Dismembering the Fairy Tale of Flight 93, Part 1 by Dave McGowan (Nov. 11, 2006)

NEWSLETTER #86
November 4, 2006
September 11, 2001 Revisited

ACT IV: PART I

 We all know the inspiring story of Flight 93, of the heroic passengers who forced the hijacked plane to the ground, sacrificing themselves to save the lives of others. The only trouble is: it may simply not be true ... The shortage of available facts did not prevent the creation of an instant legend – a legend that the US government and the US media were pleased to propagate, and that the American public have been eager, for the most part, to accept as fact.  John Carlin "Unanswered Questions: The Mystery of Flight 93," The Independent, August 13, 2002

Before the official spin set in and United Airlines Flight 93 became forever known as the "Let's Roll" flight, immortalized in numerous articles, web postings, books and movies, early reports from local journalists on the scene strongly suggested a much different scenario than the one sold to the American people. So too does all the available photographic evidence. And the overwhelming majority of eyewitness accounts also paint a much different picture of the fate of Flight 93 than the story sold by Washington and its media cohorts.

That official story, of course, holds that a Boeing 757 that took off for San Francisco, California out of Newark, New Jersey at 8:42 AM, well past its scheduled liftoff time, was hijacked somewhere over Pennsylvania by four knife-wielding terrorists, all wearing red bandannas, with one sporting a fake bomb strapped around his waist. At about 9:35 AM, the aircraft abruptly turned around somewhere over the Cleveland area and began heading back towards Washington, presumably with the intention of impacting a target of strategic importance. From about 9:30 until just before 10:00 AM, as the aircraft headed east over Ohio and Pennsylvania, numerous passengers and crew members frantically placed calls to loved ones. During some of those calls, passengers learned of the attacks in New York and, quickly deducing what their likely fate would be, decided to attempt to overpower the hijackers and gain control of the aircraft. During the ensuing struggle, control of the plane was lost and it plummeted to the ground, plowing into abandoned coal-mining land near Shanksville, Pennsylvania at 10:06 AM, killing all forty-four people on board (seven crew members, four hijackers and thirty-three passengers).

Needless to say, Hollywood just loves the Flight 93 story, with its iconic images of the heroism and patriotism of ordinary Americans. And there quite likely was heroism exhibited aboard that aircraft that day. But perpetuating a lie does nothing to honor the memory of those who died on September 11, particularly if that lie is brazenly exploited by the very people responsible for the death and destruction that day. If we are to do more than just crassly exploit the dead, we first have to understand how they really died.

Despite the magnitude of the events of September 11, 2001, and despite the monumental changes in our lives that have occurred in the aftermath of those attacks, the vast majority of Americans have never bothered to look at any of the details of what happened that day. Having read the above one-paragraph summary of the saga of Flight 93, you, the reader, probably already know more about what supposedly happened in Shanksville that day than the average American. As a nation, we have accepted that our world must fundamentally change as a result of what happened that day, and yet we can’t be bothered with actually taking the time to look at what really did happen that day. We have accepted the notion that torture is now a legitimate tool of the state, and that anyone deemed an enemy of that state can be tried and convicted with ‘evidence’ that need never be revealed. In doing so, we have sacrificed not only our most basic rights, and not only the lives of our sons and daughters, but, most tragically of all, our very humanity, and we have done so on blind faith, never bothering to look at any evidence beyond the endlessly replayed images of crashing jets and collapsing towers.

To say that this is a pathetic state of affairs would be quite an understatement.

Most Americans probably assume that they saw footage of a crashed airplane in Pennsylvania sometime during the day of September 11, 2001, or shortly thereafter. We were, after all, provided with nonstop coverage of the attacks across the television dial for several weeks, so there was certainly ample time to air some footage of the smoldering wreckage of Flight 93, or at least some eyewitnesses describing the wreckage of Flight 93, or maybe a location interview with a rescue worker describing the harrowing task of recovering bodies. But though we may think that we saw such images amid the chaos of that day, we most certainly did not – just as we did not see any footage of aircraft wreckage at the Pentagon.

And we never will, for the simple reason that images such as those do not exist – and if someone were going to manufacture them using Hollywood wizardry, they would have already done so.

Don’t get me wrong here: images of the purported crash site of Flight 93 do exist. Some of those photographs and digital images were taken within minutes of the alleged event, long before any cleanup efforts began. Some of the photographs were even taken by the government’s own crash investigators. None of them, however, depict the site of the actual crash of a large passenger plane. We know this because, as a general rule of thumb, aircraft crash sites contain recognizable aircraft wreckage.

Just as one would expect to find some recognizable vehicle wreckage at the scene of even the most horrendous of car crashes, one likewise expects to find aircraft wreckage at the scene of a plane crash. Historically, at least, that is how these things have always worked, as can be seen in the above photos of various Boeing 7X7 aircraft that have crashed over the years. According to all early reports, however, there was no such wreckage to be seen anywhere near the alleged crash site of Flight 93.

