The Science Of 9/11
I don’t know what happened on 9/11, and neither do you.
Barring some monumental reshuffling of the world’s power structure, we may never know. But we can say with absolute certainty what didn’t happen on 9/11, and that’s what we’re going to focus on today: the impossible science of 9/11. According to the official records, on that day, science decided to take the morning off.
Most people were too shell-shocked to wonder about it. I was too, until I realized that the science demolishes the silly narratives we thoughtlessly accepted for so long.
A few years ago I never really wondered about the science of steel and fire, of cellular communications, structural engineering, or the physics of aircraft and flight. I merely accepted the story.
Okay, boxcutters versus combat military pilots, and the box cutters won. Damn. Let’s go to war.
But the science matters, perhaps more than everything else.
Science is cold, detached. It cares nothing about sentiment, politics, history, or law. Science is wholly uninterested in you and me, and it doesn’t care if we accept its existence. Newton’s first law of motion will make its presence known whether convenient or not; just ask anyone learning how to ice skate. We can craft faulty narratives all day long but we can’t create our own science, which is something those who do care about history, law, politics, and especially the lives involved, ought to take notice of.
The laws of science are a just judge, immutable unless God Himself decides to bend them, and only He can. And yet, the official story of 9/11 — the one proclaimed across AI-generated YouTube videos and propagated on Wikipedia and high school textbooks — requires that the basic science you learned from elementary school on up be suspended, including the science of making a hole in the ground.
Plane Crashes With No Planes
In most discussions of 9/11, a few facts get glossed over. Here’s one: When airplanes crash, they leave a big mess. Big airplanes, small airplanes, airplanes that crash into buildings, into the ground, or into the sea, they always leave a bunch of stuff to clean up. It’s the science of the matter, literally.
Matter: material substance that occupies space, has mass, and is composed predominantly of atoms consisting of protons, neutrons, and electrons, that constitutes the observable universe, and that is interconvertible with energy. – Merriam Webster Dictionary
The matter (that is, the engines, seats, landing gear, luggage, passengers, etc) all has to go somewhere. Usually in an airplane crash it’s relatively localized within the general crash site, with elements often ejected nearby, then painstakingly pored over by crash investigators and catalogued. Every little piece of debris.
Not on 9/11 though.
Both United 93 (which crashed in Shanksville, PA) and American Airlines 77 (at the Pentagon) were notable for being the only two jetliners in history to crash without leaving a recognizable debris field. United 93’s purported crash site left a relatively small hole in the ground, with green trees standing resolutely nearby.
This was the best image of the crash site the government was able to release for the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui11. Where did all of that matter go?
Assistant Fire Chief Rick King was on the first fire truck to reach the site.
“Where is this plane? And where are the people?” he remembers wondering. “…Thousands of tiny pieces scattered around—bits of metal, insulation, wiring—but no fuselage, no wings, only a smoking crater and charred earth.” King sent his men to search the woods for the plane.“Rick, there’s nothing,” they reported.
John Meyer, the first reporter on the scene, was equally perplexed.
“I was able to get right up to the edge of the crater. All I saw was a crater filled with small, charred plane parts. Nothing that would even tell you that it was the plane…There were no suitcases, no recognizable plane parts, no body parts.”
Also among the first ten people to arrive was coroner Wallace Miller.
“It looked like someone took a scrap truck, dug a 10-foot ditch, and dumped all this trash into it.”
Eventually some significant aircraft matter did turn up, though it was buried deep down in the hole, and found only after days of FBI investigators poring over the secured site. For some reason the black box was unearthed 15 feet down, and yet the flight voice recorder (despite being installed directly next to it) was 25 feet down. How exactly this could occur is anyone’s guess, but try and replicate that in a lab. You can’t, because science doesn’t work that way.
The site still reeked of jet fuel three weeks later, when reporters were given FBI guided tours. This is also the only plane crash in history notable for the incredible volume of unblemished mail that survived. Letters were everywhere, providing data that tidied up the FBI identification of suspects and aircraft that a lack of things like wings and landing gear would have provided.
In the days and weeks that followed, there were pieces of United 93 discovered miles away, washing up on lake shores and destroying at least one cabin, as reported in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on September 14th, 2001, an article that has since been scrubbed from the paper’s online archives.
As I said at the beginning, I don’t know what happened to United 93, and neither do you, but I know what the science says: There is no way it disappeared into a hole in the ground in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
The Pentagon
Charles “Chic” Burlingame was a 6’4” former Navy fighter pilot, who did tours in both Vietnam and the Persian Gulf War, as well as instructing at Top Gun for several years. On September 11, 2001, this combat veteran was behind the controls of American Airlines Flight 77, a Boeing 757-S233.
