NEWSLETTER #88
November 10, 2006
September 11, 2001 Revisited
November 10, 2006
September 11, 2001 Revisited
ACT IV: PART III
Moving on to other aspects of the
‘crash’ of
Flight 93, we find that some early reports from the scene made mention
of witness
accounts of explosions and other unusual noises occurring before
Flight
93 went down. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, for example, mentioned in
passing
that some witnesses “said they heard up to three loud booms before the
jetliner
went down." (Jonathan D. Silver "Day of Terror: Outside Tiny
Shanksville, a Fourth Deadly Stroke," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,
September
12, 2001) One such witness was Laura Temyer, who told the Philadelphia
Daily
News that she “heard like a boom and the engine sounded funny … I heard
two
more booms – and then I did not hear anything.” Asked how she
interpreted what
she heard, she insisted that she believed “the plane was shot down.”
Temyer has
said that she has told her story twice to uninterested FBI officials. A
number
of other witnesses reported that “the engine seemed to race but then
went
eerily silent as the plane plummeted.” (William Bunch “Flight 93: We
Know It
Crashed, But Not Why,” Philadelphia Daily News, November 15, 2001)
Ernie Stull, the mayor of Shanksville,
had some
other interesting news to share with the Philadelphia Daily News: “’I
know of two
people – I will not mention names – that heard a missile … They both
live very
close, within a couple of hundred yards … this one fellow’s served in
Vietnam
and he says he’s heard them [before], and he heard one that day.”
(William Bunch “Flight
93: We Know It Crashed, But Not Why,” Philadelphia Daily News, November
15,
2001) One such witness was Joe Wilt, who spoke to Ken Zapinski of the
St.
Petersburg Times: “The explosion unleashed a firestorm lasting five or
10
minutes and reaching several hundred yards into the sky, said Joe Wilt,
63, who
lives a quarter mile from the crash site. ‘The first thing I thought it
was was
a missile,’ Wilt said.” (Ken Zapinski “A Blur in the Sky, Then a
Firestorm,”
St. Petersburg Times, September 12, 2001)
To briefly recap then what we have
learned thus
far:
·
Although it is impossible to discern from
any of the
available photographs, and was impossible to discern even for those who
were
present at the scene in the immediate aftermath, United Airlines Flight
93
plowed into the ground near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
·
The aircraft was intact when it hit the
ground,
although area residents, the local press and local authorities were
fooled into
believing that the debris was spread over a swath of land more than
eight miles
long. (One early official estimate, provided by State Trooper Tom
Spallone,
amusingly claimed that the “debris field spread over an area [the] size
of a
football field, maybe two football fields.” In reality, the debris was
deposited over an area the size of roughly 6,000 football fields.
Including the
end zones. [Cindi Lash and Ernie Hoffman “Crash in Somerset: ‘…Debris
Field
Spread Over an Area Size of a Football Field…’” Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette,
September 11, 2001])
·
Other than a C-130 flying high above, there
were no
military aircraft in the area before or after the crash, although a
number of
residents mistakenly thought they saw an unmarked white jet, and an air
traffic
controller mistakenly thought he tracked a military jet, and an
earthquake
monitoring station erroneously recorded the presence of a military jet,
and a
number of residents falsely reported that a plane capable of high speed
flight
at extremely low altitudes passed over their homes.
·
There were no explosions on the plane
before it went
down, although numerous witnesses who had apparently ingested some
powerful
hallucinogens claimed that burning debris came raining down from the
sky, that
clouds of debris settled over the Indian Lake area, that there were
multiple
explosions heard before the crash, and that a missile was heard in the
vicinity of
the crash.
Speaking of pre-crash explosions, we do
have one
other key witness, albeit one mired in controversy within the 9-11
skeptics
club. That witness was Edward Felt, listed as a passenger on the doomed
flight.