An early report from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, for example, contained several eyewitness accounts, all of which noted a curious lack of recognizable aircraft debris. Co-workers Homer Barron and Jeff Phillips, for example, "drove to the crash scene and found a smoky hole in the ground ... 'It didn't look like a plane crash because there was nothing that looked like a plane,' Barron said. 'There was one part of a seat burning up there,' Phillips said. 'That was something you could recognize.' 'I never seen anything like it,' Barron said. 'Just a big pile of charcoal.'" ("The Crash in Somerset: 'It Dropped Out of the Clouds,'" Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 12, 2001)

Nina Lensbouer, identified as a former volunteer firefighter, told reporters that her "instinct was to run toward it, to try to help. But I got there and there was nothing, nothing there but charcoal. Instantly, it was charcoal." Similarly, "Charles Sturtz, 53, who lives just over the hillside from the crash site, said a fireball 200 feet high shot up over the hill. He got to the crash scene even before the firefighters. 'The biggest pieces you could find were probably four feet [long]. Most of the pieces you could put into a shopping bag." ("The Crash in Somerset: 'It Dropped Out of the Clouds,'" Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 12, 2001)

Mark Stahl, digital camera in hand, was one of the first witnesses on the scene, just minutes after the alleged crash. He had an unobstructed view of the crater and surrounding area, which he took the time to photograph. Nevertheless, he had no clue that he was photographing the site of a purported plane crash: “He didn’t realize a passenger jet had crashed until a firefighter told him.” Ron Delano was another early arrival at the scene; “He was stunned by what he saw. ‘If they hadn’t told us a plane had wrecked, you wouldn’t have known.’” (“Homes, Neighbors Rattled by Crash,” Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, September 12, 2001)

Area resident Eric Peterson, according to the Post-Gazette, "rushed to the scene on an all-terrain vehicle and when he arrived he saw bits and pieces of an airliner spread over a large area of an abandoned strip-mine in Stonycreek Township. 'There was a crater in the ground that was really burning,' Peterson said. Strewn about were pieces of clothing hanging from trees and parts of the Boeing 757, but nothing bigger than a couple of feet long, he said. Many of the items were burning. Peterson said he saw no bodies, but there also was no sign of life." (Jonathan D. Silver "Day of Terror: Outside Tiny Shanksville, a Fourth Deadly Stroke," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 12, 2001)

In a similar vein, a Reuters wire report held that the impact “was so powerful that police investigators who cordoned off the site as a crime scene on Tuesday reported finding no pieces of debris larger than a phone book, and no bodies.” (“Passengers on Flight 93 May Have Struggled With Hijackers,” Reuters, September 12, 2001)

Remarkably enough, the government's own official photographs of the crime scene, introduced as evidence during the hopelessly tainted Zacarias Moussaoui trial earlier this year, confirm those early reports. The three aerial photographs below (which can be enlarged for a better look) reveal that not only was there no significant wreckage visible in the supposed impact crater, there was no significant wreckage visible anywhere near the crater!

According to the official 9-11 narrative, the lack of visible wreckage is attributable to the fact that the plane is actually buried in the ground beneath the crater. Flight 93 impacted with such tremendous force, we are told, that virtually the entire aircraft burrowed into the soil. As we all know, September 11, 2001 was ‘the day that everything changed.’ Enormous office buildings, for example, suddenly and inexplicably acquired the ability to drop into their own footprints with no assistance from demolitions experts. Five-story masonry buildings suddenly acquired the extraordinary ability to swallow enormous airliners without leaving behind an appropriate entry hole or any trace of aircraft wreckage. And now we find, perhaps most amazingly of all, that the ground itself somehow also acquired the ability to swallow commercial aircraft. On that fateful day, and only on that day, a 100+ ton airplane measuring 155 feet long, 125 feet wide and 45 feet tall disappeared into a crater measuring, at most, “about 30 to 40 feet long, 15 to 20 feet wide and 18 feet deep." ("Crews Begin Investigation Into Somerset County 757 Crash," ThePittsburghChannel.com, September 11, 2001)

Any skilled magician, I suppose, could make an airplane disappear into a building. But making an entire airplane disappear without a trace in an empty field? I have to admit that that is pretty impressive.

The patch of soil that purportedly swallowed United Airlines Flight 93 seems to have had some peculiar physical properties. The photo to the left purports to show one of the aircraft's engines being excavated from the alleged impact crater (other parts were allegedly dug out of the ridiculously small hole as well, including the flight recorder, which reportedly burrowed to a depth of about twenty-five feet). Curiously though, several published reports noted that a "section of engine weighing a ton was located 2,000 yards - over a mile - from the crash site." (Richard Wallace "What Did Happen to Flight 93?" Daily Mirror, September 12, 2002; some reports place the engine section at about a third that distance from the 'crash' site, or vaguely specify that it was found a "considerable distance" from the alleged impact crater.)

So what appears to have happened in Shanksville, as best I can determine, is that Flight 93 impacted what MSNBC referred to as "the loose, porous soil of a deserted strip mine" in such a way that the engine on one side of the aircraft burrowed deeply into the ground, while the engine on the other side of the plane, encountering the very same loose soil at the exact same moment in time, snapped off and bounced thousands of feet away! If this had happened on any other day, it would obviously beg for a rational explanation. But since it happened on September 11, 2001, and since we have already established that the physical properties of the world were in a strange state of flux that day, no further explanation is necessary.

If a nose-diving plane did in fact impact relatively soft earth at some 580 miles per hour, as the Warren 9/11 Commission has claimed, then it is conceivable that a portion of the plane could have burrowed into the ground – but certainly not the entire 155-foot-long aircraft. A substantial portion of the plane would surely have been visible jutting out of the alleged impact crater. And if the entire aircraft did somehow plow into the ground, then wouldn’t the buried wreckage consist of a 100-ton compacted mass of metal, fabric and human tissue, rather than a few scattered bits and pieces of the airplane?

