Alright what I'm about to post sorta strikes me as conspiracy theorist crap and I wonder why someone with greater authority hasn't picked up on this, but the information presented here is pretty compelling. And since I just watched this what with it's freaky music at midnight I'm kind of spooked and thrilled by it right now so maybe my judgment is a little skewed. So if any of you can tell this is bullshit and can back it up with some proof please do so...I just wanted to see what others had to say about it since I myself don't really know what to think.

http://pixla.px.cz/pentagon.swf

edit: typos

(Edited by Jakob Dorof at 9:59 pm on Sep. 2, 2004)

it seems like some kind of bullshit, but i can offer no proof to back that up. you would have to think that, for a number of reasons, if that explosion was caused by anything other than a large plane somebody would've known all about it before now. perhaps not...but i think at best this is probably some sort of irresponsible filmaking. at the very least, it's irresponsibly soundtracked.

Yeah, that did annoy me. Especially with the creepy-ass stuff at the beginning...but that was probably intentional. I just wish it was presented in a more respectable format...regardless of whatever truth it may (or may not) hold, a three minute flash animation with Marilyn Manson music won't turn many heads.

I also wonder why no one else has picked up on this, if it bears any truth. You'd think that someone like Michael Moore at his more conspiracy theorist counterparts would be all over this stuff, but then again, supporting this kind of stuff can be incredibly damaging to your credibility and image...especially if it is found to be untrue. Still, I found it interesting. I'll watch it again tomorrow, when it isn't going to freak the bejeesus out of me again.

wow... very interesting. i find conspiracy theory stuff intriguing... i've always kinda wondered about the lack of attention given to the pentagon in relation to sept. 11th.

whether it's true or not, that was done way too immaturely to ever raise any real questions.

really makes you wonder though.

I had a friend that used to talk about that conspiracy all the time and read up on it. But he always claimed it was a bus or truck that hit the pentagon.

bullshit on a stick. yeah the plane was moving at 560 mph. do you know what happens when an object hits a steel reinforced wall at that speed? it fucking VAPORIZES!

The plane would've left at least a little bit of wreckage, don't you think? I find it very hard to believe that both of its wings would have vaporized entirely the very instant the tip of the plane's nose connected with the building (especially if, then, the plane's body skidded an additional 3 rings into the Pentagon before vaporizing completely).

More importantly, though, that does not answer the question of the picture-perfect lawn left directly in front of the damaged area. As the presentation says, missiles have that kind of precision...planes sure as hell don't.

Like I said before, this isn't something I really want to believe. It's just that the information, as it's presented here, is a bit hard to argue against. Maybe they faked something, lied about something, or whatever...but if they did, I'd like some concrete evidence (as in, photographs of the Pentagon's lawn all scuffed up or what have you). As far as my own little research went, it only seemed to help solidify's the animation's point: the image's found of the Pentagon's lawn searching for "Pentagon 9/11" show it, again, absolutely unscathed. Meanwhile, a search for "plane crash" (not including the overlapping pictures) brings up pictures of several random plane crashes...all of which leave *at least* a couple hundred feet's worth of destruction behind them - i.e., a distance around the size of the Pentagon's lawn in all of these photos.

(Edited by Jakob Dorof at 8:06 am on Sep. 3, 2004)

Jakob, then ask me this question: where'd the 757 really go then? Huh? We know it existed. Passengers called loved ones and said they were flying erratically in DC. There were hundreds of eyewitnesses (conveniently not quoted in the flash movie) that said, unmistakably, they saw an American jetliner crash into the Pentagon.

And with your search of plane crashes, how many of them involved crashing into heavily fortified structures like the Pentagon? Planes that crash in open fields at narrow angle of attacks will have a wide field of damage. But planes that crash at high angles will leave a small, deep crater of debris and that's it. Little else will be found outside of the impact zone.