As reported by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and other media outlets
before the
story was scrubbed, Mr. Felt placed a rather infamous call from the
aircraft at
approximately 9:58 AM, about eight minutes before the time of the
alleged
crash: "a telling detail came minutes before the plane went down when
dispatchers at the Westmoreland County Emergency Operations Center
intercepted
a frantic cell phone call made to 911 by a passenger aboard the doomed
flight.
'We are being hijacked, we are being hijacked!' the man told
dispatchers in a
quivering voice during a conversation that lasted about one minute. 'We
got the
call about 9:58 this morning from a male passenger stating that he was
locked
in the bathroom of United Flight 93 traveling from Newark to San
Francisco, and
they were being hijacked,' said Glenn Cramer, a 911 supervisor. 'We
confirmed
that with him several times and we asked him to repeat what he said. He
was
very distraught. He said he believed the plane was going down. He did
hear some
sort of an explosion and saw white smoke coming from the plane, but he
didn't
know where. And then we lost contact with him.'" (Jonathan D. Silver
"Day of Terror: Outside Tiny Shanksville, a Fourth Deadly Stroke,"
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 12, 2001)
As many readers are no doubt aware,
there has
been considerable debate within the 9-11 skeptics' community over the
legitimacy
of the phone calls reportedly placed from the hijacked planes,
particularly in
the case of Flight 93. While many, if not most, skeptics seem to favor
the
belief that it would have been impossible for the calls to be placed,
I’m
afraid I must here part company with my fellow skeptics – which I am
sure will
come as quite a shock to readers familiar with my past writings.
According to various media reports from
publications around the country, all of the following calls were placed
by
passengers and crew aboard Flight 93: Passenger Jeremy Glick spoke very
briefly
to his mother-in-law, JoAnne Makely, and then to his wife, Lyzbeth;
passenger
Lauren Grandcolas called and left a message for her husband, Jack;
passenger
Honor Elizabeth Wainio called her step-mother, Esther Heymann; flight
attendant
CeeCee Lyles twice called for her husband, Lorne, the first time
reaching an
answering machine; passenger Mark Bingham talked first to his aunt,
Kathy
Hoglan, and then to his mother, Alice Hoglan; passenger Linda Gronlund
called
her sister, Elsa Strong; passenger Joe DeLuca called his father,
Joseph, Sr.;
passenger Tom Burnett called his wife, Deena (four times); passenger
Andrew
Garcia called his wife, Dorothy; passenger Marion Britton called her
good
friend, Fred Fiumano; flight attendant Sandra Bradshaw called her
husband,
Phil; passenger Louis Nacke called his wife, Amy; passenger Todd Beamer
spoke
at length to GTE Airphone supervisor Lisa Jefferson; and passenger
Edward Felt
called 9-11 operator Glen Cramer to report an explosion and smoke
aboard the
aircraft.
All of these calls were reportedly
placed between
about 9:20 AM, when passengers first realized that the aircraft had
been
hijacked, and 9:58 AM, when Todd Beamer purportedly ended his call to
Lisa
Jefferson with the immortal words, “Let’s roll,” and Ed Felt
frantically placed
a 9-11 call that was abruptly terminated. Eight minutes later, the
plane
purportedly slammed into the ground.
The phone calls, as recounted by the
recipients,
were remarkably consistent in describing the situation that the
passengers and
crew were facing: the distressed callers spoke of three men, all in red
bandannas and all Middle-Eastern in appearance, who had commandeered
the
aircraft. Two of the men had entered the cockpit and presumably taken
control
of the plane. The third, sporting what was undoubtedly a fake bomb
around his
waist, was standing guard over the first class passengers. The thirty
or so
coach passengers, huddled in the back of the plane along with the
flight crew,
were left unguarded, thus explaining how they were all able to use
telephones
during the ordeal. Two individuals, either first class passengers or
members of
the flight crew, had been stabbed and lay dead or dying in the first
class
cabin. A number of passengers and crew members, some probably unaware
that
other passengers were sharing similar thoughts, spoke of taking action
against
the outnumbered hijackers.