If you’re like me, you’re probably wondering right about now what exactly happened to the rest of the airplane. If none of it was visible outside the crater, and only a few pieces were allegedly exhumed from within the crater, then what became of the rest of the plane, along with all its passengers, luggage and cargo?

As it turns out, much of the wreckage was distributed, in tiny bits and pieces, over a debris field of roughly 15 square miles. As the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported, "United Airlines Flight 93, a Boeing 757-200 en route from New Jersey to San Francisco, fell from the sky near Shanksville at 10:06 a.m., about two hours after it took off, leaving a trail of debris five miles long." That trail of debris, it turns out, was later found to extend more than eight miles. (Jonathan D. Silver "Day of Terror: Outside Tiny Shanksville, a Fourth Deadly Stroke," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 12, 2001)

Under normal circumstances, an airplane that nose-dives into the ground and burrows into the soil will not leave a miles-long trail of debris, though an airplane that blows apart in the air certainly will. Flight 93, of course, did not blow apart in the air, so the only explanation for the debris trail, once again, is the mysterious break in the time/space continuum that fateful day.

According to numerous published reports, debris from the aircraft was "found up to 8 miles from the crash site ... Papers and other light objects were carried aloft by the explosion after impact of the plane and they were transported by a nine-knot wind." (Bill Heltzel and Tom Gibb "2 Planes Had No Part in Crash of Flight 93," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 16, 2001) According to my crude calculations, that means that debris allegedly ejected from the plane when it impacted the ground somehow remained aloft for nearly a full hour as it drifted for miles across the local terrain. And this was not, it should be noted, relatively flat terrain that the debris allegedly drifted over. To the contrary, for the detritus to travel the length of the debris field, from the alleged crash site to the town of New Baltimore, it would have had to pass – are you ready for this? – up and over a mountain ridge! "Authorities," understandably enough, "initially insisted crash debris could not have traveled over a mountain ridge more than eight miles from the crash." Those same authorities, however, later came to their senses and insisted that such a scenario was "not only plausible, but probable." (Debra Erdly "Crash Debris Found 8 Miles Away," Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, September 14, 2001)

Much of the debris seems to have landed on the Indian Lake area, roughly two to three miles from the purported 'crash' site. And this was not isolated bits and pieces of debris; what "workers at Indian Lake Marina said they saw [was] a cloud of confetti-like debris descend on the lake and nearby farms." (Tom Gibb, James O'Toole and Cindi Lash "Investigators Locate 'Black Box' From Flight 93; Widen Search Area in Somerset Crash," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 13, 2001) Witness Carol Delasko also spoke of what "looked like confetti raining down all over the air above the lake." (Debra Erdly "Crash Debris Found 8 Miles Away," Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, September 13, 2001)

These witness accounts would seem to indicate that there had been some kind of explosive event in the air above Indian Lake, rather than on the ground a couple miles away. At least one early report quoted witnesses who claimed that an airplane had literally broken apart in the air over the Indian Lake area: "investigators also are combing a second crime scene in nearby Indian Lake, where residents reported hearing the doomed jetliner flying over at a low altitude before 'falling apart on their homes.' 'People were calling in and reporting pieces of plane falling,' a state trooper said. Jim Stop reported he had seen the hijacked Boeing 757 fly over him as he was fishing. He said he could see parts falling from the plane." (Robin Acton and Richard Gazarik "Human Remains Recovered in Somerset," Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, September 13, 2001)

The ‘gopher plane’ theory, alas, provides no explanation for these reports and witness accounts. How is it possible, after all, for an airplane to hit the ground intact and burrow underground, and yet simultaneously break up into thousands of pieces that come to rest up to eight miles away, on the other side of a mountain ridge? And while we ponder that question, here is another one that begs for an answer: what became of the aircraft's considerable load of aviation fuel (given that Flight 93 was fueled for a cross-country flight)?

Some of that fuel purportedly burned up in a fireball that arose from the crash site, but if the plane did in fact burrow into the ground, then logic dictates that a substantial amount of the fuel load would have been injected into the loose soil. The reality, however, is that no trace of jet fuel was found in any of the soil excavated from the crater and the surrounding area: "By today, Environmental Resources Management Inc. of Pine, a contractor hired by United, expects to return 5,000 to 6,000 cubic yards of soil to the 50-foot hole dug around the crater left by the crash. The soil is being tested for jet fuel, and at least three test wells have been sunk to monitor groundwater, since three nearby homes are served by wells, Betsy Mallison, a state Department of Environmental Protection spokeswoman, said. So far, no contamination has been discovered, she said." (Tom Gibb "Latest Somerset Crash Site Findings May Yield Added IDs," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, October 3, 2001)

Also missing from the crater was any sign of the forty-four humans reportedly on board the plane. You would think that, at the very least, the remains of the flight crew and/or hijackers, who would have been in the nose of the aircraft when it plowed into the ground, would have ended up at the bottom of the Shanksville crater. But there is no indication from any local or national reports that any human remains were exhumed from that crater. As the Washington Post reported, “Immediately after the crash, the seeming absence of human remains led the mind of coroner Wally Miller to a surreal fantasy: that Flight 93 had somehow stopped in mid-flight and discharged all of its passengers before crashing. ‘There was just nothing visible,’ he says. ‘It was the strangest feeling.’ It would be nearly an hour before Miller came upon his first trace of a body part." (Peter Perl “Hallowed Ground,” Washington Post, May 12, 2002)

Perhaps when the plane stopped to discharge its passengers, it also jettisoned its load of fuel.

