Hidden in Plane Sight

June 13, 2003

After spending some time carefully examining a website that published photos of the aftermath of 9/11 at the Pentagon, it became very clear to me that there was a missing plane and 64 missing people. 

I decided to check the manifest of those killed on Flight 77, which informed me that there were  only 50 passengers and 6 crew listed.  Apparently, there were families who didn't want to list the names of their loved ones killed on the flights of 9/11. (See also: HERE)

Both of the above linked sites lists the names of those killed on flight 77.  There's also an area to click on for those who were killed at the Pentagon, and the other flights.

Now, what strikes me as curious is the number of people claimed to have been killed at the Pentagon: 125 fatalities.  I was under the  impression that this was a construction zone where it was not likely that the offices would be occupied.  In fact, in many of the Pentagon photos, you can see large spools of cable near the point of impact.  Next, if you look at the damage sustained by the building, it seems hard to believe so large a number of fatalities.  It seems like a lot of people for such a small area. 

Going back to consider the victims on Flight 77, I wanted to know a little bit more about them. This was an event that I grieved over for weeks and I wanted to know the human beings I was grieving for. As I read the list, I also began to want some answers.

Why?

Well, if you look at the occupations of the passengers of Flight 77, you get a strange feeling that something is wrong with this picture:

an electrical engineer with BAE Systems.

 2 Boeing propulsion engineers

1 Boeing engineer

a senior vice president for government relations at the Washington office of Genzyme, a biotechnology firm ~ governing cellular therapies

a physician who worked with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the surgeon general to address racial and ethnic disparities in health.

a man who worked on data systems for NASA and also developed data systems for the study of global and regional environmental issues.  Along with his family....

a retired Navy admiral/retired American Airlines pilot

a senior executive at the Defense Department

a chief operating officer of Metrocall Inc., a wireless data and messaging company.

an associate director of clinical research for a biotech firm.

a retired chemist.

a director of medical affairs, IPC

a vice president for softward development, EM Solutions, Inc.

a technical manager, XonTech Inc.

a technical group manager, XonTech Inc.

There were also a number of children along with their teachers, who were chosen by National Geographic Alliance Coordinators for this trip.  One of the teachers had this said about the trip:  "She was originally supposed to go to Florida, but two weeks ago they changed it  and told her she was going to California,"

And of course, there was Barbara Olsen, attorney, CNN Commentator and wife of the United States Solicitor General.

Family members of one of the flight attendants commented that "she was trained five years ago in how to deal with a hijacking.

One of the passengers, John D. Yamnicky Sr, was a retired naval aviator who worked for Veridian Corp., a defense contractor, since his retirement as a captain in 1979.

"He had done a number of black programs -- which means top-secret," said his son. "We were given no details."

One of the passengers, William E. Caswell, a graduate of Princeton University, was a third-generation physicist whose work at the Navy was so classified that his family knew very little about what he did each day. They don't even know exactly why he was headed to Los Angeles on the doomed American Airlines Flight 77.

 As you can see, it's a pretty impressive manifest.  A lot of knowledgeable and skillful people.  I haven't checked the passenger occupations for the other flights lost on September 11. But with just this one flight, a lot of questions come to mind.

With so many questions coming up, I decided that I wanted to know more, and it seemed obvious to try to find what the witnesses of the crash had to say. So, I went looking for the stories of the eyewitnesses. 

One of the witnesses, an Army Captain named Lincoln Liebner, reported the following:

"I saw this large American Airlines passenger jet coming in fast and low".  "Captain Liebner says the  aircraft struck a helicopter on the helipad, setting fire to a fire truck." 

Helicopter?  Fire truck?  Do they always have fire trucks sitting at the Pentagon?

Some eyewitnesses believe the plane actually hit the ground at the base of the Pentagon first, and then skidded into the building. Investigators say that's a possibility, which if true, crash experts say may well have saved some lives. However, it is hard to credit this when looking at the photos.  

Radar shows Flight 77 did a downward spiral, turning almost a complete circle and dropping the last 7,000 feet in two-and-a-half minutes. The steep turn was so smooth, the sources say, it's clear there was no fight for control going on. And the complex maneuver suggests the hijackers had better flying skills than many investigators first believed. The jetliner disappeared from radar at 9:37 and less than a minute later it clipped the tops of street lights and plowed into the Pentagon at 460 mph.

