SO WHERE IS THE PLANE?
Part III
by Joe Vialls, March 2002
In what appears to be a major disinformation exercise, a French web site has caused a minor storm on the Internet by claiming American Airlines Flight 77 did not crash into the Pentagon on September 11. That’s right folks, American Airlines was and still is merely a figment of your overworked imagination!
This is heady stuff, perhaps enough to put genuine sleuths off the track, and direct even more suspicion and hatred towards the United States military, who many mutter darkly are an evil bunch of people who wantonly killed their own men, and vast numbers of America’s women and children.
Starting where the French start, let us take a closer look at this new conspiracy. The French claim that the Boeing 757 was “too big” to fit in the hole left in the Pentagon, which therefore proves that a Boeing 757 could not have hit the Pentagon. It proves no such thing…
Visit any one of several hundred vertical or near-vertical high-speed crash sites and you will observe a strange phenomena – the aircraft all seem to vanish into relatively small holes. There is no easy explanation for this, but rest assured I speak from direct experience.
In the early sixties we were sent out to find the crash site of an English Electric Lightning Mach 2 fighter, which went in vertically at nearly 400 miles per hour during an aerobatics display. Despite having a wingspan of 35 feet, the Lightning impact crater measured only 22 feet across. Did we find the wings lying around in the field next door? No, we did not.
By some strange twist of physics the wings were in the same impact crater, near the top. What was left of the Lightning fuselage lay many feet beneath the wings, having acted in all respects like a Barnes Wallace “Earthquake Bomb”.
American Airlines Flight 77 was seen to take off from Washington, was tracked somewhat erratically on radar because its transponder was off, and was then seen by hundreds of people as it hurtled back overhead Washington at high speed , before pulling an almost impossibly-high “G” turn through 180 degrees, and slicing down towards the Pentagon in a steep dive.
Civilian aviation eyewitnesses at the time estimated Flight 77’s speed to be in excess of 400 miles per hour, which in the dense atmosphere found at low altitudes, is almost enough to tear the wings off. Not only that. Two airline captains pilots on the internet speculated meaningfully that no human pilot could have held the control yoke through the 180 degree high “G” turn, which they estimated at a minimum of 5G but more likely 6 or 7G. The term “G” simply means gravity, so if your arm weighs 20 pounds at rest, at 5G it will weight 100 pounds.
If you want to get a feel for this, stretch both of your arms right out in front of you as far as they will go (no bending please), and then ask a friend to place a 100 pound weight on the palm of each of your hands. Now simply stand there for 15 seconds without either arm dropping below the horizontal. Tricky, huh? But I digress, back to the French conspiracy.
Next up the French show you dazzling “proof” that the Boeing 757 did not slice down through the roof, but instead managed to squeeze its way into the Pentagon through a single first-floor window. To reinforce this Gallic claim they show you a genuine photo taken by a genuine US Marine. As American as apple pie, so it must be true! This is stirring stuff until you peer through the thick smoke haze on the photo and realize this is a different part of the Pentagon. Sacre Bleu! These French are as slippery as frogs…
Next, before turning to the hard evidence, the French try to distract us with a parallel or sub conspiracy. The evil American military have spread sand across the perfectly good green lawn outside the Pentagon. “Why”, they ask, “…did someone cover up the lawn with sand?” Obviously the French believe we are looking at an evil sub-conspiracy here which rivals their home-grown Count de Marenches of the SDECE. Perhaps the sinister sand obscures a secret missile silo pointed at Paris, or something like that?
Well, not exactly, you wine-swilling Parisians. The American military engineers built a road covered with sand, over which they could drive their heavy trucks to and from the disaster area. You know how it is with these ten and twenty ton trucks. They all have the same irritating tendency to become completely bogged down on soft ornamental lawns.
Hard evidence? Ah, yes. Despite having access to the same images as you or I, the French cunningly edit their copies to obscure the large pile of second-hand Boeing 757 spare parts piled outside the left front of the Pentagon disaster area, shown in the center picture at the top of this page. Click on the red link below it and you will be taken as if by magic to a giant high-resolution photo on an American military server, which will show you the entire area in huge detail.
You don’t have to be James Bond, and no password is required at all. Fancy that! The American military covering up its terrible guilty secrets by posting them on a server with public access.
Which bits of the pile are which bits of American Airlines Flight 77 you had best decide for yourself, because there are lots of bits to choose from. The three men in white at the front of the pile are grouped around a Bobcat, which provides a handy scale for this massive photograph taken on September 14 by the USAF’s Tech. Sgt. Cedric Rudisill.
Though most of the Boeing 757 was still in the Pentagon basement [or even below it] on that date, only three days after the crash, there is already enough scrap metal on the pile to construct a pair of fighter aircraft from scratch. And because this aircraft wreckage utterly destroys the French conspiracy, they failed to show it to you. Worse than that. The French deliberately edited it out completely, so you would be unable to reach your own conclusions.
As the picture at top right shows, once the French cat was out of the bag, others decided to cash in on the story and build thrilling sub-conspiracies all over the Internet. This pic shows what is claimed to be an American F-16 fighter approaching at about zero feet [circled in red], presumably just before the point of impact.
Oh, sure! And obviously, immediately after this picture was snapped the “F-16” suddenly skyrocketed upwards, looped the loop at near sonic speed, then came down vertically on the building. Then it probably used advanced American military alchemy to double in mass to equal the pile of junk already gathered at the front left of the Pentagon building. All good clean fun I suppose, but I doubt Captain Charles Burlingame’s widow would be amused.
Click Here for Giant Enlargement on US Military Server
page image by Windy