Despite extensive recovery efforts, nothing resembling a human corpse was ever found, officially at least, anywhere within the eight-mile-long debris field. According to the official storyline, all that was recovered, “apart from, here and there, a finger, a toe or a tooth … were small pieces of tissue and bone.” (John Carlin "Unanswered Questions: The Mystery of Flight 93," The Independent, August 13, 2002) The largest piece of human tissue reportedly found was “a section of spine eight inches long.” (Richard Wallace "What Did Happen to Flight 93?" Daily Mirror, September 12, 2002) No torsos, no arms, no legs, no hands, no feet – not even a head, or at least a portion of one of the forty-four skulls.

To briefly recap then, what we have learned thus far is that United Airlines Flight 93, as per the official narrative, nose-dived into some former strip-mining land in rural Pennsylvania. Encountering loosely packed soil, the entire aircraft, or at least a significant portion of it, slipped rather effortlessly into the ground. A small portion of the aircraft, however – the portion containing all the passengers and flight crew, and all the luggage, and all the cargo, and all the fuel, and the vast majority of the airplane itself – exploded on the ground and was reduced to scraps that soared over mountaintops to reach destinations up to eight miles away.

Such a scenario, while laughably absurd, is no harder to believe than most of the other claims that we have been fed concerning the events of September 11, so there is little reason to suspect that we have been lied to about the fate of Flight 93. But just to be sure, we should probably look a little deeper into the ‘crash’ of Flight 93.

Dismembering the Fairy Tale of Flight 93, Part 2 by Dave McGowan( Nov. 11, 2006)

NEWSLETTER #87
November 4, 2006
September 11, 2001 Revisited

ACT IV: PART II

We next turn to the case of the mysterious white military jet that either was circling low and fast over the Shanksville area both before and after the alleged crash of Flight 93 (according to a number of eyewitnesses interviewed independently by various reporters), or did not exist at all (according to the authors of the official 9/11 narrative).

As the UK’s Daily Mirror recounted on the first anniversary of the attacks, "The unmarked military-style jet swooped down at high speed through the valley, twice circled the smouldering black scar where Flight 93 had careened into the ground just seconds earlier and then hurtled off over the horizon. At least six eyewitnesses saw the mysterious aircraft on the morning of September 11 last year. But the US authorities deny it ever existed ... What was the white jet doing there and why won't they admit to its presence?" (Richard Wallace "What Did Happen to Flight 93?" Daily Mirror, September 12, 2002)

By my count, there were far more than six eyewitnesses who reported seeing what was fairly consistently described as a white, rear-engine, military-type jet bearing no identifying markings and flying very fast and very low, just above treetop level. Reporter Jeff Pillets of Bergen County, New Jersey’s The Record spoke in separate interviews with five of these witnesses, all “residents who live and work less than four miles from the crash site”:

Susan Mcelwain of Stoneycreek Township said a small white jet with rear engines and no discernible markings swooped low over her minivan near an intersection and disappeared over a hilltop, nearly clipping the tops of trees lining the ridge. It was less than a minute later, Mcelwain said, that the ground shook and a white plume of smoke appeared over the ridge … About a mile north on Buckstown Road, Dennis Decker and Rick Chaney were at work making wooden pallets when they heard an explosion and came running outside to watch a large mushroom cloud spreading over the ridge. ‘As soon as we looked up, we saw a midsized jet flying low and fast,’ Decker said. ‘It appeared to make a loop or part of a circle, and then it turned fast and headed out.’ Decker and Chaney described the plane as a Lear-jet type, with engines mounted near the tail and painted white with no identifying markings … Susan Custer said she saw a small white jet streaking overhead. ‘Then I heard the boom and saw the mushroom cloud.’ Robin Doppstadt was working inside her family food-and-supply store when she heard the crash. When she went outside, she said, she saw a small white jet that looked like it was making a single circle over the crash site. ‘The it climbed very quickly and took off.’” (Jeff Pillets “In Rural Hamlet, the Mystery Mounts; 5 report second plane at PA Crash Site,” The Record, September 14, 2001)

Meanwhile, “At least four witnesses who were at the crash scene within five minutes of the crash told WTAE’s Paul Van Osdol that they saw another plane in the area. Somerset County resident Jim Brandt said that he saw another plane in the area. He said it stayed there for one or two minutes before leaving. Another Somerset County resident, Tom Spinello, said that he saw the plane. He said that it had high back wings. Both men said that the plane had no markings on it, either civilian or military.” (“Alleged Partial Flight 93 Cockpit Transcript Obtained,” ThePittsburghChannel.com, September 12, 2001) Spinello later told the Daily Mirror: “I saw the white plane. It was flying around all over the place like it was looking for something. I saw it before and after the crash.” (Richard Wallace "What Did Happen to Flight 93?" Daily Mirror, September 12, 2002)

Reporters from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review also encountered residents who spoke of a mysterious jet: “At least two witnesses in Shanksville said they saw a large plane circling the crash site following the explosion. About two or three minutes after the explosion, the airplane climbed into the sky almost vertically, the witnesses said. ‘It sure wasn’t no puddle jumper,’ said Bob Page, general sales manager at Shanksville Dodge. Page said he could not see if there were any markings on the plane or what kind it was.” (“Homes, Neighbors Rattled By Crash,” Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, September 12, 2001)