So goes the story as reportedly told by
the
passengers of Flight 93. And so goes the story as well as told by our
fearless
leaders in Washington, at least up until the point that the passenger
revolt
began. And therein lies the problem, for the story told by the
passengers, in
conforming too closely to the government’s version of events, poses
problems
for some of the alternative theories that have arisen to explain the
events of
September 11 – in particular, the theory that claims that there were no
actual
hijackers and that the planes were commandeered via remote control, and
the
theory that claims that there weren’t actually any planes used that day
and
that the entire production was nothing but a Hollywood special effects
show.
Since numerous people in the skeptic’s
movement
have warmly embraced one or the other of these two theories, many of
these same
people have expended a considerable amount of energy attempting to
‘debunk’ the
phone calls. Unfortunately, in doing so they have made various claims
that are
themselves, alas, fairly easily debunked.
For example, it has been claimed that
the aluminum skin of a commercial aircraft acts as a shield of sorts
that
prevents or severely restricts the transmission of cell phone calls.
This claim
is belied by the fact that thousands of cell phone calls are
successfully
placed every day from aircraft sitting on the tarmac at airports around
the
world. It has also been claimed that, since cell phone reception is not
very
good even on the ground in the area around Shanksville, it is
preposterous to
suggest that it would be possible to get a cell phone signal in an
airplane
above Shanksville. This argument, however, ignores the fact that none
of the
calls would have been placed when the plane was anywhere near
Shanksville.
During the time that the calls were reportedly made, Flight 93 would
have been
passing over or very near a series of reasonably large population
centers:
Cleveland, Akron and Youngstown, Ohio, followed by Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania. If
Flight 93 came to an end in Shanksville at 10:06 AM, and if it had been
traveling at roughly 500 miles per hour, then it was still about 65
miles
outside of Shanksville when the last calls were placed.
Probably the most commonly encountered
dubious
claim concerning the phone calls is one that is sometimes stated
explicitly and
sometimes just implied: that all the calls reportedly placed from
Flight 93
were made with cell phones. The reality, however, is that the majority
of the
calls appear to have been placed using fairly reliable, though rather
expensive, seatback Airphones. And before you write me angry letters,
let me
save you the trouble, because I already know what you are going to say;
it goes
a little something like this: “at first, they tried to say that all the
calls
were made using cell phones, but then after all us skeptics started
pointing
out that the cell phone calls would have been (either very unlikely or
impossible, depending upon who is telling the story), then they changed
the
story and started saying that the calls were made on Airphones.”
That claim, as it turns out, is also
rather
easily debunked. On September 30, 2001, less than three weeks after the
attacks, the Chicago Tribune published the following report: “In the
cabin,
passengers frantically began making calls, 23 from the seat-back phones
alone
from 9:31 to 9:52 a.m. Others passed cell phones to people who had been
strangers just minutes before.” (Kim Barker, Louise Kiernan and Steve
Mills
“Heroes Stand Up Even in the Hour of Their Deaths,” Chicago Tribune,
September
30, 2001) The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
had already said much the same thing a week and a half earlier when it
was
noted that Todd Beamer’s call “was one of nearly two dozen in-flight
calls from
Flight 93 between 9 and 10 a.m. EDT that day.” (Jim McKinnon “GTE
Operator
Connects With, Uplifts Widow of Hero in Hijacking,” Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette,
September 19, 2001) Even earlier than that, within just a day or two of
the
attacks, it had been reported that Mark Bingham called his mother “from
the air
phone in the seat in front of him,” and that Jeremy Glick “got on a
seat phone
to his wife, Lyzbeth.” (Jaxon Van Derbeken “Bay Area Man’s Last Seconds
of
Bravery,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 12, 2001 and Stacy Finz,
Jaxon Van
Derbeken and Sam McManis “Passengers on S.F. Flight Died Heroes,” San
Francisco
Chronicle, September 13, 2001)
I am not arguing here, by the way, that
because
it was reported in the mainstream press that the calls were placed via
Airphones that it must necessarily be true. What is at issue here is
whether
the reports, regardless of their veracity, preceded the claims by
skeptics that
the calls would have been impossible. And since the reports clearly
came before
the claims of skeptics, there appears to be no merit to the charge that
Washington and the media changed the official story in response to
skepticism
over the phone calls.