Admiral Timothy Keating attended flight school with him: “I was in a plebe summer boxing match with Chic, and he pounded me…Chic was really tough.”
“[He] enjoyed boating, in-line skating, and weightlifting, and was in great shape,” right up to his death, according to his friend, Steve Brooks.
According to the established history, 5’4” Saudi hijacker Hani Hanjour managed to somehow gain access to the cockpit of American Airlines 77 and wrest the controls from Burlingame and his first officer David Charlebois without either of them managing to enter the code signaling a hijacking in progress.
In fact, none of the pilots in any of the four planes, ostensibly violently overtaken by radical jihadists, managed to sound the hijacking alarm. None of them managed to use those military or airline polished skills to pitch the aircraft and give their crews or passengers a fighting chance. And if the phone calls logged into the official records are genuine, none of the flight crews followed hijacking protocols.
A brief note on the phone calls. In 2001 (and practically today even) it was impossible to make a cellular phone call at altitude. Even close to the ground within cellular range, the calls would have spotty reception and get dropped several times as the planes moved from cellular tower to cellular tower. Another fact the narrative glosses over: American Airlines removed the in-flight phone service from its entire fleet prior to 9/11.
Getting back to the cockpit, we’re told that Hanjour managed to gain control of the aircraft.
Hanjour—an amateur pilot so rad that he was refused a Cessna rental in Bowie, Maryland after three separate instructors deemed him incompetent to fly alone—proceeded to perform the single greatest feat of acrobatic flying in jumbo jet history, defying the laws of physics and aeronautics while taking the craft so far beyond its capabilities that no pilot has yet managed to replicate it in a simulator.
American Airlines Flight 77 took off from Washington Dulles Airport, heading for the west coast. After flying at cruise altitude for a while, the aircraft made a 180-degree turn and headed back towards Washington in a descent. At 7000 feet, the 250,000 pound machine made a 330-degree descending and accelerating corkscrew turn at 3,500 feet per minute to arrive precisely parallel at ground level, taking out some street light poles (somehow without severing its wings) and skimming over the grass outside the Pentagon at 500 knots without disturbing the surface before it buried its 124-foot wingspan into a 67-foot wide hole that housed the Office of Naval Intelligence, wherein it too (see United 93) essentially disappeared.
(Side note for those unaware: This was the same office that was conducting the investigation of a 2.3 trillion dollar Defense Department deficit that Donald Rumsfeld announced one day prior.)
Former U.S. Army Private Adam Eisenberg was a member of Alpha Company, 3rd US Infantry stationed at Fort Meyer on 9/11. As it became clear America was under attack, his unit was deployed (without being issued ammunition) as first responders on scene at the Pentagon. Eisenberg (a former Pratt & Whitney employee and airplane parts specialist) would remain on site from September 11th through September 20th under Operation Noble Eagle, the official cleanup operation.
“In my 240 hours on site, I never saw anything that looked like a plane part, I never saw anything that looked like an individual that had died on a plane, I didn’t see any personal effects that looked like luggage. Every single thing that we saw, every body that we saw, was somebody that was killed inside the Pentagon.”
– Adam Eisenberg, podcast appearance 8/10/24
The Boeing 757-200 series are fashioned with a pair of 8000 lb engines — either the Pratt & Whitney PW2000 or the Rolls Royce RB211 variants. These engines are as close to indestructible as it gets, and are the prime piece of evidence in investigating the wreckage of a plane crash. Yet on 9/11 they supposedly disintegrated.
In order for American Airlines flight 77 to have hit the Pentagon in the trajectory the 9/11 Commission asserted, these engines would have had to touch the ground prior to the nose of the aircraft hitting any surface. If it crashed into the ground outside the Pentagon, as the only video2 ever released would seem to indicate, then the wreckage — including the engines, wings, tail fin, seats, etc — would have been strewn across and embedded in the destroyed lawn, not 99% disintegrated with a few shady scraps of metal gently scattered atop the pristine September grass.
From impossible physics to disappearing evidence, there are a thousand questions that investigators need to explain in deciphering what happened on 9/11 at the Pentagon. One thing that couldn’t have happened, as the best airline pilots in 757 simulators have proven, was the Maverick-worthy, aerodynamic-defying, historic flight supposedly accomplished by Hani Hanjour on September 11th.