Elsewhere, John Feegle was identified as yet another eyewitness. He said that the jet “didn’t look like a commercial plane. It had a real goofy tail on it, like a high tail. It circled around, and it was gone.” (Rowland Morgan “Flight 93 ‘Was Shot Down’ Claims Book,” Daily Mail, August 18, 2006) Kathy Bates, who was at her summer cottage just a quarter-mile from the alleged crash site, saw the plane as well: “Blades and her son ran outside after the crash and saw the jet, with sleek back wings and an angled cockpit, race overhead … she said she was so shocked by the crash she can’t say exactly how long after the impact it was.” (William Bunch “We Know It Crashed, But Not Why,” Philadelphia Daily News, November 15, 2001) Lee Purbaugh, who will be discussed later in this post, has also claimed that he saw the white jet.

It appears as though Shanksville residents were eager to talk about the mystery jet to any reporter who would listen. It’s odd then that, with the national press descending on the area in the days following September 11, 2001, the story of the unidentified white jet remains, to this day, little known outside of that rural community.

Despite the numerous witness reports, officials initially denied that there were any other aircraft, military or civilian, in the Shanksville area at the time of the ‘crash’ of Flight 93. A few days after the attacks, however, the official position abruptly changed and the FBI was assigned the task of offering an explanation that was apparently designed to quiet down the troublesome locals: "Hoping to dispel rumors that United Airlines Flight 93 might have been shot down by military aircraft, the FBI Saturday said that two other planes were in the area but had nothing to do with the hijacked flight crashing in western Pennsylvania. The FBI said that a civilian business jet flying to Johnstown was within 20 miles of the low-flying airliner, but at an altitude of 37,000 feet. That plane was asked to descend to 5,000 feet -- an unusual maneuver -- to help locate the crash site for responding emergency crews. The FBI said that is probably why some witnesses say they saw another plane in the sky shortly after Flight 93 crashed at 10:10 a.m. [sic] Tuesday in a grassy field near Shanksville, about 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh." ("FBI Explains Other Planes at Flight 93 Crash," ThePittsburghChannel.com, September 15, 2001)

In August 2002, John Carlin of the UK's Independent deconstructed that official fable: "The FBI has said, on the record, that the plane was a civilian business jet, a Falcon, that had been flying within 20 miles of Flight 93 and was asked by the authorities to descend from 37,000ft to 5,000ft to survey and transmit the co-ordinates of the crash site 'for responding emergency crews'. The reason, as numerous people have observed, why this seems so implausible is that, first, by 10.06am on 11 September, all non-military aircraft in US airspace had received loud and clear orders more than half an hour earlier to land at the nearest airport; second, such was the density of 911 phone calls from people on the ground, in the Shanksville area, as to the location of the crash site that aerial co-ordinates would have been completely unnecessary; and, third, with F-16s supposedly in the vicinity, it seems extraordinarily unlikely that, at a time of tremendous national uncertainty when no one knew for sure whether there might be any more hijacked aircraft still in the sky, the military would ask a civilian aircraft that just happened to be in the area for help."

Who knew that at a time when no one knew for sure what was going on in America's skies and any civilian aircraft still in the air was considered a possible threat, authorities were calling on random, unidentified civilian pilots to do the work of the US military?

There are, alas, other problems with the government's belated explanation for the presence of the second aircraft, not the least of which is the fact that several of the witnesses specifically reported seeing the jet before the crash, which would seem to rule out the possibility that the mystery aircraft was there doing some impromptu, post-crash surveillance work. In addition, virtually all of the witnesses described the jet as flying extremely low, not much above treetop level, which is just a tiny bit lower than the 5,000 feet claimed by the FBI. And one final problem: all civilian planes – with the exception, of course, of those involved in ‘black ops’ – are required to bear readily identifiable markings.

Susan McElwain, who lives just two miles from the alleged crash site, "knows what she saw - the white plane rocketed directly over her head. 'It came right over me, I reckon just 40 or 50 ft. above my mini-van,' she recalled. 'It was so low I ducked instinctively. It was traveling real fast, but hardly made any sound ... There's no way I imagined this plane - it was so low it was virtually on top of me. It was white with no markings but it was definitely military, it just had that look ... The FBI came and talked to me and said there was no plane around. Then they changed their story and tried to say it was a plane taking pictures of the crash 3,000 feet up. But I saw it and it was there before the crash and it was 40ft above my head. They did not want my story - nobody here did.'" (Richard Wallace "What Did Happen to Flight 93?" Daily Mirror, September 12, 2002)

In addition to the numerous witnesses who saw the white jet, the Daily Mirror noted that further "verification that some kind of military aircraft was operating in the area is scientifically irrefutable. At 9:22am a sonic boom - caused by supersonic flight - was picked up by an earthquake monitoring station in southern Pennsylvania, 60 miles from Shanksville." (Richard Wallace "What Did Happen to Flight 93?" Daily Mirror, September 12, 2002) Another UK newspaper, The Independent, cited additional evidence suggesting the presence of military aircraft, including a report from “a federal flight controller published a few days [after the attacks] in a newspaper in New Hampshire: that an F-16 had been 'in hot pursuit' of the hijacked United jet and 'must have seen the whole thing.' Also there was one brief report on CBS television before the crash that two F-16 fighters were tailing Flight 93." (John Carlin "Unanswered Questions: The Mystery of Flight 93," The Independent, August 13, 2002)

