THE LIGHT POLES

Clipped or Staged?
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
The Frustrating Fraud
Last Updated Jan. 7 2008

In denying a 757 impact at the Pentagon on 9/11, Loose Change looked at, among other things, the five light poles said to have been shorn by the wings of Flight 77 just before impact. The video cited previous problems when planes hit light poles - pole left damaged but standing, wing comes off, plane crahes. “And yet Flight 77 managed to tear five light poles completely out of the ground,” Avery continued, “without damaging either the wings or the light poles themselves.” How precisely he knows that the wings were undamaged on the plane he believes doesn't exists is left unexplained, but to prove the poles were untouched, they had hard proof - actual photographs, including those at left. A look at the very photos they used proves the assertion flat wrong. If these light poles aren’t damaged, why don’t they have lights on them? [at left: pole 1, pol 4, and pole 1 again. below right, pole 5.]

Clearly if a Boeing 757 with its 125 feet of wings came swooping in over the highway, it’d cut some poles – but since they insist on seeing no plane, the Loose Change people summarize that the undamaged poles “seem to have just popped out of the ground.” The only implication I can see in this is of a covert Pentagon system of specially designed poppable light-poles to fake a cruise missile/drone strike out to look like an airliner attack. I guess it’s possible, but the photos show that this system also seems to mangle the tops of the poles on the way down, which they would have to to effectively fake an airliner attack, thereby proving fallacious the whole issue which started by insisting there was no such damage.

This is perhaps the most-widely-cited graphic analysis of the light pole arrangement, which of course aso coincides with the 'official' flight path. This graphic was made in 2002 or so by UK 'debunker' Ron Harvey. Another researcher, Dick Eastman, first doubted the poles' existence: "Ron Harvey says that 5 poles were downed. Ever hear that from any other source? I saw eye witness testimony that one pole was "clipped."" [link] Later he admitted their existence; "The poles not a question that is in dispute. I have long acknowledged the existence of the poles as soon as I finally got my hands on an actual picture of one (Ron Harvey was not forthcoming with me at the time) -- in fact it was the pole data in contrast to the witness accounts that first suggested the presense of two converging aircraft paths." [link.] One had a swooping 125 foot wingspan backed by 100 tons of force - and flew well above the poles, which were knocked down by air vortices off the wingtips of his F-16 killer jet.


Russel Pickering's analysis at PentagonResearch.com found that they were 27.66 feet high, made of .188 inch-thick aluminum, 8 inches in diameter at the base and 4.5 inches at the top and topped with 70 pound lampheads. The reason the wings wouldn't be damaged is because the use of a "breakaway style" pole design. As Pickering explains: "this limited damage factor is why the FAA requires these type of poles in the "safety zones" around airports and helipads. They recognize that this type of pole minimizes damage to aircraft." He cited the FAA's rules: "any structure located within 250 feet of runway centerline has to be frangible, which means the structure needs to break away when hit by an aircraft to minimize damages to the aircraft and its pilot."

I have done my own anlysis now on poles 1 and 2 (pole 1 being the one that allegedly speared Lloyd England's windshield). I deduced a slightly different pole height than Pickering, although he's probably right and, along with tree damage and a slight mark high on a camera pole, have mapped out a rough outline of the plane's apparent bank at that moment - right-high, like the witnesses all have said.


If these were faked, they were faked well, The PentaCon video in 2007 made the case that the light poles were staged to fake the official attack path, and poorly so at that, bearing dozens of effects errors. Largely a rehash of Eastman's early theory sans the killer jet and beefed up with better witness pool, the video and its makers propose the poles were cut down, crimped, and in one case curved, some point perhaps weeks in advance, hidden in the bushes unnoticed, and dragged out for the attack in the morning. Or something to that effect. The one that hit Lloyd England's taxi was trickier, and they go to great length to explain the conspiracy behind this, or at least to argue there must be one. As PentaCon producer Craig Ranke (aka Jack Tripper) explained:

"If you accept that the plane flew on the north of the station you MUST accept that ALL the physical damage was staged/simulated/fabricated. Therefore, because the light poles line up perfectly with all the physical damage to the building there is no reason to suggest that any natural force [...] or projectile at all brought them down. They were simply removed and planted BEFORE the event."

That's of course one of the many reasons I do not accept the north side flight theory.