It is impossible to know how many cell
phone
calls were placed to supplement the Airphone calls. What we do know is
that
many of the reported calls were very brief, with more than a few ending
abruptly. Andrew Garcia, for example, was only able to get out his
wife’s name, “Dorothy,”
before the connection was lost. It seems reasonable to assume that
calls such
as Garcia’s were the most likely ones to have been placed via cell
phones. And
we know for certain that Edward Felt’s call, which was dropped
prematurely, had
to have been made by cell phone since he indicated that he was calling
from a
restroom, well beyond the reach of an Airphone.
Taking all this into consideration, the
first
question that comes to mind is: what would have been achieved by faking
the
cell phone calls? If the storyline was firmly established by the
Airphone
calls, particularly Jeremy Glick’s detailed 20-30 minute call to his
wife,
Lyzbeth, and Todd Beamer’s 13-15 minute call to Lisa Jefferson, then
why bother
with adding redundant cell phone calls that would be vulnerable to
detection as
fakes? The second question that comes to mind is: if the plan was to
fabricate
cell phone calls, why go to the trouble of manufacturing calls such as
Garcia’s, which did nothing to advance or promote the storyline? And
why fake
Felt’s frantic call, which directly contradicted a key element of the
official
storyline?
If the cell phone calls were faked,
doesn’t it
seem a little odd that the one call that could only have been made from
a cell
phone, Edward Felt’s call from the restroom, is the one that the
government
would prefer that you not know about? (The FBI reportedly seized the
audiotape
of the call, and the operator who fielded it, Glen Cramer, "received
orders not to speak to the media." [John Carlin "Unanswered
Questions: The Mystery of Flight 93," The Independent, August 13,
2002])
And doesn’t it also seem a little odd that during all of the supposedly
fake,
scripted calls, “none of the callers mentioned a fourth hijacker,”
despite the
fact that the official story features not three but four hijackers?
(Kim
Barker, Louise Kiernan and Steve Mills “Heroes Stand Up Even in the
Hour of
Their Deaths,” Chicago Tribune, September 30, 2001)
By most accounts, successfully placing
a cell phone
call from a moving aircraft was not an easy thing to do with the
technology
available in 2001. The problem apparently stems from the fact that an
airplane
quite obviously moves very fast, thus passing through reception ‘cells’
very
quickly. It is extremely difficult, therefore, to get and maintain a
cell phone
signal. It is not, however, impossible.
Imagine that you are trapped on a
speeding
airplane that has been hijacked and you know that, short of some kind
of
miracle, you are living the last minutes of your life. Imagine also
that you
have a cell phone at your disposal, but you realize that it is very
unlikely to
work. During the last, say, forty-five minutes of your life, what do
you think
you would spend most of your time doing? I am going to take a wild
guess here
and say that most people in that situation would spend a considerable
amount of
time frantically punching the numbers of loved ones into their cell
phones and
hitting the “send” button. Repeatedly. And I’m also guessing that,
given the ubiquity
of cell phones these days, there were more than a few of them, from
various
service providers, available to passengers and crew members that day.
So it is
probably safe to say, without exaggeration, that literally hundreds of
cell
phone calls were attempted during the final forty-five minutes
of Flight
93. And even if the calls had, say, a 98% failure rate, we might
reasonably
expect a handful of them to get through, if only long enough to say a
few final words.
The real issue here though, it appears
to me, is
not whether the calls were technologically possible. That seems to be
almost a
moot point. As previously stated, the cell phone calls added nothing to
the
narrative established by the Airphone calls, and no one has argued, as
far as I
know, that Airphones don’t really work. If that were the case, you
would think
there would have been some complaints over the years from all the
people who
have coughed up $7+ per minute to use them. So the real question we
need to ask
here is: were all the calls, regardless of how they were
reportedly
placed, manufactured – presumably to create a patriotic, uplifting
storyline?
