LET’S TALK ABOUT IT THEN - THE WITNESSES

LET’S TALK ABOUT IT THEN - THE WITNESSES
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
The Frustrating Fraud
July 22 2008
edits 7/23 2am

The Paper / The Witness Roster
Although it does not deny a 757 impact at the Pentagon, John Farmer’s recent paper You All Just Haven’t Talked About it, and its second Plane north path flyover theory proposition deserves special attention and a solid panning. At the outset he warned me:

“You are referring to my little essay as if it were some conclusive theory or something. It is not and was never asserted to be. My only assertion is that there is an evidence set for something more going on in the sky over the Pentagon and DC area at the time of the attack than the public record accounts for.”

But however seriously he meant it, the paper is far more specific than that. It spends its first seven pages on the evidence in the Citgo video supporting a north path aircraft – one solid but inconclusive clue – and the last six pages call on five eyewitness accounts that ultimately offer little if any assistance to the case: William Lagasse, Chadwick Brooks, Roosevelt Roberts, Center for Military History witness “NEIT428,” and “mole,” an anonymous source from a chat forum. One of these, Roberts, was immediately removed. Originally the paper said:

“Add to this another DPS Officer, Roosevelt Roberts who in a 2001 audio interview claims he ran out from the loading dock near the Pentagon southern lot and saw another plane flying low over the south lot, and there is no doubt that AAL77 was not alone.”

As it happened, the paper’s release roughly coincided with Citizen Investigation Team’s on-air announcement of having talked with that witness as a “second plane”/ flyover witness. Within days, after absorbing this new testimony, Farmer announced a change of heart: “I have had to remove DPS Officer Roberts as a second plane witness. If his CIT follow-up interview is accurate, he most likely saw AAL77 as it came down from the Citgo area and across Route 27.” Oddly enough from his account, it seems clear that Flight 77 was alone.

So right up front that leaves us four to deal with and two I’m already pretty sure are liars – the original Defense Protective Service Citgo witnesses cited by CIT in The PentaCon. He did not include CIT’s other Citgo witness Turcios, for obvious reasons, but this curiously impossible account did not alter his enthusiasm for the others that also make no sense to the same end. He decided based on an interesting interpretations that “when SGT Brooks and SGT Lagasse’s accounts are taken objectively, they both seem to be describing two different plane approaches simultaneously. One is consistent with the southern path (Lagasse’s yaw and Brook’s vibration) and the other with a northern approach.” Interestingly, like Turcios and Roberts, both only cite one plane bearing these traits.

Lagasse's Yaw
The core of Farmer’s analysis of DPS Sergeant Lagasse is his well-known north-path testimony considered with his final moment “yaw” (nose oriented a bit sideways from the plane’s forward direction) which meant that “it approached the Pentagon at another angle consistent with the actual flight path of AAL77." Now that sounds interesting, considering he already describes the south-path action of crashing low into the building. "In other words," Farmer explains "when he first saw it, he was looking at the right side" of a plane north and set to not hit "and then at the end he is looking at the left side of it," as he'd see of the real impact plane, and "as he would have a plane passing the south side of the station."

This observation spurred to me to reason out a few of Lagasse's early observations to Dick Eastman from June 2003 that had confused me before. When Eastman asked the agitated but open officer “how much of the plane was visible to you as it went in?” Lagasse responded that he “could see the fuse, tail, port wing and starboard wing root” at its final moment, but not the right outer wing. This perhaps fits better with a south approach (seeing left side), but both angles are similar at such a distance. He cites the rise of Route 27 as his view limiter at right, but I used the tree here).

More interestingly, he describes to Eastman the impact of this plane that had passed north of him:

“[It] was approx 100-150ft agl when it passed over theannex and continued on a shallow-fast decent and literally hit the building were it met the ground. There was no steep bank, but a shallow bank with a heavy uncoordinated left rudder turn causing a severe yaw into the building with the starboard side of the cockpit actually hitting at about the same time the wing was involved with the trailer…” [source]Indeed, a left rudder turn would lead to a left yaw matching the right side hitting first as the right wing entered the construction area. Since Construction storage trailers were either to the left of impact or too far right to be struck, and the right wing/engine is known to have torn through the generator trailer at about the time the nose struck, right side first, it seems most likely Lagasse meant this trailer and deduced from the evidence the actual impact angle. From this Farmer’s leap almost makes sense except for the glaring problem that he did not see his own north path plane he’d been tracking remaining high up and flying at least 60 feet – four fuselage-widths – above the crashing one.

