The building was designed with exactly that scenario in mind and was constructed in a manner that the force of such a blow would be dissipated around the main support columns in the middle. And as Metal wing has pointed out, the majority of the plane is simple aluminum. Those materials that would have incinerated in the explosion milliseconds during impact and would have never made it that far into the building.

The debate is not whether it is plausible that structural damage “could” have been obtained by such a method, it is whether the damage conceivable from such a strike, could cause the “failure” that we witnessed that day. I submit to you that it is scientifically impossible.

The building was designed with exactly that scenario in mind and was constructed in a manner that the force of such a blow would be dissipated around the main support columns in the middle. And as Metal wing has pointed out, the majority of the plane is simple aluminum. Those materials that would have incinerated in the explosion milliseconds during impact and would have never made it that far into the building.

The debate is not whether it is plausible that structural damage “could” have been obtained by such a method, it is whether the damage conceivable from such a strike, could cause the “failure” that we witnessed that day. I submit to you that it is scientifically impossible.

That would effect the floors above, and they could weaken, even collapse, but 80 "normal" floors below would slow and eventually halt a collapse, maybe lead to toppling at a point, but it could never in reality fall straight down at freefall speed.



Apparently, You never saw the post 9/11 interview with Minoru Yamasaki.
He clearly stated that the floors below would not be able to withstand the additional weight .......

As the weakened floors began to collapse, they pancaked. This means that floors crashed down on floors with increasing weight and momentum, crushing each successive floor below. With the weight of the plunging floors building force, the exterior walls buckled.

The space shuttle was designed to re enter the atmosphere without blowing up. The I35 bridge in Minneapolis was designed not to collapse. I can go on and on. Unless you actually flew a plane into one of those buildings you can theorize all you want, but it doesn't make your design calculations foolproof. An accidental collision by a 707 is not the same thing as a purposeful collision by a 757/767 flying at over 500mph. I think it was miraculous that they stood as long as they did.

The debate is not whether it is plausible that structural damage “could” have been obtained by such a method, it is whether the damage conceivable from such a strike, could cause the “failure” that we witnessed that day. I submit to you that it is scientifically impossible.

I guess this was the point I was trying to get at. There is no question serious damage could be done, but come on, we all saw the collapse, there is no way in hell that particular collapse was from that strike, and what of building 7? More jet fuel??? why only the buildings that had, just by coincidence had their "new owner" update their insurance policy to billion dollar status that happened to cover, "terrorism" only months before, and not the other surrounding buildings, even ones that were closer to the WTC didn't have more than broken glass and "minor" damage.

Look I respect the right for individuals to draw their own conclusions; and i love my country, but for the love of God, this scenario is like a print shop blowing up and forming a dictionary. It is impossible statistically, scientifically, and there are plenty of eye witnesses that heard the pop pop pop of explosions seconds before the building collapsed. AND the "new owner" had sections of the building closed off for maintenance, section by section, weeks before the collapse, so there is just way to many inconsistencies that no one can give a reasonable answer too. I would much rather believe it was some hatemonger that got lucky, unfortunately, that is not what all the evidence suggests. Contrarily, it suggests that a small group of very powerful people needed a catalyst big enough to get the American sheeple to give them the authority to destroy what little constitutional liberties we had, and write them a blank check to remake the map in thier image, and freely provide them the blood of even more of thier children to further thier world empire.

have we come to a conclusion yet? lol

In a pancake collapse there is still resistence from the floors below. As you state, they could build momentum, but it is unlikely. Due to the fact that there were over 80 floors below, each offering a certain amount of resistence (that none has bothered to factor in to their equations), there is ABSOLUTELY no way it could collapse at freefall speed in less than 10 seconds.

Also, in a pancake collapse it would not pulverize the concrete to dust! There would have been a huge stack of pancaked floors that toppled over onto surrounding buidings a much greater distance from the center. Debris would have been much larger, and there would have still been columns jutting from the center where the central supports were. None of this happened! Debris weighing over 100 tons was thrown over 400 feet or more to embed itself into other buidings. Even if the walls "blew out" from the pressure of a pancake collapse it could not throw sections of that size any distance. They would have simply fallen outward away from the main rubble pile.

A pancake collapse would also not account for the pools of molten steel below the towers and building 7 that remained hot and liquid for up to a month after the collapse at temperatures of over 2000 degrees. Jet fuel could NOT do that, nor could it heat the steel in its short burn life to make it possible.

It's not just one thing that makes a pancake collapse an improbable theory, it's dozens, and I have always believed that if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, chances are it's a duck.