The same for a plane crashing into a building as thick as the Pentagon. Where'd the wings go? They most likely buckled and folded back on top of the fuselage (or remaining portions of the wing) and were CARRIED into the building with the rest of the plane. We're talking about a fast moving object here. Momentum will pull much of the debris in with it. There are hundreds of cables, pipes, wires, etc., that are inside of a wing that might not be fully severed.

The clean lawn isn't surprising, but the photos are still selective and misleading. There ARE photos of a plane debris lying on the lawn. You see, someone chose what pictures to include in this slide. I'll be selecting footage for stuff I'll be editing today myself and I will leave stuff out that doesn't help support the story I'm trying to tell.

But again it all comes back to this question that the conspiracy theorists conveniently leave out: where'd the freaking plane go then? I'm sure hundreds of loved ones would love to know the answer to that question if it didn't crash into the Pentagon.

Here's what you have to ask yourself with this stuff... why? Why would the government kill innocent civilians on an airplane and then shoot a missile into the Pentagon? And just so happen to luckily coincide it with a known and proven terrorist act. It doesn't make any sense. People were describing it as a missile, because how many of us have seen any object travelling near the speed of sound at a low altitude.

I go to Indianaplis every year for the Formula One race, they get up to around 205mph at the end of the front straight. When you stand close to the track and see what 205mph is (close to a football field a second) up close and personal, its way faster than seeing it from a distance. Now multiply that by 2.5 times and there you have the speed of that plane. It was travelling 2.5-3 football fields (a football field is 120 yards/140m for our friends across the pond) a second. Now figure in the mass and the inertia of an MD-88 or whatever that plane was at that speed (break out the physics books) and then add that a wing is nothing more than a thin layer of aluminium wrapped around spars with FUEL CELLS in the hollow space.

Now look what a fuel loaded airplane did to the WTC. How hot did that have to get to melt steel reinforcements and bring the towers down? And I can add that since the WTC was never engineered to withstand a bomb or misslie attack, the explosion ripped thru and did more damage to the building. Now the Pentagon, on the otherhand was designed to withstand that sort of an attack. If we turn to our fluid dynamics textbooks, will see the general binding principal of fluid materials (gases and liquids) THEY TAKE THE PATH OF LEAST RESISTANCE! So when that plane flew into the Pentagon, it acted like a pop-gun. The interior halls of the place absorbed the brunt of the explosion and sent fireballs and debris flying down the hallways of the Pentagon. I'm sure it looked like a John Woo film in there, sans doves. That's why there was little damgage to the exterior of the building, it was all concentrated into the super reinforced hallways of the Pentagon.

Conspiracies always look good on paper, but when the real world is applied to them they fall apart. How many people would have to be in on the secret? A couple thousand? You think every person involved would just sit there and go along with that? Its preposterous. I'm out.

Snopes Debunks the Pentagon Conspiracy

I would post the photo on there of a piece of plane debris lying on the lawn, but it won't allow external linking. Please read that page Jakob.

Ditto.

Maybe I missed something incredibly important in that article, but aside from its superior form of presentation, it's points seem even less concrete than the conspiracy theory animation. First of all, the way they chose the conspiracy theorists' "questions" is highly misleading:


That would be a pretty stupid question to ask, but as shown in the presentation I linked, it wasn't. The conspiracy theorists on this matter do recognize that the aircraft (or whatever the hell it was) penetrated all the way through the third ring of the Pentagon, not just "the outside." Also to the discredit of your linked article, it says:


And what does it offer as proof that all five rings were damaged. A computer generated 3D image...which of course can be BS just as much as a flash animation can be. But even stranger is that the article later changes it's tune to agree with what the conspiracy theory really states:


So first they say it was all five rings, and then a couple paragraphs later, just three...which is what the conspiracy theorists believe anyhow. In fact, they use it in their argument. The article also states that the Pentagon plane dissipated much of its energy connecting with the ground first before hitting its target, which again raises the question of the undamaged lawn. But we can get to that later.