The World Trade Center
“After that, collapse was inevitable…”
This is a phrase you hear in every discussion of why the World Trade Center Twin Towers fell. Whether they’re YouTube videos, network television remembrance pieces about 9/11, or top notch or second rate documentaries, you’ll always hear the narrators claim that as the extreme heat of the fires weakened the truss supports, the floor began to sag and break away from the core supports. And as those upper floors fell, collapse was inevitable.3
But why?
Why didn’t the lower floors resist the upper floors’ collapse? Science says that the 76 stories of undamaged, steel-reinforced structure of foundational mass should have remained. A smaller mass has a hard time obliterating a larger mass, as vehicle versus brick walls can attest. Or in football terms, imagine a wide receiver running full tilt into a pile of interior linemen. Who wins that physics battle? Go on out into your backyard and try it with a stack of bricks. Or run a computer simulation and see if the numbers add up.
But there is no resistance in the demise of the World Trade Center. It just falls because, simply, “collapse was inevitable.” At the very least, we should have seen a clearly perceptible series of violent impacts, toppling every which way, instead of a smooth-as-silk free fall.
“NIST’s report on the collapse of the Twin Towers was voluminous, yet NIST did not analyze what is arguably the most important aspect of the collapses for establishing their likely technical cause: the structural behavior of the towers during the collapse.”
– World Trade Center Physics: Why Constant Acceleration Disproves Progressive Collapse, Affleck et al.
But no government investigative body has addressed that. It just fell and you’re also not supposed to wonder why the core supports disappeared instead of standing erect in the center of the collapsed floors that pulled away from them.
Back to Newton again.
Newton’s Third Law of Motion states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Thus, the motion of the the floors buckling and collapsing (action) would have to have been arrested by slamming into the floor underneath it (reaction), causing deceleration and a shattering jolt. Furthermore, if this impact had caused that next floor to buckle and collapse as well (as the World Trade Center story alleges) the resulting jolt would be even more noticeable.
And what about the conservation of angular momentum?
The law of conservation of angular momentum: The momentum of a rotating object does not change unless some type of external torque, any outside force that acts upon the object to cause it to twist or rotate, is applied. Without the application of torque, angular momentum remains constant and the momentum remains conserved.
The top 30 floors (severed from the rest of the building for whatever reason) of Tower 2 began to rotate due to the intense gravity acting upon them. The angular momentum (or spinning) of this massive block of building will not be retarded (Newton’s word, not mine) unless sufficient torque is applied to change it. And yet, instead of continuing in the sideways direction gravity has sent it, this block pulverizes in mid-air.
Three guesses what can cause steel and concrete to explode in mid-air.
The NIST report wants us to accept an impossible story, where jet fuel that burns between 800-1500 degrees defies fire science and doesn’t burn itself (and the available fuel of office materials) out in a matter of minutes, where a building fire can burn hot enough to melt fireproofing-coated steel supports on floors 77 through 83, and then magically ignite the foundational steel thousands of feet below into molten lava so hot it remains liquified even three weeks later.
For the record, in order to liquify structural steel, you need a sustained heat source of a minimum of 2750 degrees.
But what about other metals? What about structural iron, or the melting aluminum of the plane itself, which have much lower melting points?
“The yellow color implies a molten metal temperature of approximately 1000°C [1832°F], evidently above that which the dark-smoke hydrocarbon fires in the Towers could produce…. Also, the fact that the liquid metal retains an orange hue as it nears the ground…further rules out aluminum…We also noted [in our experiments] that…the falling aluminum displayed a silvery-gray color, adding significantly to the evidence that the yellow-white molten metal flowing out from the South Tower shortly before its collapse was NOT molten aluminum.”
– Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Completely Collapse? Dr. Steven E. Jones, Physicist and Archaeometrist, Journal of 9/11 Studies, 1 September 2006/Volume 3
This molten material was seen seeping out of the building from several places. If it wasn’t from the aircraft, where did it come from in such quantities and in so many places?
“You’d get down below and you’d see molten steel, molten steel, running down the channel rails, like you’re in a foundry, like lava.” — FDNY Captain Philip Ruvolo
Ken Holden, the Commissioner of the NYC Department of Design and Construction, testified before the 9/11 Commission: “Underground it was still so hot that molten metal dripped down the sides of the wall from Building 6.”
NIST had literally nothing to say about these scientific anomalies in the wreckage of the Twin Towers:
“The condition of the steel in the wreckage…was irrelevant to the investigation…since it does not provide any conclusive information on the condition of the steel when the WTC towers were standing.”