In "More On What Really Happened at the Pentagon" (30 May 2009), not only does **** Eastman not spell out what he takes my position or that of others to be but it is difficult to figure out what his own take on what happened at the Pentagon is supposed to be. His essay is not a model of clarity of exposition. It is very weak in structure and in reasoning. If I were grading it, I'd mark it a generous "C-". He also provides a highly biased and inaccurate history of Scholars for 9/11 Truth. For years, a report of what happened involving Steve Jones and me has been archived on 911scholars.org at "Founder's Corner". So much of what he is saying here is mistaken even though he could have consulted the history that I find his lack of research inexcusable.

If anyone wanted to know my take on the Pentagon, they could find it in "Thinking about 'Conspiracy Theories': 9/11 and JFK", where the reasons why I believe no 757 hit the Pentagon but a smaller plane, such as an A-3 Skywarrior, apparently did. My purpose here is not to defend that hypothesis, however, but to explain how we know what didn't happen at the Pentagon and to refute the unfounded criticisms that Eastman has published here. One of his more bizarre complaints is that "Fetzer treats all theories as equally good and offered not (sic) methodological criteria for discrimination among theories". No one who has read the first few sections of this paper-which discusses the nature of theories and their testability employing measures of likelihood and probability-would make that claim. He does not appear to have exerted any effort at all to determine my actual views.

This is at least as perverse as my friend Rolf Lindgren's complaint that I am a "9/11 activist" rather than a "9/11 researcher and scholar". He acknowledges that I have academic qualifications - which include 28 books and around 150 articles and reviews, the majority in peer- reviewed journals-but has his own conception of what is involved in 9/11 research. As a point of clarification, I have explained to him, with no apparent affect, that my research is devoted both to non-controversial aspects of 9/11-see, for example, "Why doubt 9/11?" -and to the controversial questions, such as how the WTC was destroyed and whether there was video fakery on 9/11, which are not resolved by prior research. The books he cites are not "the last word".

While I, like everyone else, have benefited tremendously from the earlier studies by Thierry Meyssan, including Pentagate (2002) and 9/11: The Big Lie (2002), like most scholars, in putting together a library, we collect books of special interests to consult when we are investigating issues with which they deal. This does not mean that we spend time reading them in their entirety as opposed to studying them selectively as appropriate. He has never appreciated this point.

Insofar as I have published The 9/11 Conspiracy (2007), organized the Madison conference, produced the "Science and Politics of 9/11" DVD, made hundreds of appearances on radio and television as well as presenting many public lectures, I am at a loss as to what else it would take to establish my credentials as a 9/11 scholar. Apparently, this does not satisfy his conception of what 9/11 scholarship requires.

Sometimes I wonder how familiar 9/11 activists are with the current state of research. Eastman, and many others in the community, goes ballistic over the idea that some kind of directed-energy weapon may have been used to destroy the Twin Towers and savage Judy Wood. Yet, in Synthetic Terror (2005), Webster Griffin Tarpley discusses the anomalies of the destruction of the towers and raises the possibility that they may have been turned to dust using "some form of directed energy weapon" (pp. 243-245), a conjecture that he attributes to Jim Hoffman. Late in the book, he advances the hypothesis that Flight 93 might have been taken out by a Lockheed Hercules C-130 using "a powerful airborne chemical laser". Yet Tarpley and Hoffman are not similarly attacked for trying to figure out what happened. Critics like Eastman and Lindgren appear to be highly selective in their targets.

This kind of inconsistency has a corrosive effect upon the integrity of research, where some of the most qualified students of 9/11-such as Wood, a former professor of mechanical engineering at Clemson, who has degrees in structural engineering, engineering physics, and materials engineering science-are massively vilified while others of lesser competence and qualification, such as Tarpley and Hoffman, are given a free pass. Hoffman, who did good work early on, along with his associate, Victoria Ashley, have in fact become so vicious and unprincipled in attacking others, including Judy Wood, Morgan Reynolds, and me, that it would be morally irresponsible not to ask whether they have an agenda contrary to the discovery of 9/11 truth. Critics like Eastman regularly confound real threats with illusory ones.

Questions about what happened at the Pentagon, of course, fall into the area of uncertainty as a complex and complicated issue many in the community dislike. There is a body of evidence, much of which is photographic, however, to which scientific reasoning can be applied to resolve that uncertainty. As I have elsewhere explained, the basic measure of the strength with which evidence e supports hypothesis h is provided by the likelihood, L, of h, if e were true. That, in turn, is equal to the probability, P, of e if h were true, where L(h/e) = P(e/h). Approximately speaking, this involves treating the evidence as an "effect" of the "cause" described by various hypotheses, where an hypothesis hi with higher likelihood on evidence e is better supported and is therefore "preferable" to an hypothesis hj with lower likelihood.