Anyway, in response to the first question, the article offers little more than self-contradictions, info that aligns with the conspiracy theory, and an impressive vocabulary. On to the next...


Again, the question asked on behalf of the conspiracy theory in this article isn't the question that the conspiracy theory is really asking. The animation I linked never once complained about "just hitting the ground floor."


The first/second floors bit is irrelevant, so let's just ignore that. The linked photographs demonstrate jack shit, unfortunately, and the animation in fact uses the very same photographs (the ones of the collision taken by Pentagon cameras) in its argument much more effectively: as the photographs show, the projectile did not connect with the ground, at least not as shown in this (only) released recording of the collision. So if it DID hit the ground, then it must've jumped back up a bit before it was in that camera's field of view (and as the presentation shows, there are multiple third-party recordings, i.e. the ones from the nearby Sheraton and gas station, which were immediately confiscated and never released). But again that raises the question of the undamaged lawn.

I also find it interesting that the article claims that the plane hit the ground, "thereby dissipating much of the energy that might otherwise have cause more extensive damage," while the quote they cite to prove this has Rumsfeld saying that the plane was going at "full power." Yet another of the article's startling contradictions.

Lastly, the fact that they used unnamed "eyewitnesses" to "demonstrate" that the airplane actually hit the ground before the Pentagon are cited without any quotations or accounts at all (other than "another account" that is clearly just a report by some newscaster, not someone that was actually there...read the way its phrased for yourself). The animation, however, cites numerous eyewitness reports with actual quotations, which are much more compelling; namely, the one where the eyewitness describes the projectile as the size of a plane that could fit "8 to 12 people." I've been on 757s altogether too many times myself, and as I'm sure you already know for yourself, they fit a hell of a lot more people than that (I would estimate around 150-200+, but I can't find anything on the Internet that confirms a precise number).


Again with the "first ring" "ground floor" nonsense. As I've stated earlier, that's not in the conspiracy theorists' argument, so it's irrelevant. But on to the debris...


You've got to be kidding me. I'm supposed to look at some tiny, disfigured shred of metal no more than 10 feet long and just know that it came from a 757? Funnier still is that this is the only photograph of the remnants of the plane that they offer as their "proof." Somehow, I think that with a plane that is "14.9 yards high, 51.7 yards long, with a wingspan of 41.6 yards and a cockpit 3.8 yards high," there would be a weeee bit more evidence for its existence than a single shred of sheared metal several hundred yards away from the crash site itself. In short, this image proves NOTHING.


Which is why the animation I linked also provides numerous images of the building's interior, right down to the projectile's final penetration at the third ring. And guess what? There's no evidence of a plane there, either! But wait, there's more:


Yes, as the Pentagon cameras show, there was a very large explosion, and it's true that much of the plane would have burned up into nothingness. And certainly, pictures taken from a few hundred feet away probably wouldn't be able to show any visible wreckage. But again, that's what the close-ups are for...even in the third ring of the Pentagon, there was no evidence of a plane whatsoever; only wreckage from the walls that were penetrated by the projectile. And yet, the wreckage shows not a single trace of a plane. Like I said, the majority of the plane would've been vaporized, but there would have to be some leftovers...and that dinky, lonesome little image Snopes provides just isn't cutting the muster. I'm still skeptical about both of the wing's instantaneous vanishing act, but I feel that the whole debris issue is the aspect of the collision that is hardest to prove or debunk, so I'll let this one be as a stalemate.


Man, it would be really great if these guys actually would address some of the REAL points that the conspiracy theory brings up, but I guess that's just too much to ask. Again, this is another "point" that the conspiracy theory simply does not raise, so debunking it doesn't do anybody any good. Again, though, they do mention the undamaged lawn, but of course, they never address it.


Ahhh, the matter of the wings. Finally, something I really wanted to know about! Admittedly, this is more my own observation than the animation's, so there's less credibility here, but let's just get down to it:


This offers a possibly true explanation for the "outer portions" of the wings (I don't know enough about the physics of this, so I'll take their word for it), but the inner portions bit is where I don't follow.