It is difficult to conceive of any rational explanation for why interceptor aircraft would not have been shadowing Flight 93. As John Carlin reports, "What the government acknowledges is that the first fighters with the mission to intercept took off at 8.52am; that another set of fighters took off from Andrews Air Force base near Washington at 9.35am – precisely the time that Flight 93 turned almost 180 degrees off course towards Washington and the hijacker pilot was heard by air-traffic controllers to say that there was 'a bomb aboard'. Flight 93, whose menacing trajectory was made known by the broadcast media almost immediately, did not go down for another 31 minutes." (John Carlin "Unanswered Questions: The Mystery of Flight 93," The Independent, August 13, 2002) The Daily Mirror added that "military officials ... were informed that it was a suspected hijack at 9:16am, 50 minutes before the plane came down." (Richard Wallace "What Did Happen to Flight 93?" Daily Mirror, September 12, 2002)

So I guess what happened is this: even though the entire country was following the events live on television and knew what was happening, the U.S. Department of Defense – which, after all, has the words “U.S.” and “defense” right there in its moniker – had not yet figured out that responding to the crisis might be a good use of taxpayer money. In fact, the military was feeling so lethargic that when the fourth hijacked flight of the morning went down, the Pentagon responded with (or so we are to believe): “Most of our guys are on break right now; can’t you track down a local pilot that has failed to comply with orders to touch down at the nearest airport and have him go take a look?” And that is why, you see, there never actually was a military jet in the area, even though numerous witnesses saw a military jet, and at least one air traffic controller tracked a military jet, and an earthquake monitoring station recorded the presence of a military jet.

There was, however, “a C-130 military cargo aircraft about 17 miles away that saw smoke or dust near the crash site, but that plane wasn't armed and had no role in the crash. That plane was flying at 24,000 feet.” That plane, flying at an altitude of nearly five miles, was clearly not the aircraft seen by Shanksville residents, so it is unclear why the FBI acknowledged its presence. It is unclear, for that matter, if it actually was present. If it was, it could have, if outfitted with the right communications technology, served as a very effective mobile command post. ("FBI Explains Other Planes at Flight 93 Crash," ThePittsburghChannel.com, September 15, 2001)

In a rather strange twist, a Lt. Col. Steve O’Brien belatedly came forward to claim that the C-130 that purportedly flew over the Shanksville site after the alleged crash of Flight 93 was, amazingly enough, the very same C-130 that, a half-hour earlier, had been seen flying over the Pentagon at the time of the alleged crash of Flight 77! As O’Brien himself said in an interview (click on video link to the left), “You just wonder how you could be at two places that geographically separate at those exact times and witness both those events.”

According to his interviewer, O’Brien “saw firsthand the end of American Flight 77 and United 93.” So here we have a most remarkable witness: the only man on the planet who claims to have been a witness to two separate events that, if the available evidence is to be believed, never actually happened. Flights 77 and 93 are, as far as I can ascertain, the only two passenger jets in aviation history to crash without leaving behind any visible aircraft wreckage, and Colonel O’Brien, curiously enough, bore witness to the demise of both of these uniquely self-destructing planes. What are the odds of that happening?

Actually, the odds are pretty good, I suppose, considering that September 11 was a day on which the impossible became possible and the improbable became commonplace. Consider that in all of modern history, only three steel-framed towers have experienced complete spontaneous collapses; all three fell on September 11, 2001. In the last 30 or so years, only four aircraft have been successfully hijacked in US airspace; all four were on September 11, 2001. So it shouldn’t come as any great surprise that September 11 was also the day that both immaculate plane crashes took place, and that one man witnessed both of these extraordinary events. That’s just the kind of day that it was.

Unfortunately, however, O’Brien seems to have trouble keeping the details of his story straight, which doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in him as a witness. In the video interview, we hear that “O’Brien speaks of an unusually clear and beautiful summer day along the East Coast. But the splendor of that summer morning ultimately gave a more clear view of the first horrific sight of his day [the alleged crash of Flight 77 at the Pentagon].” But when O’Brien spoke to the Minnesota Star-Tribune, he said that when he was allegedly asked to shadow Flight 77 over Washington, he “had a hard time picking him out” because of “all the East Coast haze.” (Bob Von Sternberg “How We’ve Changed,” Minnesota Star-Tribune, September 11, 2002)

O’Brien also told the Star-Tribune that, after passing over the Pentagon, “He flew west, not exactly sure where he was supposed to land. Somewhere over western Pennsylvania, O’Brien looked down at a blackened, smoldering field. ‘I hoped it was just a tire fire or something, but when I checked with Cleveland center, he told me he’d just lost a guy off the scope petty close to where we saw it. By then, we were able to patch in AM radio, so we heard about all the planes. It was like a domino effect – a really bad day for airplanes.” About a year and a half later, in May 2004, O’Brien told Minnesota Public Radio a much different story: “In a recent interview, Lt. Col. Steve O’Brien, commander of Gopher 06, says he remembers seeing a big explosion … Through the haze the shape of the Pentagon emerged where the explosion had occurred. The crew alerted the controllers and tuned in a newscast using navigation radios. ‘The first thing we heard on there was ‘We’re now hearing about a second airplane hitting the World Trade Center.’ That was not what we were expecting to hear. We were expecting to hear about an airplane impacting the Pentagon, and they haven’t even mentioned that yet,’ says O’Brien. ‘They’re just talking about a second airplane hitting the World Trade Center, and the light goes on, and it’s like, ‘Oh my God, the nation’s under attack!’’” (Bill Catlin “Museum Features Air Guard’s History and Role in the War on Terror,” Minnesota Public Radio, May 31, 2004)