So according to the main investigative body attempting to discover the reason why two of the world’s largest buildings failed after a comparatively tiny aluminum plane crashed into the tip of them, the evidence doesn’t matter.
A look at the steel itself would seem warranted, had it not all been immediately sold to China and India at far below market cost. One piece of steel that was recovered after the collapse of Building Seven (more on that in a minute) was coated in red residue and so pockmarked that it resembled Swiss cheese.
“If the ‘Swiss-cheese appearance’ is indeed the result of ‘boiling and evaporation’ of the material as the [R.J. Lee] report suggests, we note the boiling temperature for aluminosilicate is approximately 2,760°C.”
– Extremely High Temperatures During the World Trade Center Destruction, Jones et al.
So how did the fires get so hot, burn for so long, and leave chemical residues inconsistent with office fires all across the New York skyline, and in the lungs of residents? And here’s another science question for the Mr. Wizards among us: Why did all of the concrete turn to dust in the first place?
“What can explain the near-total pulverization of approximately 8.8 million square feet of 5.5-inch-thick lightweight concrete flooring and the near-total dismemberment of 220 stories of steel structure? NIST provides no explanation, and gravity alone appears to be implausible. A simple analysis of the approximate amount of energy required to pulverize the concrete and dismember the steel structures indicates that about 1,255 gigajoules of energy would have been required, far exceeding the estimated 508 gigajoules of gravitational potential energy contained in the buildings.”
– Beyond Misinformation: What Science Says About the Destruction of World Trade Center Buildings 1, 2, and 7, Walter et al.
If you want to spend the next three weeks of your life researching studies, papers, and experiments by structural engineers, chemists, EPA whistleblowers, and fire scientists to uncover what may account for the scientific holes in the official report’s conclusions, you can easily do so. You’ll find that the most intriguing scientific models of what could have brought down the Twin Towers coincides with the 150+ eyewitness testimonies of first responders, evidence that the NIST investigators, media, and most of us ignored or were barred from ever hearing.
There are only a few things that could have brought the towers down so perfectly, and physical evidence of them abound in the wreckage, air, water, and on the rooftops of skyscrapers nearby. An actual investigation would have started with the witnesses, and moved on to collecting and examining every scrap of metal available, instead of disposing of it as fast as a dump truck can drive. But actual forensic investigations weren’t conducted on 9/11, because they weren’t desired. The science might have proved to everyone then what it’s stubbornly insistent about now: that of the many things necessary to bring the towers down, a pair of Boeing 767s are not among them.
Never Forget…Building Seven
Building Seven of the World Trade Center complex (WTC 7) was never hit by an aircraft, never had thousands of gallons of Jet-A fueling its office fires, and didn’t have a chunk of upper floors crashing down atop its lower floors to get the collapse going. There was no precipitating cause indicating it was in any greater danger of collapse than any of the other buildings that took far greater damage from the Twin Towers’ raining debris.
Yet all day long the public was told by the media that WTC 7 was so damaged that collapse was inevitable.3 So inevitable that news reporters even reported it had collapsed minutes before it actually came down.
Like the Twin Towers, WTC 7 also fell symmetrically, with perfect uniformity within its own footprint. Yet the lack of an explanation as to how external debris hitting the structure could cause every one of the 81 support columns to fail simultaneously is a problem for the official story. It remained largely ignored for seven years until NIST finally settled on an answer in a 2008 report. It concluded that thermal expansion as a result of ordinary office fires was a new phenomenon that can induce building collapse, something that had never occurred before, and hasn’t happened since.
Fancy CGI videos created by AI are popping up all the time, attempting to mask the stench of the rotten story with additional toppings. A new crop of non-conspiracy theorists now vaguely blame exploding diesel generators in the substructure for weakening the supports, something NIST rejected all along. These YouTube shorts are a little vague on the details, though the graphics are snappy. What isn’t vague is that such scientific wizardry didn’t exist in the only comprehensive study ever made of WTC 7.
In 2016, a department in the University of Alaska Fairbanks began what would become a four year academic study into the quandary of Building Seven. Engineering professor Leroy Hulsey recruited two PhD students and numerous volunteers to assist the exhaustive analysis. Almost immediately Hulsey’s assistants, Zhili Quan and Feng Xiao were threatened via email to abandon the project. They persisted, studying every perceivable cause for the building collapse, and in 2020 they released their findings:
“The principal conclusion of our study is that fire did not cause the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11, contrary to the conclusions of NIST and private engineering firms that studied the collapse. The secondary conclusion of our study is that the collapse of WTC 7 was a global failure involving the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building.”