.."from the first floor of the building to the second floor, 7 1/2 to 8 1/2 yards high. It is as wide as the two windows above (5 1/2 to 6 1/2 yards). It would appear that  the wall between the building's two supporting pillars has been removed."

Also note the lack of broken windows around the impact site.

Something just does not fit here.

"...walls of the interior are not only unblemished, but show no signs of soot, smoke or heat damage. On the upper floor, to the left of one of the support columns, one can plainly see a green file cabinet with a computer monitor or TV on top of it. Two floors below one can plainly see a wooden stool with an open book on top of it. Are we to believe that a plane with 8,600 gallons of fuel would not generate a fireball and enough heat to singe the pages of an open book only feet away? or to melt the plastic case of a monitor?"

So, where's the plane and all the people?  Where's the wreckage? A Boeing 757 has a wingspan of 124 ft., 10 in., an overall length of 155 ft., 3 in., a tail height of 44 ft., 6 in., and the maximum fuel capacity is 11,489 gallons. But there is absolutely nothing in the photographs of the Pentagon crash to support the claims that a plane of this size plowed into the building.

The pictures that were released to the public of the actual crash, and there are many duplicate sites, all show the second picture in the series brighter, with even the ground having a blue cast in areas as if to cover shadows.  Also, this second picture appears to be framed in a circle.  The Pentagon in the first shot is so blurred, it's hard to see the small building  that's built very close to it.  The second picture, the impact picture, illuminates this building and brings it into focus. You can see the trees to the left of this small  building. 

One site has a picture showing the Pentagon's lawn, the second  from the bottom. In this picture of Mr. Rumsfeld and  two other men, you can clearly see that same building.  Is this an optical illusion?  Or is this small building actually closer to the Pentagon than it appears in the traffic survelliance pictures?   

What we discover in all of this is that there are far more questions than answers.  And the few answers that come to mind are deeply disturbing.

The implications are that the Pentagon, the U.S. military, the government and the media are engaged in one of the biggest frauds and manipulations in the history of this country, if not the world.

As stated in the first part of this analysis, the events of September 11, 2001 are inescapably tied to one another, and if one group can be tied to one of these events, it would be safe to assume that they would be tied to all of them. No one wants to even entertain the idea of our own government being responsible for the horrific slaughter on innocent lives, police officers and firefighters, but the evidence is now before us that this might very well be the case.

But what about all those eyewitnesses who saw a plane hit the building? Are they liars? Are they "Media Plants?" or is there another possible solution here?

Was the flying and crashing plane a hologram?

Is it conceivable that such an event could be merely a stage production utilizing some sort of new technology that we aren't aware of? 

We know that Army Captain Liebner claims he saw an American Airlines passenger jet. But he wasn't the only witness. Other accounts reported in the American press, immediately after the event, suggest either a smaller aircraft or a winged missile.

But what happened to the people listed on the passenger manifest of flight 77? In fact, WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO FLIGHT 77?

Well, it seems that there is no way of knowing this because the plane turned off its transponder. In other words, no one can be sure what was flying in that air space.  Could Flight 77 have been replaced by a drone?

I decided to interview an experienced airline pilot myself. He informed me that transponders give off a code so air traffic  control can identify the plane.  I asked if it would be possible for one plane to "piggy back" another and not show up on radar.  He explained that when several military planes fly in formation, they file for clearance as "a flight of two, three, four, etc., and only the lead aircraft will squawk (display) the transponder code for tracking. This avoids the confusion of two or more planes in close proximity.  He said the close proximity of the aircraft may even appear  as if there only one plane flying because the radar blips tend to merge together.

"....transponders tell Air Traffic Control the latitude, longitude, altitude, and speed of the aircraft as well as the plane's identification, airline and flight number. Compare transponders with conventional, or "primary radar," which detects distant objects and determines their position, velocity, and other characteristics by analysis of very high frequency radio waves reflected from the surface of the aircraft.  Conventional radar shows the  latitude and longitude of the aircraft, but, unlike transponders, will not reveal the airline, flight number, nor altitude of the aircraft."