As a simple example, we find likelihoods employed in everyday life and in criminal investigations. The discovery of a body with bruising around the neck but no bullet holes or knife wounds makes it more likely that the deceased was killed by strangulation than by shooting or stabbing. After all, the probability of no bullet holes (knife wounds, and so on) if the victim was shot (stabbed, and so forth) is zero, while the probability of bruising about the neck as the result of strangulation is very high. Since the evidence (no bullet holes or knife wounds but bruising around the neck) is more probable if the death was caused by strangulation than by shooting or stabbing, that hypothesis has a higher likelihood and is therefore better supported by the evidence.

When the evidence has "settled down" and tends to point in the same direction, then that hypothesis is also acceptable in the tentative and fallible fashion of science. The introduction of new alternatives and the acquisition of new evidence, including the discovery that evidence that has been taken to be authentic in the past has been fabricated, can lead to the rejection of hypotheses previously accepted and the acceptance of hypotheses previously rejected-or to the suspension of belief in cases previously thought to be resolved. There appear to be more than a half-dozen arguments against the official account that a 757 hit the Pentagon, which appears to be a fantasy. To begin with, consider the alleged "hit point" at the Pentagon on the ground floor:





Figure 1. The Ground Floor "Hit Point"

This "hit point" was too small to accommodate a 100-ton airliner with a 125' wingspan and a tail that stands 44' above the ground. The debris is wrong for a Boeing 757: no wings, no fuselage, no seats, no bodies, no luggage, no tail! Not even the engines, which are made of titanium and steel, were recovered. The probability that a real Boeing 757 would leave no wings, no fuselage, no seats, no bodies, no luggage and no tail at the point of impact approximates zero. The probability that an absent plane would leave no wings, no fuselage, no seats, no bodies and such at the point of impact approximates one-although, of course, planted evidence is not ruled out. As long as one is greater than zero, the hypothesis there was no real Boeing 757 has the higher likelihood.

Indeed, this conclusion is further reinforced by the discovery of unbroken windows in the immediate vicinity of the purported "hit point". Jack White, a legendary student of the photos and films in the assassination of JFK, has created a web site devoted to 9/11, which includes many important observations, such as this one. I have greatly benefited in my own research from exchanges with Jack, just as I have from exchanges with Judy Wood and Morgan Reynolds. It is a pity that more students of 9/11 are not devoting attention to Judy's web site and Morgan's web site as well as to Jack's. If we really want to discover the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about 9/11, we cannot allow ourselves to be bound by the confines of our own imagination and experiences.






Figure 2. Before and After the Upper-Floors Collapsed

The Pentagon's own videotapes do not show a Boeing 757 hitting the building, as even Bill O'Reilly admitted when one was shown on "The O'Reilly Factor". At 155 feet, the plane was more than twice as long as the 77-foot Pentagon is high and should have been present and easily visible; it was not, which means that the video evidence also contradicts the official account. The tail of what appears to be a far smaller plane, however, is visible just above the guard mechanism. In this graphic, Jack White has sized the image of a Boeing 757 to that of the tail, which vividly displays the inconsistency of supposing that it might be the tail of a Boeing 757. If a plane of its dimensions were present, it should have been readily visible, but in fact it is not.




Figure 3. Sizing a Boeing 757 to the Pentagon Frame

The aerodynamics of flight, including "ground effect", would have made the official trajectory-flying at high speed barely above ground level-physically impossible, because a Boeing 757 flying over 500 mph could not have come closer than about 60 feet to the ground, which means that the official account is not even aerodynamically possible. Russ Wittenburg in the DVD "Zero", an experienced pilot who flew the planes alleged to have been used on 9/11, states that the Boeing 757 can't go 500 mph hour at sea level because the air is too dense. Robin Hordon, an air traffic controller, in the same film, explains that the Boeing 757 cannot do the maneuvers attributed to it. The official story thus appears to entail violations of laws of physics, of engineering, and of aerodynamics, insofar as the damage to the building, the absence of debris, the clear, smooth, unblemished lawn and now its alleged performance are incompatible with a Boeing 757.





Figure 4. The Unblemished Lawn Post-Impact

Moreover, if a Boeing 757 could have traveled at 500 mph at ground level, it would have caused enormous damage to the grass and the ground, including producing substantial furrows from the low hanging engines, yet photos taken immediately after the alleged impact show the grass surface as smooth and unblemished as a putting green, where I expect Tiger Woods to show up and practice his game. The purported debris began showing up later, including especially a piece of fuselage torn from a commercial carrier, which was photographed in several locations. James Hanson, a lawyer from Columbus, OH, has traced this piece to a crash that occurred on 20 December 2005 in Cali, Columbia, where a vine common there ripped it off the plane. I am going to include Jim's paper in The 9/11 Controversies (forth-coming), which will be the second book from Scholars that I publish.

