One conspiracy therory that just wont go away is the events leading up to 9/11 and the conspiracies concerning the actual events on 11th September.
The Pentagon Attack
Theory: A missile, not American Airlines Flight 77, hit the Pentagon. The two holes punched in the side of the building were much smaller than the wingspan of a 757. According to a French author, the building was struck by a satellite-guided missile fired as part of an attempted military coup.
Fact: Crash investigators concluded that the main hole in the Pentagon was smaller than the plane’s wingspan because one wing was sheared off and the other was damaged on impact. The second, smaller hole was made by the jet’s landing gear. And if a missile did strike the Pentagon, why was DNA from the passengers of Flight 77 found in the rubble? Finally, Flight 77’s black box was unearthed at the site.
Remote Control
Theory: The two planes that hit the Twin Towers weren’t piloted by hijackers but directed by remote control.
Fact: Boeing said these planes could only be piloted from the flight deck. In addition, the passengers and crew made phone calls describing hijackers taking over. In a call minutes before the crash, American Flight 11 attendant Betty Ong told ground personnel, “Our Number One has been stabbed and our Five has been stabbed. Can anybody get up to the cockpit? Okay. We can’t even get into the cockpit. We don’t know who’s up there.” A second flight attendant on Flight 11 told an American Airlines ground employee, “Listen to me. Listen to me very carefully,” and then went on to describe the hijacking as it unfolded.
The Twin Towers Collapse
Theory: The Twin Towers collapsed because demolition charges were planted inside them, not because of fire and structural damage resulting from American Flight 11 and United Flight 175 plowing into them. The buildings had been designed to withstand great stress and the fires were not hot enough to melt steel. And, if the buildings had collapsed, they would have fallen at an angle—not pancaked straight down, as only buildings destroyed by controlled demolition do.
Fact: Planting enough explosives to blow up the Twin Towers would have required considerable preparation, such as hacking away concrete and steel to position the charges. The work would have taken weeks, possibly months, and could scarcely have gone unnoticed. Additionally, no evidence of explosives has ever turned up at Ground Zero or on debris from the towers. The explosions set off by the crashes ignited fires that did not melt the buildings’ steel structure but significantly weakened it, causing its design to fail. Floors crashing down upon one another with enormous impact took the building down.
Flight 93
Theory: United Flight 93 was shot down over southwestern Pennsylvania by an unidentified white military plane or by a heat-seeking missile fired from an F-16, possibly flown by the North Dakota Air Guard.
Fact: On 9/11, a white Dassault Falcon business jet, owned by VF Corp of Greensboro, North Carolina, was preparing to land at an airport 20 miles north of Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where Flight 93 crashed. According to Popular Mechanics, which did a thorough investigation into Flight 93 and other conspiracy theories, the Cleveland control center contacted the VF plane’s cockpit and asked the pilot to divert and see if he could find the crash site. The Dassault descended to 1,500 feet and eventually spotted the smoking hole in the ground where Flight 93 had crashed. As for the missile, according to an Air National Guard spokesman, Lt. Colonel Rick Gibney flew an F16 that morning from Fargo, North Dakota, to Bozeman, Montana, where he picked up Ed Jacoby Jr., head of New York state’s Emergency Management Office; he then took him to Albany, New York. Jacoby told Popular Mechanics that Gibney couldn’t possibly have shot down Flight 93 because he was with the fighter pilot at the time the plane went down and they never were anywhere near Shanksville. Additionally, the military did not know about the crash of Flight 93 until four minutes after it occurred.
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