"The Post states it disappeared from radar screens at 8:50 a.m., when the "hijackers" turned off the transponder.  But now the Post turns attention to the FAA's ability to track the plane with conventional radar. 

"The answers to the mystery of the aircraft's disappearance begin with the fact that hijacking took place in an area served by only one type of radar, FAA officials confirmed ..."  [Did NORAD Send the Suicide Jets?]

The article quoted above goes on to say that "the radar installation near Parkersburg, W.Va., was built with only secondary radar -- called 'beacon-only' radar.  That left the controllers monitoring Flight 77 at the Indianapolis center blind when the hijackers apparently switched off the aircraft's transponder."

Getting back to our problem: We KNOW it was flight 77 because Barbara Olsen called her husband, the US Solicitor General, to tell him they were being hijacked!  But, did she really call him and if so, when? The research on this question lead us to:

My research lead me to a site that examines this issue in some depth. What stood out like a sore thumb was the following remark:

"Fox News reports that, extraordinarily,  Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson then said Barbara Olson's call, made "in the midst of terrible danger and turmoil swirling around her," was a "clarion call that awakened our nation's leaders to the true nature of the events of Sept. 11."

What seems to be true is that the story about Barbara Olsen is what "activated the American psyche, generated mass loathing, and enabled media manipulation of the global population."

It was the story about Barbara Olsen that clarified for us that our "enemies" were Arab Hijackers, and that they were sent by the evil Osama Bin Laden.

Without the story about Barbara Olsen, there would be NO “War on Terror” in Afghanistan and occupied Palestine.

Clearly, this issue and the issue of what REALLY happened to Flight 77 is the crux of the matter.

The little white lie was about Barbara Olson, a conservative commentator for CNN and wife of US Solicitor General Ted Olson. Now deceased, Mrs Olson is alleged to have twice called her husband from an American Airlines Flight 77 seat-telephone, before the aircraft slammed into the Pentagon. This unsubstantiated claim, reported by CNN remarkably quickly at 2.06 am EDT [0606 GMT] on September 12, was the solitary foundation on which the spurious “Hijacker” story was built.

The story on CNN ran:

“Barbara Olson, a conservative commentator and attorney, alerted her husband, Solicitor General Ted Olson, that the plane she was on was being hijacked Tuesday morning, Ted Olson told CNN. Shortly afterwards Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon” … “Ted Olson told CNN that his wife said all passengers and flight personnel, including the pilots, were herded to the back of the plane by armed hijackers. The only weapons she mentioned were knives and cardboard cutters. She felt nobody was in charge and asked her husband to tell the pilot what to do.”

Think about it, people! If you knew or suspected your spouse’s aircraft had just fireballed inside the Pentagon building, how would you spend the rest of the day? [...] About the last thing on your mind [especially if you happened to be the US Solicitor General], would be to pick up a telephone and call the CNN Atlanta news desk in order to give them a “scoop”. As a seasoned politician you would already know that all matters involving national security must first be vetted by the National Security Council. Under the extraordinary circumstances and security overkill existing on September 11, this vetting process would have taken a minimum of two days, and more likely three.

When we look further into this matter, we discover that Ted Olson NEVER made any direct personal reference to the death of his wife until he was interviewed by London Telegraph reporter Toby Harnden, with his exclusive story “She Asked Me How To Stop The Plane.” This story never appeared in any American newspaper. The above article states "if he is ever challenged by a Senate Select Committee about the veracity of his claims, the story could not be used against him because it was published outside American Sovereign territory." 

In case you didn't know what a Solicitor General's Office does, they supervise and conduct government litigation in the U.S. Supreme Court.

According to the US Solicitor General Theodore Olson:

“She [Barbara] had trouble getting through, because she wasn’t using her cell phone – she was using the phone in the passengers’ seats,” said Mr Olson. “I guess she didn’t have her purse, because she was calling collect, and she was trying to get through to the Department of Justice, which is never very easy.” … “She wanted to know ‘What can I tell the pilot? What can I do? How can I stop this?’ ”

What I would like to ask is: How could Barbara Olsen have made a collect call from a credit-card activated only phone system?  Ted Olsen has just told us that Barbara did not have a credit card with her.