This is far from the only case of the fabrication of evidence at the Pentagon. Jamie McIntyre, the CNN reporter at the scene, reported that there were no indications that a plane had crashed: "From my close-up inspection, there is no evidence of any plane having crashed anywhere near the Pentagon. . . . There are no large tail sections, wing sections, a fuselage-nothing like that-anywhere around which would indicate that the entire plane had crashed into the side of the Pentagon". He would subsequently contradict his report, no doubt under intense pressure from his employer to take back anything that might be considered to undermine the official account. He now states that, "For anyone with any common sense . . . there is not going to be any doubt that a plane hit the building". But that is just what we would expect (with high probability) if no Boeing 757 actually hit the building.

Even more stunning, therefore, is that, even though the lime-green civilian fire trucks that arrived first at the scene had extinguished the fires at the Pentagon in around fifteen minutes, vast volumes of black smoke would later appear that were easily visible across the Potomac from the steps of the Capitol, where members of the House and the Senate had congregated as a safety precaution due to threats that the Capitol Building itself might be the next target. What we have here is a demonstration of the use of "special effects" of the kind that Hollywood has patented. The smoke is coming, not from the Pentagon itself, but from a series of enormous dumpsters in front of the building. It is hard to imagine any more damning proof of fakery:







Figure 5. Smoke and Flames Emanating from Dumpsters

At this point, it appears to be "pilling on" to observe that data from a flight recorder provided to Pilots for 9/11 Truth by the National Transportation Safety Board corresponds to a plane with a different approach and higher altitude, which would have precluded its hitting lampposts or even the building itself, which means that, if the NTSB's
own data corresponds to the Boeing 757 that is alleged to have been flown toward the building, it would have flow over the Pentagon rather than hit it. Those who remain unconvinced by the evidence that has been presented here, therefore, are encouraged to view the 9/11 DVD's "Pandora's Black Box" and "Pentacon", which offer additional substantiation. The evidence thus appears to have "settled down".

The probability that a real Boeing 757 could have hit the Pentagon and not left debris from its wings and tail or even its engines-not to mention bodies, seats, and luggage-is zero. The probability that the alleged trajectory could have been flown in violation of the laws of aerodynamics is even less than zero-since violations of these laws is not physically possible. The probability that the trajectory, if it were possible, could have left a smooth, green, unblemished lawn is zero. The probability that debris would have been planted or that smoke would have been simulated, had this event involved the crash of a real Boeing 757, is likewise extremely low. That all of these things would have occurred if the alleged impact were contrived, however, is very high. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine any reasonable alternative.

When no alternative explanation is reasonable, then an explanation has been established beyond a reasonable doubt. The conclusion that no Boeing 757 hit the Pentagon appears to have been established beyond a reasonable doubt. The problems being generated within the 9/11 community over the quality of research, as this case illustrates, appear to be rooted in the lack of commitment to logic and evidence by individuals like **** Eastman, who has demonstrated that he is not competent to evaluate research on 9/11. Ironically, our conclusions about the Pentagon apparently converge, which means that he ought to be regarding me as an ally rather than as an enemy. Fortunately, progress can be made as long as others of greater ability are allowed to pursue the search for truth, which confronts enormous obstacles from without and would certainly benefit by greater tolerance from within the research community itself.

Jim Fetzer, a former U.S. Marine Corps officer, is McKnight Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, and the founder of Scholars for 9/11 Truth. He maintains its web site at 911scholars.org.

http://www.rense.com/general86/911s.htm

bldg 7 and the Oklahoma building both contained financial records...that are now gone...just like the missing trillion dollars from our treasury....now this conspiracy is a little more plausible...but not the towers....


but I thought we were speaking of the twin towers......when the architect of the building says it(the collapse) is possible I believe him. the steel did not need to become molten....only weakened....which is what the fire did....weakened to the point of collapse...

The National Institute for Standards and Technology has been forced to admit that the total free-fall collapse of the twin towers cannot be explained after an exhaustive scientific study, implicitly acknowledging that controlled demolition is the only means by which the buildings could have come down. http://digg.com/world_news/NIST_Admits_Total_Collapse_Of_Twin_Towers_Unexplainable

The National Institute for Standards and Technology has been forced to admit that the total free-fall collapse of the twin towers cannot be explained after an exhaustive scientific study, implicitly acknowledging that controlled demolition is the only means by which the buildings could have come down. http://digg.com/world_news/NIST_Admits_Total_Collapse_Of_Twin_Towers_Unexplainable