Anyone that has watched the footage of the WTC collapse cannot but remark on the surprising way in which the towers fell. It was as if the steel cores of the buildings, the ‘skeleton’ that holds them up, suddenly disappeared and the body of the buildings were left to collapse straight down with nothing to resist them but thin air. This brings us to the other ‘Achilles heel’ of the official government version of what happened on 9/11.
The footage of the collapse of the 1,300ft WTC towers has been played and replayed ad nauseum and is etched in all of our minds. If by some miracle you have not seen the footage, it is freely available on the various memorial DVDs of the 9/11 attacks. It is also available for download from our web site. I strongly suggest that you avail yourself of a copy and study the collapse of both towers. What you will see is that from the start point of the collapse until there is nothing but fresh air where the towers used to be, about 10 seconds elapse. An object in ‘free fall’ i.e. falling through thin air, will take a specific amount of time to reach the ground. The laws of gravity dictate that a 5 ton SUV, for example, and a 1lb rock, given that their relative densities are so much higher than the resistance presented by the surrounding air, will take approximately the same time to reach the ground when dropped from the same height. The time t required for an object to fall from a height h (in a vacuum) is given by the formula t = sqrt(2h/g), where g is the acceleration due to gravity. Thus an object falling from the top of one of the towers (taking h = 1306 feet and g = 32.174 ft/sec2) would take 9.01 seconds to hit the ground. Of course, this is in a vacuum, with no air present. Allowing for the resistance of the air we would have to add on a few seconds, yet according to the government’s 9/11 Commission report , the south tower collapsed in 10 seconds flat. But, as we all saw, the collapse of the south tower ‘pancaked’ through the 75 lower floors of the tower. Those undamaged floors below the impact zone would have offered resistance that is thousands of times greater than air. What time might we allow for the section above the impact point that collapsed to pass through each floor? 1 second each floor? If so, then the collapse should have taken 75 + 10 seconds, or over 1 minute and 20 seconds. For talks sake, let’s allow just a half second delay in the collapse provided by each ‘pancaked’ floor. In this case it should have taken 37.5 + 10 seconds. But let’s be really charitable and suggest that each floor below the impact point offered just 1/10th of a second resistance to the section that first began to ‘pancake’ on the lower floors. In this case the collapse should have taken 7.5 + 10 seconds for a total of 17.5 seconds. Yet this is not what happened. As the official 9/11 report states and as we all saw, the towers collapsed in just 10 seconds!
How can this be possible? The only explanation is that the floors below the impact point offered no resistance whatsoever allowing the building to fall in ‘free fall’ with only fresh air as resistance. The only way that this could have occurred is if the support offered by the steel core beams was in some way undermined. The most obvious way to undermine the steel core beams of the WTC tower would seem to be via the techniques employed by demolition experts to take down buildings and have them fall into their own ‘footprint’ - which is exactly what happened to the WTC towers.
However, in the case of the WTC towers there are several factors that point to something other than standard technology being used to demolish towers.
For anyone that has seen a controlled demolition, the fact that explosives are used is very evident, with plumes of dust and debris being ejected and a series of resounding ‘booms’ of explosive charges detonating just before the building falls. In the case of the WTC towers however, no explosions of such magnitude or ‘booms’ were visible or audible before the onset of the collapse, although what appear to be small explosions were observed below the collapse point.
If we hold to the official version, these ‘squibs’ have no obvious explanation. They do, however, fit very well with what we would expect to see in a planned demolition. Added to this are the many reports from fire-fighters and civilians who reporting hearing and witnessing explosions going off inside the building before the towers collapsed. These reports were finally released by the City of New York i.e. the U.S. government, after a prolonged campaign by families to have them released:
“We thought there was like an internal detonation, explosives, because it went in succession, boom, boom, boom, boom, and then the tower came down…It actually gave at a lower floor, not the floor where the plane hit.” Firefighter Edward Cachia.
“There was just an explosion in the south tower. It seemed like on television when they blow up these buildings. It seemed like it was going all the way around like a belt, all these explosions.” - Firefighter Richard Banaciski.
“I saw a flash, flash, flash at the lower level of the building. You know like when they demolish a building?” - Assistant Fire Commissioner Stephen Gregory
“It was like a professional demolition where they set the charges on certain floors and then you hear 'Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop'." - Paramedic Daniel Rivera.
Among the reports of explosions throughout the building there were many reports of explosions in the basement areas of the towers: For example, janitor William Rodriguez reported that he and others felt an explosion below the first sub-level office at 9:00 am, after which co-worker Felipe David, who had been in front of a nearby freight elevator, came into the office with severe burns on his face and arms yelling: "explosion! explosion! explosion!" Rodriguez’s account was corroborated by José Sanchez, who was in the workshop on the fourth sub-level. Sanchez said that he and a co-worker heard a big blast that “sounded like a bomb,” after which “a huge ball of fire went through the freight elevator.