Perhaps Ted Olson made a mistake and Barbara managed to borrow a credit card from a fellow passenger? If Barbara had done so, once swiped through the phone, the credit card would have enabled her to call whoever she wanted to for as long as she liked, negating any requirement to call collect.

...The chances of meaningfully using a seat-telephone on Flight 77 were nil. We know from the intermittent glimpses of the aircraft the air traffic controllers had on the radar scopes, that Flight 77 was travelling at extreme speed at very low level, pulling high “G’ turns in the process. Under these circumstances it would be difficult even reaching a phone, much less using it. [...] Exactly the same applies with United Airlines Flight 93 that crashed before reaching any targets. The aircraft was all over the place at extreme speed on radar, but as with Flight 77 we are asked to believe that the “hijackers” allowed a passenger called Todd Beamer to place a thirteen minute telephone call. Very considerate of them. The Pittsburg Channel put it this way in a story first posted at 1.38 pm EDT on September 16, 2001:

“Todd Beamer placed a call on one of the Boeing 757's on-board telephones and spoke for 13 minutes with GTE operator Lisa D. Jefferson, Beamer's wife said. He provided detailed information about the hijacking and -- after the operator told him about the morning's World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks - said he and others on the plane were planning to act against the terrorists aboard.”

Note here that Mrs Lisa Beamer did not receive a telephone call from Todd personally, but was later “told” by an operator that her husband had allegedly called. [Mother of All Lies About 9/11]

Again: What REALLY happened to Flight 77 and it's passengers?

A reader comments on this article:

I did some quick research on this issue, and found out:

a) use of cell phones are banned in commercial jets (while in the air) -- this, of course, would not be an issue if hijacked ;-)
b) the use of a cell phone from a fast-moving, high-altitude plane does *NOT* seem to be impossible -- just very implausible:

When in the air (a certain distance), your cell-phone actually has much *better* connectivity because you have no line-of-sight obstacles. However, this leads to another problem (and one that annoys the cell-phone providers) -- you actually will have connectivity to multiple "cells" available. This is what is called "bridging", and means that you will connect to several different areas at once. Cell-phone providers do *NOT* like this -- they assume that either you are using your phone from an aircraft, or that your phone has been "cloned" and someone is using it illegally.

The higher you go in the air, however, the less receptivity that you will have, because the "cells" start to look smaller and smaller.

In a high-altitude, non-moving aircraft, you would probably have some difficulty getting a signal. In addition, the claim that in a high-speed aircraft you would be leaving cells too quickly to get a connection is probably true -- this was indicated as a definite problem.

The "air phone" in aircraft is not a cell phone, but actually a radio-phone, so it is not subject to cell-phone problems. In summary, the claim appears to be correct.

Another Reader Comments

cellular antennas are designed to be very directional. if you check out a local tower, the antennas for cellular communications are the small vertical ones, sometimes arranged 3 in a row on each side of the tower. these antennas are typically mounted so that they are angled slightly down towards the ground. so while line of site is improved, reception would be worse. also, the average cell tower provides coverage for maybe a few km away from the tower, say 3-5km. if you're flying at 35,000 ft, that's 10km up in the air. so in addition to the terrible angle, the cell phone user on the airplane would be about 2 times too far away from the antenna on the tower. of course, cell size and transmitter powers vary based on the type of service, and even how the provider sets up the cells in a certain area. so all my numbers are approximate.

one cell phone should never be allowed to connect to more than one base station (the tower and associated equipment for one cell). providers have databases that track if you are using your phone and what base station your phone is communicating with. the base stations communicate with one another via landline data links. assuming everything is working properly, no one should ever be able to make a call with your phone's "ID number" when you are using your phone. now, if you're traveling, the base stations will communicate with each other (and with your phone, depending upon the type of service) and decide which base station you should be talking to. then it switches you over to that base station, but the switch is fast and usually invisible to the user.

if you're cruising at 500 mph, that's 0.2 km/s, which means you'll be moving between cells maybe every 30-60 seconds. it might still work, because handoffs can occur very quickly, if i remember correctly. but getting the initial connection could be a bit tricky...

I have to agree that it is highly improbable that a call was made from either aircraft.

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