– A Structural Reevaluation of the Collapse of World Trade Center 7 – Final Report, Hulsey et al., 2020, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, College of Engineering and Mines, Institute of Northern Engineering, University of Alaska Fairbanks
Remember, the tale is that WTC 7 was smashed by the collapse of the North Tower, which caused a fire that created thermal expansion that felled the building. But if fire didn’t cause this near-simultaneous failure of every column of Building Seven, what did?
A potential answer may lie in the testimony of Barry Jennings.
Barry Jennings was the deputy director of Emergency Services for the New York City Housing Authority on 9/11. After the first tower was struck, Jennings was called into work at the Office of Emergency Management, along with corporation counsel Michael Hess. They entered WTC 7 to discover the Office of Emergency Management was empty, with coffee still steaming in cups and half-eaten food on tables. Jennings received a phone call from his superior instructing them to vacate the building immediately.
“When we reached the 6th floor, the landing that we were standing on gave way. There was an explosion and the landing gave way. I was left there hanging. I had to climb back up and walk back up to the 8th floor. The explosion was beneath me….so when the explosion happened it blew us back….both buildings [the Twin Towers] were still standing.”
Jennings and Hess were trapped in WTC 7 because it exploded before the first of the Twin Towers collapsed. They remained trapped there for hours afterward, and as Jennings testified multiple times:
“All this time, I’m hearing all kinds of explosions.”
Jennings’ testimony in news stories, a documentary, and a closed door hearing with NIST directly refute the entire WTC timeline and official findings of both NIST reports and the 9/11 Commissions findings.
His testimony fell on deaf ears, and a BBC documentary edited his interview to misrepresent his story, claiming he was trapped by debris from the Twin Towers.
In September of 2008, as the NIST report on WTC 7 was being released, it was reported that Jennings had passed away a month prior, but no cause of death was ever confirmed. A private investigator hired by documentary filmmaker Dylan Avery to look into it returned his money, and told them to never call him again.
Not So Great Commisions
I may be the only person I know who’s had a copy of the 9/11 Commission Report on my library shelf. I bought it as a reference book for one of the most consequential historical events in history, and even assigned it to at least one of my high schoolers.
It’s not there anymore, not even as a work of fiction, because much like the Warren Commission report on the Kennedy Assassination, it was merely a whitewash of implausible and unsubstantiated claims that defy logic and science.
I began this article by positing the presupposition that I don’t know what happened on 9/11, and neither do you. In making the case for that assertion we’ve been primarily focused on the technical how-and-why questions related to 9/11. Any honest appraisal of the science would have to conclude, or at the very least acknowledge, that the official stories don’t hold water, and in many cases are patently absurd.
That creates a problem. A problem for history, and a problem for us reconciling our understanding of it.
Those Americans still stubbornly refusing to take that journey of reevaluation are going to have to reconcile that with the testimonies of thousands of structural engineers, airline pilots, flight crew members, scientists, and no less than 150 first responders who were there on 9/11.
There are also the whistleblowers — some who’ve been shouting from the beginning, others who are just recently finding their courage — from all walks of life with stories to tell. A generation later, most Americans are still unwilling to examine that evidence with fresh eyes and ears for the facts, and instead are content to simply accept the fantastical mythology of 9/11 for what it is: a poorly written piece of unscientific fiction.
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If this discusson has whet your appetite for exploring more about the hidden history of 9/11 you can find more at the following locations:
Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth
Pilots for 9/11 Truth
Firefighters for 9/11 Truth
Military Officers and 9/11 Families
And here is a profound documentary on 9/11 whistleblowers you will not be able to find by searching YouTube:
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Footnotes
Criminal No. 01-455-A Prosecution Trial Exhibits Exhibit Number P200057 Description – Photograph of the scene in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, where Flight 93 crashed; resized and slightly retouched to improve quality.
The FBI seized over 80 hours of footage from hotels, gas stations, and traffic cameras in the vicinity. None of these have ever been released, nor has any of the the Pentagon’s extensive security footage. The Pentagon is one of the most secure buildings in the world, with security cameras undoubtedly covering every available angle, even in 2001.
From the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) report: “The potential energy released by the downward movement of the large building mass far exceeded the capacity of the intact structure below to absorb that through energy of deformation...Since the stories below the level of collapse initiation provided little resistance to the tremendous energy released by the falling building mass, the building section above came down essentially in free fall, as seen in videos.” — p. 146, NIST NCSTAR 1
What about the woman standing in the gaping whole? It was obviously not hot enough there? Yet that area fell at the same rate as the rest of the building?