There appear to be three primary
theories
concerning the purportedly faked phone calls. It is not really for me
to say
which is the most absurd and/or offensive, but I probably will do so
anyway as
we proceed along.
The first theory holds that there were
no actual
airplanes used, and hence no actual passengers, crew members or
hijackers. And
if there were no airplanes or passengers, then obviously there couldn’t
possibly have been any phone calls placed. How then were they faked?
Easy
enough – they were created out of thin air by the scriptwriters who
wrote the
screenplay for the day’s events. According to this theory, the
passenger lists
were faked and there were no real passengers, so there obviously could
not have
been any real surviving family members either. In other words, all the
people
involved in the phone calls, both callers and recipients, never really
existed
at all. It was all just made up.
If this theory is incorrect and there
were real
victims aboard Flight 93, with real grieving family members, then it is
difficult to imagine how offensive such a theory would be to those
surviving
family members. We would assume, therefore, that any researcher
promoting such
a theory would have carefully done their homework before offering up a
scenario
that could seriously hamper efforts to gain a wider audience for
alternative
9-11 theories.
After all, it would not have been that
difficult
a task. They could have begun by reading through the profiles of each
passenger
and crew member published by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette back in
October 2001.
There they would have found photographs of and biographical information
about
each fake passenger – specific information that can be checked for
authenticity, like family, educational and employment histories, and
names of
surviving family members. With that information in hand, one could then
do a
little sleuthing to determine, for example, whether the purportedly
fake family
members really do exist.
This
really isn’t fucking
rocket science, people. It doesn’t take much time or technical
expertise to
discover, for example, that a Reverend Paul Britton, fake surviving
brother of
fake Flight 93 passenger Marion Britton, still lives and works in the
fake town
of Huntington Station, New York; or to find that Lorne Lyles, fake
husband of
fake flight attendant CeeCee Lyles, now lives in the fake city of
Gibsonton,
Florida, about fifty miles north of the fake address shown on his fake
deceased
wife’s fake drivers license, which also contains a fake photo, fake
drivers
license number, and fake physical description – as does, come to think
of it,
the fake drivers license of fake passenger John Talignani, whose fake
stepson,
Mitchell Zykofsky (pictured below alone and with his fake brothers and
fake stepfather), is still a fake NYPD detective.
It is possible, of
course, that all the grieving relatives (including the fake Beaven
brothers
pictured to the lower right, grieving over the loss of their fake dad)
who descended
upon Shanksville to attend memorial services were all actors. And it is
possible that all the grieving relatives who went on radio and
television to
discuss their losses and, in some cases, the fake phone calls they
received,
were actors as well. It is even possible that to this day, five years
after the
fact, they are still dutifully playing their parts (although at least
one of
them – Melodie
Homer, fake widow of fake co-pilot Leroy Homer – seems to have lost
her
copy of the script). It is also possible that reporters from the
Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette – some of the very same reporters, notably, who were all
but alone
in reporting on such anomalies as the mysterious white jet, the
eight-mile
debris trail, the pre-crash explosions, and the lack of identifiable
aircraft
wreckage at the alleged crash site – decided to toe the government line
by
fabricating richly textured fake lives and fake careers for all the
fake
passengers and fake crew members aboard fake Flight 93. Or maybe the
reporters
were just fooled by the legions of actors the government had in place
ready to
supply fake anecdotes about their fake deceased relatives.
In
this day and age, virtually anything is possible,
I suppose. But is it at all probable? And has anyone made any attempt
to put
together a credible case in support of such a scenario, or have they
just
tossed it out there because they had already firmly hitched their
wagons to a
dubious theory that they must now force all the available evidence to
comply
with? As far as I can see, the latter appears to be the case.
Using a standard ten-point rating
system, I am
going to have to give this theory an 8 on the Offensiveness Scale and
about a 7
on the Absurdity Scale.