Indeed, the inner portions of the wings probably should have penetrated the Pentagon walls. But the pictures we've seen haven't really aligned with that bit of logic. As for the "sizable portions" being destroyed in the fire, I believe it...but I'd still like to know why there is absolutely no evidence of these wings penetrating the walls. Snopes agrees that they did penetrate the walls...it's just that for some reason or another, the pictures don't show that at all.

But then, Snopes does try to provide some photographic evidence of the wings' damage to the walls:


Hmmm, Snopes, that's all I see: the "blackened sections on both sides of the impact." Where are the holes were the wings should've "penetrated the Pentagon walls"? This image doesn't do jack for the article's case (actually quite the opposite), because the blackened sections appear to be nothing more than a result of the "explosion and subsequent fire." They're burn marks. Just look at the Pentagon camera images - that was one damn big explosion. Naturally, the parts of the building that were scorched by this flame are going to appear darker than the rest of the building; these blackened sections have absolutely nothing to do with the wings.


Yet another question not raised by the animation, therefore, another irrelevant answer on behalf of Snopes. Since this has taken a good deal longer than I thought it would, so I'm just going to go ahead and skip quoting it.


More irrelevance, but what the hell:


Great, moot point. I'm done.

In closing: again, this isn't something I want to believe. It's just that the information in the animation is really solid, and if this crappy, watered down article that doesn't even address the most critical points of the conspiracy theory is the best counterpoint out there, then that only reinforces my concerns about the entire event. Also, I want to state very clearly that this article paints the conspiracy theory as one that believes that the whole damn thing was staged by the government and that there are actually no Islamic extremists: that's bullshit, and not what I'm thinking at all. YES, someone attacked the Pentagon on 9/11 (most probably al Qaeda or someone with strong ties to bin Laden because the notion that the Pentagon and Trade Center attacks were orchestrated by two separate, uncoordinated groups is highly improbable), there's no denying that. The question is, with what? And from what revelations (and the counterpoints thereof) I've seen in the past 24 hours, I'm beginning to doubt it was a 757. Why would the government want us to believe it was a 757 as opposed to, say, a missile? I have no idea...but again, from what I've seen so far, something is missing. It just doesn't add up. I'm still open to other explanations, certainly, especially ones in favor of what the majority of us consider fact: I just want something more concrete than a freaking 3-minute flash animation to restore my faith.

I have to promise myself that I'm never going to post something so large again...

Seriously Jakob, you're scaring me. I'll dig up more evidence for you but I'm sure you'll find some way to disproof it. Funny how the onus of proof has shifted from the side of nutty conspiracies (where it should be) to the accepted truth, but oh well, we'll play that game.

P.S. - I didn't catch wind of it in your long reply but what do you think happened to the 757? The real one that contains passengers who are, I guess, missing?

Another rebuttal to the Pentagon Conspiracy

I think this says it all.

I thought the conspiracy was that the government was covering up the "fact" that a missle was fired at the Pentagon and not an airplane. I guess the idea is that the people would freak out if they knew the evil-doers has the ability to just launch missles at well-protected government institutions. We can regulate our aircrafts a little better, but what can we do about missles coming from any random place?

Not to add to the conspiracy (which I think has no legs to stand on), but isn't it a very convenient coincidence that the plane hit the unoccupied portion of the Pentagon that was weeks from being renovated? Either way, I'm glad their weren't more injuries.

What part of the newly installed kevlar netting and the fact that an engine dislodged and created a 12 foot hole that acted as a vent for much of the explosion and energy to dissipate from didn't you see?

Also, the theory clearly states that the plane skipped off of a helipad, hence leaving the lawn intact and giving the jet its unusual angle of attack at the impact point.

