the high-pitched squeal of a fighter jet, flew over Arlington cemetery so low that he thought it was going to land on I-395. It was flying so fast that he couldn’t read any writing on the side. The plane, which appeared to hold about eight to 12 people, headed straight for the Pentagon but was flying as if coming in for a landing on a nonexistent runway"
“I was right underneath the plane”, said Kirk Milburn, a construction supervisor for Atlantis Co., who was on the Arlington National Cemetery exit of Interstate 395 when he said he saw the plane heading for the Pentagon. “I heard a plane. I saw it. I saw debris flying.”
Kirk Milburn - who was driving his vehicle at the time - said he saw the plane heading for the Pentagon, and because he saw it he also said, “I heard a plane. I saw it. I saw debris flying”.
What he said next, however, is not in keeping with a 757:
“I guess it was hitting light poles”, said Milburn. “It was like a whoosh whoosh, then there was fire and smoke, then I heard a second explosion.”
Notice that the witness says, “I guess it was hitting the light poles”. One suspects that he couldn’t see it if he was guessing. What is most interesting is that he said, “It was like a WHOOOSH whoosh, then there was fire and smoke, then I heard a second explosion”. No doubt he saw something, but since he was also driving at the time, it is not certain exactly what he saw.
Two early, primary witnesses have described a sound of a “whoosh”! The second one, when he couldn’t see it, said it was like a “WHOOSH whoosh”, just like the other man who couldn’t see it, but then he has also told us that he saw a plane and heard a plane. But what he described was most definitely not a 757 flying low over his head.
A 757, under no circumstances makes a sound of “whoosh”, and if the “whoosh” sound was being made by the hitting of light poles, it is a certainty that if a 757 was doing it, you would not hear the “whoosh” of hitting light poles over the roar of the jet engines. If there’s a 757 right overhead that’s hitting light poles, and it’s going 460 mph, it would not be “whooshing”! Anyone that has ever spent any time at the end of an international airport runway knows that the sound of a large commercial jet flying low overhead would be more accurately described as a deafening ROAR!
It is true that eyewitness testimonies are notoriously unreliable. Take ten witnesses to an event and it is likely that you will get ten responses that will differ from each other in one aspect or another.
Memory Conformity: Disentangling the Steps towards Influence during a Discussion
(Amina Memon & Fiona Gabbert, Aberdeen and Dan Wright, Sussex University).
It is human nature for people to discuss their shared experiences, especially of extraordinary events such as witnessing a crime. Recent studies of several high profile cases have shown that even a single erroneous eyewitness can have a significant negative influence on the accuracy of another eyewitness’s testimony if the witnesses come into contact with one another and discuss the criminal event. Although it is natural for people to discuss their experiences, it is highly problematic for the legal professionals, and our system of justice, if evidence – in the form of witness statements – becomes contaminated.
Our previous research (funded by the Economic & Social Research Council) investigated how peoples’ memories can become influenced during a discussion about a mutually experienced event under controlled laboratory-based conditions. When people discuss an event what one person says is often adversely incorporated into the other person’s report. ...
Having said that, given the nature of the events that are alleged to have occurred at the Pentagon on 9/11 - a large commercial airliner crashing into a large building, we might expect most people to concur at least on the basic details. But, as we have seen, that is not the case with the Pentagon attack.
I am of the opinion therefore that the very conflicting nature of the testimonies of the eyewitnesses to the Pentagon attack are important clues revealing the true nature of what happened that day. Imagine that a significant number of people are witness to a large commercial airliner flying extremely low and at high speed over an urban area and crashing into a building.
Imagine also that, not long thereafter, all eyewitnesses to the event are told by authorities and the media that it was indeed a large commercial airliner that flew into the building. Now ask yourself: in such a case, how likely is it that there would be any serious discrepancies between the testimonies of those eyewitnesses? How likely is that any of the eyewitnesses would report that what they actually saw was a small aircraft or something that sounded like a missile? Unlikely, I would suggest.
Now imagine that a significant number of people are witness to a drone aircraft like the Global Hawk for example, which also flies very low and very fast over an urban area. While the wingspan of this drone craft is quite large, it is much smaller in overall size to a large commercial aircraft. Imagine also that this drone is painted with the colors and logo of a well-known airline that are only ever seen on large commercial aircraft.
Imagine that there are even “windows” painted on the side to make the illusion all the more convincing. Imagine that, not long after witnessing the incident, all eyewitnesses to the event are told by authorities and the media that what they saw was a large commercial airliner flying into the building. Now ask yourself: in such a case, what are the chances that there would be seriously conflicting reports between eyewitness accounts of the incident? Very good, I would suggest.
Eyewitness accounts are indeed useless when one must rely on them as the sole evidence. This is not, however, the case with the Pentagon attack. There is already much evidence - the facts on the ground - to suggest that it was not a Boeing 757 that hit the Pentagon on 9/11. The fact that there are serious conflicts in eyewitness accounts merely serves to back up this other evidence that it was NOT a Boeing 757 that hit the Pentagon.
We might also wonder why there are no conflicting WITNESS reports of what hit the WTC towers? All eyewitnesses to the event in New York concurred that two large passenger plane hit the North and South towers. Of course, we were all treated to ad nauseam repeats of the video footage of that event, leaving no one in any doubt about what happened. So why not treat us all to the video evidence from the Pentagon?
There is one very obvious answer to this question: the video footage, held by the US government, would disprove the official story.
911 Tape of EMV responding to the Pentagon - includes video outside and inside the building in some areas. (Real Audio Required)
The above video and audio of EMV responding is completely inconsequential to the investigation at hand, and I can think of no reason why CatHerder would include it, other than to attempt in some subtle way to drive home the official claim that a 757 hit the Pentagon.