Engineer Mike Pecoraro, who was working in the sixth sub-basement of the north tower, said that after an explosion he and a co-worker went up to the C level, where there was a small machine shop. “There was nothing there but rubble,” said Pecoraro. “We're talking about a 50 ton hydraulic press - gone!” They then went to the parking garage, but found that it was also gone. Then on the B level, they found that a steel-and-concrete fire door, which weighed about 300 pounds, was wrinkled up "like a piece of aluminum foil." Having seen similar things after the terrorist attack in 1993, Pecoraro was convinced that a bomb had gone off.
What are we to make of these reports, from dozens of witnesses, that explosions were going off throughout the WTC towers? Particularly, how do we explain the reports of massive explosions in the basement areas of both towers? In the immediate aftermath of the collapses of the towers, a company was employed by the City of New York to begin the clean up. In an act that can only be described as criminal negligence at the scene of a crime, this company immediately began to collect the steel beams, most of which has been inexplicably reduced to 30ft sections, and ship them off to Asia to be melted down. What was the name of this company? Why, Controlled Demolition Incorporated (CDI) of course! When asked about the collapse of the towers, Mark Loizeaux, the head of CDI, which calls itself “the innovator and global leader in the controlled demolition and implosion of structures,” stated:
“If I were to bring the towers down, I would put explosives in the basement to get the weight of the building to help collapse the structure.”
Is this getting strange enough for you yet? Yet perhaps most interestingly of all is the fact that, many weeks after the collapse, still molten metal was discovered by removal teams in what used to be the basement levels of the WTC towers. This same Mark Loizeaux of CDI, affirmed that “hot spots of molten steel were found at the bottoms of the elevator shafts of the main towers, down seven basement levels.” Adding to the mystery is the video footage of what appears to be molten metal falling out of the impact area of the south tower before the tower collapsed .
As reported in the November 29th 2001 edition of The New York Times, while some engineers said that a combination of an uncontrolled fire and the structural damage might have been able to bring the buildings down, Dr. Jonathan Barnett, professor of fire protection engineering at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute said that uncontrolled fire and the
structural damage would not explain steel members in the debris pile that appear to have been partly evaporated in extraordinarily high temperatures. Think about that for a while.
Authorities found evidence that some of the massive steel core beams had partly evaporated! Evaporating Steel beams? The temperature required to evaporate steel is somewhere in the region of 2,860 degrees centigrade, much higher than the 500-800 degrees centigrade proposed for the WTC fires.
It is an established fact (by the 9/11 Commission itself) that the jet fuel in the planes and the office fixtures that provided further fuel for the fires burned intensely for just 10-15 minutes but nevertheless could not have reached the 1,500 degrees centigrade required at which the core steel beams of the towers would have melted.
Added to this we have the surpassingly strange fact that
a large percentage of the material of the towers (plastics, concrete, steel etc.) was apparently turned literally to dust as the towers fell. If we take a piece of concrete and drop it from several hundred feet onto the ground, would we expect it to turn to dust?! How can we explain this? How can the Bush government explain this? Are they going to? Are they going to explain how the laws of physics were somehow suspended on September 11th 2001, only in New York and only in the area of the WTC complex?
If we are to believe the official claim that the towers fell as a result of a ‘pancake’ effect, not only would be expect most of the material to remain in sizeable chunks, but we would also expect to see most of the 47 large core steel beams still standing as the floors pancaked around them. At the very least we would expect to see chunks of steel beams that were hundreds of feet in height/length. Yet, that is not what we saw.
What we saw was
the almost complete disintegration of the WTC towers into either dust or relatively small chunks of steel and masonry ready to be immediately hauled or swept away. Needless to say, none of these facts fit with the official story that the planes or the resulting fires caused the towers to collapse. So what did cause the collapse of the WTC towers?
Professor of Physics Steven E. Jones at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah posits that the most likely explanation is that some form of thermite reaction was employed. Thermite reactions are caused by the mixture of aluminium metal and the oxide (rust) of another metal, usually iron, and an external ignition source and are used in industry to cut and melt steel. They are also used in thermite grenades and bombs that have been used in combat as incendiary devices, able to burn through heavy armor or other fireproof barriers. The result of a thermite reaction is molten iron, a temperature of 2,500 degrees centigrade and, when employed on metals such as steels, the ‘liquification’ of the steel.
However, given the apparently instantaneous undermining of these massive steel columns, we may not be dealing with ordinary, publicly available thermite compounds.