Yet
another contender in the dubious theory
competition is the one that claims that the passengers were real, as
were the
relatives who received real telephone calls, but those calls, you see,
were not
actually placed by the passengers, although the various relatives were
all
fooled into believing that they were. How was it done? It’s a rather
complicated scenario, but basically it boils down to this: a special
'war room'
of sorts was set up, staffed by a group of operatives employing special
voice
mimicking software that allowed them to assume the vocal identities, as
it
were, of all the passengers and crew members. In this war room, a movie
of the
scripted event was played, complete with sound effects and appropriate
background noise. This allowed all the operatives to be on the same
page, so to
speak, as they made their calls, relaying information that was actually
transpiring in the movie, not on the actual plane, although the movie
was
perfectly synchronized with the actual movements and flight pattern of
Flight
93. Or something like that. Prior to perpetrating this hoax, of course,
the
conspirators had to obtain, by various cloak and dagger means, samples
of all
the voices that they planned to mimic. And they had to learn enough
about their
forty subjects to know, for example, the names of spouses, parents,
children
and other loved ones. And they had to learn how their subjects
responded to
highly stressful situations, so that they could accurately portray them
in such
a situation. And, perhaps most importantly, they had to learn to
communicate in
that kind of private language that all intimate couples develop over
time, so
that they would be able to fool husbands and wives, as well as parents
and
siblings – so that they could not only speak in the proper voice, but
also use
the right words and phrases.
How were they able to pull this off?
Beats the
hell out of me. All that I can say is that, while I am aware that the
primary
proponent of this theory, A.K. Dewdney, appears to be fairly well
respected
within the 9-11 skeptics community, I am going to have to give his
theory a
solid 9 on the Absurdity Scale, along with a 7 on the Offensiveness
Scale. The
only reason I am not awarding it a perfect 10 is that there is a slight
possibility that someone out there might propose something even more
ludicrous.
For those who would like a more detailed explanation of this theory,
drop by www.physics911.net/cellphoneflight93.htm,
or run a Google search to find some of Dewdney’s other screeds.
Yet another theory that I stumbled upon
while
researching this series of posts posits that the surviving relatives of
the
passengers of Flight 93 are quite real, but they did not receive the
phone
calls that they claim to have received. They are, you see,
co-conspirators of
sorts in that they are willingly lying at the behest of the government
to help
perpetrate this hoax. According to this theory, the victims didn’t
actually die
on Flight 93, but rather died either before September 11 or during the
attacks
on the World Trade Center. Nevertheless, all the families went along
with the
ruse to help manufacture a great story about average Americans as
heroes. Why?
Because, uhmm, all the surviving family members are covert operatives?
… or
because they were all paid handsomely for their complicity? … or, uhhm,
actually, I don’t really know; I didn’t spend enough time with this
particular
theory to weed out all the fine details. Let’s just award it a 9 on
both the
Absurdity and Offensiveness Scales and move on.
One
thing that becomes
clear while wading through all these theories is that a considerable
amount of
time has been devoted to attempts at ‘debunking’ the Flight 93 phone
calls. There
appears to be little doubt, however, that the surviving relatives of
the
passengers and crew members of Flight 93 – like Gordon Felt, to the
left,
brother of Edward Felt – are real people who lost a loved one on
September 11,
2001. And it appears as though they honestly believe that they received
phone
calls from those loved ones as the final minutes of their lives played
out on
that doomed airliner. There is no indication, on the other hand, that
they
didn’t know their husbands and wives and sons and daughters well enough
to know
whether they were talking to real people or a team of electronic Rich
Littles.
And there is no reason to believe that surviving relatives such as
Jerry and
Beatrice Guadagno were complicit in covering up the cause of death of
their
only son, Richard.
However … there are clear indications
that the
most widely publicized call – the keynote call as it were, the
legendary Todd
Beamer “Let’s Roll” call – was fabricated. With the exception of Ed
Felt’s call
reporting an explosion on board, Beamer’s was the only call placed to
someone
other than a family member or close friend. The operator who allegedly
fielded
the call, Lisa Jefferson, knew nothing about the man she allegedly
spoke with
and prayed with. While most of the other calls from Flight 93 were
quite brief,
Beamer purportedly remained on the line for at least 13 minutes (15 by
some
accounts), and yet he inexplicably never asked to be connected to his
wife or
other loved ones, choosing instead, in the final minutes of his life,
to carry
on an extended dialogue with a complete stranger.