As far as Rumsfeld saying that it hit the Pentagon at full speed, that's what he reported because somebody told him that. That was shortly after it happened. He didn't have all the facts in front of him. What was he supposed to say? "A plane hit the Pentagon going approximately 322.6587345mph judging from the physicist that did a rough calculation after seeing that the unusual angle of attack surely meant it skipped off the helipad"? Hell no... a plane just flew into the fucking Pentagon!!! All we care is that it was a high rate of speed and it did damage. Just like the WTC. Holding anybody accountable for words they said immediately after the attack is really splitting hairs. And I despise Rumstud.

And don't you think that after all this bullshit about WMD's that the Bush Admin would love it to be a missile? I mean c'mon, what would get the country more fired up than a scud missile plowing into the Pentagon?

But to dispel the missile theory, where did it come from? Only the Russians and possibly, and I mean possibly, the Chinese have an ICBM that could accurately hit the Pentagon from overseas. Which means a scud or or silkworm or some other STS missile would have had to been used. Which means that that missile would have had to been fired from either a ground location or from a ship within a 100 mile radius. Probably closer to have any sort of real accuracy. Even our most sophisticated Tomahawk missile would have been able to have been tracked in a metropolitan area with a major air hub nearby. Meaning that a normal radar sweep of the DC airspace would
have revealed a cruise missile coming inbound. Don't you think a UFO flying without an IFF beacon and closing in a hundred feet off the ground at 400+ mph would have raised a few eyebrows? The missile theory has no credibility to me at all. Period.

Unoccupied? Where did the people who were killed in there come from? I know I remember hearing reports of people in offices there that were killed.

Granted, it apparently was the least occupied portion of the complex, so I'll give you that much. But still, what the fuck does it matter? I think if you look at the maps of the city (and I'm going to try and locate some) this was the most OBVIOUS approach to hit the Pentagon from where the plane was coming from.

Some photos of interest:

A fighter jet test by the US (or so they'd have us believe) into a reinforced concrete structure that is used to fortify nuclear power plants (not exactly 100% like what was used to build the Pentagon, but this gives you an idea of the debris path and explosion when a plane hits a very hard structure): Pic

And here's a second, just a second or so later, of the same plane: Pic

Notice in both of these how small the debris is that's left and how it mostly flying upwards and TOWARDS the wall it is crashing into. Very little of it is "blowing" back.

I think it's important to point out that in plane crashes, debris fields usually start at the first point of impact and spread forward from there. Unless a plane is breaking up in flight you won't find large parts strewn about before the plane's impact point.

Yeah, but what about that cloud above the test? That looks like a UFO!!!!

Shame no one caught this one on camera. Video is the only thing people trust anymore. I'm sure there are conspiracy theories flying around that airplanes didn't crash in NY, either.

Maybe that UFO took away all the people in the plane that didn't crash there! I think you're onto something Carl, or on something, but either way it's good.

Prove to me that didn't happen. Haha!!

The conspiracy theory that Jakob brought to us posed some interesting questions, but overall, I thought it was pretty weak, mostly just because that's all it did - ask questions. At the very least, some research into what might've/could've actually happened as opposed to AA FLT77 would've been nice. You know - some research on military aircraft, missles, etc.

The Snopes rebuttal, though, was even more weak. And I usually like and respect Snopes. But this piece was poorly organized and poorly constructed, and didn't really rebut much of anything at all. It just confused me further.

Look, at the end of the day, I do probably believe that things happened pretty much just as Pentagon officials said. But like Carl said, I do find it odd that there was so little coverage given to what happened at the Pentagon. And I do find it odd that no tape of FLT77 flying through DC has ever shown up/been released. But although those things seem fishy, I just have a hard time believing that something that blatant (and that PUBLIC) could be covered up so seamlessly.

I'll close with this thought, and I don't mean to be cheesy: Don't believe for a minute that our government hasn't covered up MAJOR incidents in the past or that they won't do it again. I have heard firsthand accounts of things that would blow your mind.

(Edited by jamiecarroll at 12:49 am on Sep. 4, 2004)