In his analysis, Professor Jones makes a brief reference to “nanoaluminum” and “superthermites”. In January 2005 the magazine Technology Review, a publication of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) ran a story entitled Military Reloads with Nanotech. In the article, the U.S. military’s latest research and development of ‘nanotech’ weapons was discussed:
Smaller. Cheaper. Nastier. Those are the guiding principles behind the military's latest bombs. The secret ingredient: nanotechnology that makes for a bigger boom.
Nanotechnology is grabbing headlines for its potential in advancing the life sciences and computing research, but the Department of Defense (DoD) found another use: a new class of weaponry that uses energy-packed nanometals to create powerful, compact bombs.
With funding from the U.S. government, Sandia National Laboratories, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are researching how to manipulate the flow of energy within and between molecules, a field known as nanoenergentics, which enables building more lethal weapons such as "cave-buster bombs" that have several times the detonation force of conventional bombs such as the "daisy cutter" or MOAB (mother of all bombs).
Researchers can greatly increase the power of weapons by adding materials known as superthermites that combine nanometals such as nanoaluminum with metal oxides such as iron oxide, according to Steven Son, a project leader in the Explosives Science and Technology group at Los Alamos.
"The advantage (of using nanometals) is in how fast you can get their energy out," Son says.
Son says that the chemical reactions of superthermites are faster and therefore release greater amounts of energy more rapidly.
"Superthermites can increase the (chemical) reaction time by a thousand times," Son says, resulting in a very rapid reactive wave.
Son, who has been working on nanoenergetics for more than three years, says that scientists can engineer nanoaluminum powders with different particle sizes to vary the energy release rates.
The U.S. Army Environmental Center began a program in 1997 to develop alternatives to the toxic lead that is used in the hundreds of millions of rounds that are annually fired during conflicts and at its training ranges. Carpenter says that although bullets using nanoaluminum are ready to be field tested, the government has been slow implement the technology.
However, researchers aren't permitted to discuss what practical military applications may come from this research.
Professor Jones concludes:
[…] substantial evidence supporting the current conjecture that some variation of thermite (e.g., solid aluminum powder plus Fe2O3, with possible addition of sulfur) was used on the steel columns of the WTC Tower to weaken the huge steel supports, not long before explosives finished the demolition job. Roughly 3,000 pounds of RDX-grade linear-shaped charges (which could have been pre-positioned by just a few men) would then suffice in each Tower and WTC 7 to cut the supports at key points so that gravity would bring the buildings straight down. The estimate is based on the amount of explosives used in controlled demolitions in the past and the size of the buildings. Radio-initiated firing of the charges is implicated here. Using computer-controlled radio signals, it would be an easy matter to begin the explosive demolition near the point of entry of the planes in the Towers. [...]
It is certainly very plausible then to suggest that “superthermite”, with its ability to almost instantly generate temperatures of 2500 degrees centigrade and thereby instantly liquefy steel (and possibly many other materials, although we are not allowed to know) could well have been used to effect the demolition of the WTC towers. Such a suggestion is certainly more plausible than the entirely official version of events.
However, the thermite theory does not explain how the thousands of tons of concrete in the towers were literally pulverized. Joe Casaliggi a firefighter with Engine 7 commented:
"You have two 110-story office buildings: you don't find a chair, you don't find a telephone, a computer... the biggest piece of a telephone I found was half a keypad, and it was this big (holds up thumb and forefinger). The buildings collapsed to dust."
Dr. Charles Hirsch, the chief medical examiner dealing with 9/11, informed relatives of 9/11 victims not to expect remains of their loved ones to be found since most bodies had been “vaporized” (his own word) . This was the finding of the chief medical examiner at the WTC site.
How can anyone explain that people, human beings, caught in a building collapse were completely “vaporized”, turned to dust, just like the concrete and fixtures of the WTC towers?
Most investigators point to evidence of “explosives” and “squibs” in video footage of the collapse of the two towers, yet to effect the complete destruction of so much concrete and office material,
a massive quantity of explosives would surely have been required, and such a quantity is simply not evident in the available footage. As has been suggested by Professor Jones, an advanced and publicly unknown form of “superthermite” was probably used to cut the steel core beams of the WTC towers, which
leaves open the possibility that other similarly advanced and publicly unknown technology was used to disintegrate the concrete that constituted the body of the towers. It this case, it would not be responsible or wise for me to theorize about what specific device or technique was used to turn the towers to dust, however, I will say that ‘sound’ and ‘light’ weapons have been developed in the past 20 years by the U.S. and Israeli military that are capable of ‘invisibly’ destroying hardened targets. To that I will add that part of the prepping of the WTC towers could have included the planting of ‘conductors’ to effect the propagation of such an induced wave throughout the buildings and thereby causing the vaporization of concrete and human bodies alike.