 Now, you would think that, given the significance of the events of that day and the impact they had on his life, Lt. Col. O’Brien would remember clearly whether the skies over Washington were crystal clear or hazy that morning, and whether he learned that the nation was under attack after viewing the alleged Pentagon crash scene or after viewing the alleged Pennsylvania crash scene. You would also think that, if his crew had in fact tuned in a newscast right after the explosion at the Pentagon – which occurred more than a half-hour after the second WTC tower was hit, on live television – the first thing they would have heard would not likely have been “We’re now hearing about a second airplane hitting the World Trade Center,” as if it had just happened moments before. By the time of the attack on the Pentagon, every station on the dial had already replayed the footage of the second tower strike approximately 12 times.

There is one other minor problem with O’Brien’s story: if, as he has maintained in all the interviews that he has done, he called in the location of the smoke cloud immediately after the alleged crash of Flight 93, then why did authorities need to purportedly call in a local civilian pilot to provide those coordinates?

During the 2004 interview with MPR, O’Brien revealed that there was a little surprise awaiting him after he came forward with his story: “the story turned up on the Internet as part of a conspiracy theory maintaining that no plane hit the Pentagon. ‘To be called a liar and a part of a government conspiracy kind of affected me.’” As a public service, I would offer O’Brien the following free advice that may help him to avoid such accusations in the future: first, try to tell your story in a reasonably consistent manner (if you have to, write it down and memorize it); second, make sure that your story is consistent with the known timeline of events and other aspects of the official story; and third, don’t worry too much about what us nutty conspiracy theorists are saying, because as long as your story bolsters the government account, you can tell it any way you like and no one in the ‘real’ media is going to call you on it.

You can even tell a story like this little gem out of Cambodia, which ran in my own hometown newspaper and various others on October 31, 2006, and no one in the American media establishment will seriously question the utter absurdity of the claims made therein: “Cambodian authorities said a San Francisco police officer accused of having sex with a 14-year-old girl killed himself while in custody in Phnom Penh. Donald Rene Ramirez, who had denied the offense, ‘committed suicide by firing two bullets into his mouth,’ said capital police officer Keo Thea.” (“U.S. Police Officer Dies in Custody,” Los Angeles Times, October 31, 2006) Elsewhere it was reported that, shockingly enough, “reporters in Phnom Penh were not allowed into the police station to verify the official account.” (“Officer in Child Sex case Reportedly Kills Self,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 31, 2006)

Many readers will recall that more than a few eyebrows were raised when investigative journalist Gary Webb seemingly pioneered the concept of the double-shot-to-the-head suicide. But now we find that Mr. Ramirez has raised the bar further still, by not only duplicating Webb’s unprecedented accomplishment, but doing so while incarcerated! Not only did Ramirez have to pull off the difficult task of operating a firearm with a bullet already lodged in his brain, he first had to acquire the weapon, which is itself no easy task for someone who had spent the last couple days in a Phnom Penh jail cell. But here, perhaps, I may have digressed – though I have to add, while we’re still on the subject, that I won’t really know what to make of this story until Mike Ruppert weighs in to offer his professional opinion.

Returning then to our discussion of Lt. Col. O’Brien, it appears as though he belatedly came forward with his story on the first anniversary of the attacks. As many readers have probably noticed, September 11 anniversaries have served as opportunities for the vast American media machine to crank up the volume of the propaganda campaign, attempting, as always, to silence any and all critics of the official story. O’Brien appears to be very much a part of this phenomenon. In all likelihood, he was sent forth by his handlers for the specific purpose of bolstering elements of the official story that were under attack: specifically, that Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon and that Flight 93 crashed into a field in Shanksville.

Colonel O’Brien, it appears, saw it all. Case closed. And as an added benefit, he also managed to explain away the supposedly benign presence of military aircraft at both ‘crash’ sites. All in all, not too bad for a day’s work.

No investigation of the fate of Flight 93 would be complete without a brief discussion of another star witness, Lee Purbaugh, whose claim to fame is being the only eyewitness on the ground to see the crash of the doomed airliner. The Daily Mirror described Purbaugh as "the only person to see the last seconds of Flight 93 as it came down on former strip-mining land at precisely 10:06am," and his story was told as follows: "He was working at the Rollock Inc. scrapyard on a ridge overlooking the point of impact, less than half a mile away. 'I heard this real loud noise coming over my head,' he told the Daily Mirror. 'I looked up and it was Flight 93, barely 50ft above me. It was coming down in a 45 degree and rocking from side to side. Then the nose suddenly dipped and it just crashed into the ground. There was this big fireball and then a huge cloud of smoke.'" (Richard Wallace "What Did Happen to Flight 93?" Daily Mirror, September 12, 2002)