Lisa Beamer did not learn of her
husband’s
alleged call until four days later, after which she was allowed to
speak with
Ms. Jefferson, who had been, I’m guessing, suitably prepped. The FBI
had
purportedly been keeping the Beamer call under wraps until the
information
allegedly revealed therein could be reviewed and cleared for release.
To this
day, it appears as though no one has heard a tape of the call or even
seen a
transcript. Lisa Beamer was provided only with what was described as a
“summary” of
the call.
Curiously, Todd Beamer’s boss appears
to have
learned of the “Todd Beamer as America hero” storyline before Lisa
Beamer did,
even though Lisa was supposedly the first civilian informed of the
infamous
phone call. (Rowland Morgan “Flight 93 ‘Was Shot Down’ Claims Book,”
Daily
Mail, August 18, 2006) Even more curiously, Todd Beamer’s boss happens
to be an
executive at the Oracle Corp., whose early history can be found on the
company’s website: “Larry Ellison and Bob Miner were working on a
consulting
project for the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency in USA) where the CIA
wanted
to use this new SQL language that IBM had written a white paper about.
The code
name for the project was Oracle (the CIA saw this as the system to give
all
answers to all questions or something such ;-). The project eventually
died (of
sorts) but Larry and Bob saw the opportunity to take what they had
started and
market it. So they used that project’s codename of Oracle to name their
new
RDBMS engine. Funny thing is, that one of Oracle’s first customers was
the
CIA…” (http://www.orafaq.com/)
Another funny thing is, that the Oracle
Corp. is
what is commonly referred to as a CIA ‘front’ company. But one that is,
at
least, rather candid and cheerful about it.
What then are we to make of Todd
Beamer’s
undocumented phone call? If for no other reason than that Beamer did
not use
any of his 13 minutes of airtime to speak to his wife or another family
member,
the call seems suspect. Less than a week after Flight 93 went down, it
was
reported that, during the time that calls were placed from the
aircraft, “the
phone rang twice [at the Beamer home], stopped, then moments later,
rang once
more. ‘When I picked it up, it was dead air,’ Lisa Beamer said. ‘I feel
fairly
confident that it was Todd. It would be on his mind to call me, to
protect
me.’” (Jaxon Van Derbeken “Bound By Fate, Determination: The Final
Hours of the
Passengers Aboard S.F.-Bound Flight 93,” San Francisco Chronicle,
September 17,
2001)
One would think that it would indeed be
on Todd
Beamer’s mind to call and, if nothing else, say goodbye to his wife and
kids.
But how could he have attempted to do that if he was allegedly already
on the
phone carrying on a lengthy conversation with Lisa Jefferson? Did he
try to
call his wife before calling Jefferson? If so, then why did he suddenly
lose
interest in speaking to her after he got an operator on the line? Did
he try to
call his wife after speaking to Jefferson? If so, then why did he
terminate the
secure connection that he already had rather than just having his call
transferred? That is, after all, the kind of thing that telephone
operators
specialize in.
Was Lisa Jackson fooled by someone
posing as Todd
Beamer? Or was there ever a call placed at all by someone claiming to
be Todd
Beamer? Could the alleged call have been entirely fabricated after the
fact,
during the four days before Lisa Beamer received notification and the
story hit
the press? And if so, then why? Other than adding the “Let’s Roll”
tagline for
the ‘War on Terrorism,’ Beamer’s call added little to the storyline
established
through the other calls, which do not appear to have been faked.
Such are the mysteries still
surrounding United
Airlines Flight 93. In the next installment, we will review some of the
most
popular conspiracy theories concerning the fate of United Airlines
Flight 93,
and, in doing so, possibly find some answers to some of the lingering
questions
surrounding the ‘flight that fought back.’
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