Similarly, The Independent characterized Purbaugh as being "the only person present in the field where, at 10:06am, the aircraft hit the ground." Purbaugh relayed to Independent reporter John Carlin this version of his alleged eyewitness account: "There was an incredibly loud rumbling sound and there it was, right there, right above my head – maybe 50ft up. It was only a split second but it looked like it was moving in slow motion, like it took forever. I saw it rock from side to side then, suddenly, it dipped and dived, nose first, with a huge explosion, into the ground. I knew immediately that no one could possibly have survived." (John Carlin "Unanswered Questions: The Mystery of Flight 93," The Independent, August 13, 2002)

Purbaugh's ‘eyewitness’ testimony is significant in that it differs from other witness accounts in three crucial respects: first, he is the only witness to claim that he actually saw the plane plow into the ground; second, Purbaugh maintains that Flight 93 was intact and not emitting any visible smoke when it impacted the ground; and third, he has stated quite specifically that the white mystery jet that he saw was not a military plane. He bases that assessment, naturally enough, on his experience in the US Navy. I am sure that all of you are just as shocked as I am to find that the only eyewitness on the ground in Shanksville whose testimony supports several aspects of the official narrative is a military man.

That fact alone, of course, is not enough to justify dismissing Purbaugh's eyewitness account. But there are also, unfortunately, clear indications that Lee Purbaugh probably is fibbing just a little bit.

How do we know this? First of all, his story has changed dramatically from its original telling. As quoted by MSNBC, Purbaugh's initial account went something like this: "I heard this loud noise, and I happened to look up. And this jet come right straight over my head. And it went real low. And it probably crashed down, it went nose to tail." (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14789502/page/5/) Somewhere along the way, it appears, Purbaugh’s initial observation that the plane “probably crashed” somehow morphed into an eyewitness account of the actual crash. And to spice things up, he even tossed a white jet sighting into the mix, although the white jet that he saw was definitely non-military.

Even if Purbaugh hadn't obviously embellished his story, his tale of the alleged crash would still be rather difficult to believe. Flight 93, it will be recalled, was purportedly plummeting from the skies at a speed of nearly 600 MPH. According to Purbaugh, he first caught sight of the plane when it was just 50 feet off the ground, traveling on a downward 45° trajectory. We can then deduce that he observed the aircraft only during its last 75 feet (more or less) of flight, a distance that the speeding aircraft would have covered – based on a conservative estimate of a speed of 500 MPH – in roughly 1/10 of a second!

In the real world, Purbaugh would not even have had enough time to react and turn his head before the aircraft plowed into the ground. And even if he did turn to look, the plane would have registered as, at best, nothing more than a split-second blur. The notion that he could have watched it rocking from side to side, and then dipping and diving, is ridiculous. As a matter of fact, so is the notion that he could have looked up and seen it at all at an altitude of fifty feet, as though it were frozen in suspended animation rather than traveling downward at an official speed of 850 feet per second.

I believe that Lee Purbaugh could be Shanksville's answer to the legions of dubious Pentagon witnesses (as one reporter noted, “Purbaugh’s account was perhaps the nearest of all the witness testimony to the official version of the story.”) True, he is greatly outnumbered by his fellow travelers at the Pentagon, but you have to factor in that it is bound to be a lot harder to dig up compliant eyewitnesses in rural Shanksville than it is in Washington. (Rowland Morgan “Flight 93 ‘Was Shot Down’ Claims Book,” Daily Mail, August 18, 2006)

I am not suggesting here, by the way, that Purbaugh was ‘part of the conspiracy,’ so to speak – a witness planted in advance to be there to ‘see’ what he was supposed to see. If that were the case, then there would have been more than one witness conveniently placed near the scene, and each of them would have gotten the government-approved script right from the beginning. What I am suggesting is that Mr. Purbaugh was undoubtedly questioned at length about what he had seen on the morning of September 11, and during that questioning, he most likely was asked leading questions designed to impress upon the witness what he should have seen, and Mr. Purbaugh – being a military man, and seeing an opportunity to please his superiors – decided to do his patriotic duty by becoming the only witness to recall actually seeing Flight 93 plow into the ground.

It was the least he could do, given that authorities weren’t having much luck locating witnesses in Shanksville who had seen what the government wanted them to see. The situation was so bad, in fact, that a ringer had to be flown in from the Minnesota Air Guard. Whatever works, I guess.

Dimembering the Fairy Tale of Flight 93, Part 3 by Dave McGowan (Nov. 11, 2006)

NEWSLETTER #88
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.

Jason Dahl	LeRoy Homer, Jr.	Lorraine Bay	Sandra Bradshaw	Cee Cee Lyles	Wanda Green	Mark Bingham	Deora Bodley
Deborah Anne Jacobs Welsh	Christian Adams	Todd Beamer	Alan Beaven	Marion Britton	Linda Gronlund	Honor Elizabeth Wainio	Joseph DeLuca
Georgine Rose Corrigan	Willam Cashman	Edward Porter Felt	Thomas E. Burnett Jr.	Andrew Garcia	Waleska Martinez	Toshiya Kuge	Jane Folger
Donald Peterson	Patricia Cushing	Colleen L. Fraser	Patrick "Joe" Driscoll	Jeremy Glick	Hilda Marcin	Louis J. Nacke II	Kristin Gould White
Jean Peterson	Lauren Grandcolas	Christine Snyder	Richard Guadagno	Donald F. Greene	John Talignani	Mark "Mickey" Rothenberg	Nicole Miller

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.’