So he does give clues consistent with both the north and south path, but gives them all to only one plane, which “literally hit the building were it met the ground.” While this fits with the trailer evidence he saw, it does not explain either the deflection angle of debris he noted (to the left/north) or the downed light poles, which he also saw and “remembers” in the wrong location - along his path, where he also places the damaged taxi. For this interpretation to work, he'd have to be constructing in his own mind a yaw AND a steady descent in order to fuse the two. In short, his testimony never made sense, and it’s only gotten more surreal with more verification. Lagasse is, at best, an unreliable witness. Period. His “yaw” changes this not one bit, and leaves me yawning as evidence for two planes.

Brooks' Vibration
Brooks’ value to Farmer’s thesis hinges on his 2001 LoC interview. Thanks to CIT’s 2006 verification, we know Brooks’ (stated) location, and I’ll reserve judgment on Farmer’s reading of his parked orientation and PoV. Although these are key to understanding this account, it’s something CIT did not sort out, and I at least am just guessing there. By describing a plane off to his left (and ahead?) while hearing a loud sound/vibration behind him, all well before impact, Brooks allowed Farmer to state “if SGT Brooks 2001 account is taken literally, then he was hearing a plane pass behind him while watching another plane to his left.”

We could try not taking it literally then, but there is some room for speculation here and Farmer takes it. I would guess the sound from behind was bouncing off the Pentagon, or perhaps the Citgo. But it’s possible it was a different plane, one left/ahead, one behind, which means about at the Pentagon, or just passing north or south of him and perhaps two seconds from impact, depending on how he was facing. He reported no impact or explosion at this time – not until the one he was watching approach from the west and impacted about two seconds after passing him, clipping light poles along the way, he thinks.

This means the flyover plane was well ahead of the impact one judging by Brooks’ narrative, to the tune of seconds at least (nowhere near the number he ticks off...). This certainly complicates Lagasse’s yaw interpretation! He saw the north path flyover plane pass and believe IT impacted, which necessitates the planes fly in simultaneously – at least one of these two reading has to be wrong. And no other witness describes another jet flying over the Pentagon several seconds before the impact.

NEIT428's Low Plane
The 428th witness interviewed by the Army’s Center for Military History is an Arlington National Cemetery worker and among those available now in Farmer’s FOIA collection. The key part of his account is this:

“Well, when we came out of the warehouse we heard this boom, you know, this big explosion. And we, all we could see was the smoke and the heat [...] after that happened, we looked up in the sky and there was another plane. So, you know, so we panicked. So we started running, you know. So I just dropped on the ground. The plane was so low we were thinking it was going to do the same thing, but the plane made a turn and went in the opposite direction.”

His name is still unknown to me, but I believe this is one of the ANC Ommpah-Loompahs verified in uniform and on-site again in CIT’s upcoming video smash hit whatever the hell it’s called (see the trailer around anywhere). If so my take should be considered in light of this, but whatever he may have said later, this is about his testimony as known to Farmer when he wrote this:

“My first impression was that this must surely be the C-130 known to arrive in the area a minute or so later. However, the altitude of that plane was relatively high and it seems unusual that they would duck for cover in response to it. The interviewer fortunately asks a follow-up question regarding the altitude.

“It was low enough that it could touch the building, the warehouse. It was close.””

Farmer wondered about the “documented […] plane that approached the White House from the Washington Monument area [and was] over the White House at 09:41” and if this was “the plane witnessed by the Citgo and ANC witnesses.” [emph mine] I would guess C-130 with confused altitude clues. He could see the cockpit and perhaps the people in it because it was at a distance to the west, as the C-130 was, and he was seeing its nosecone higher than he remembers and perhaps lower than we’ve all been thinking. Also he was likely nervous and exaggerating any possible threat.

NEIT428 mentions a turn to “the opposite direction,” a U-turn, which none of the witnesses describe for the “decoy” plane but only for the C-130, as Farmer well knows. If “the opposite direction” as he states is "to the left towards the Washington, D.C. area” as Farmer decides, then it must have been coming fromthe DC area when he first saw it, which does not well fit with, for example, Lagasse’s west-east flight past the Citgo. A 30-40 degree turn to the left does not equal the “opposite direction,” which requires about 180 – like the C-130 did. Of Farmer andNEIT428, one has to be wrong about the turn described by NEIT428.

Furthermore, if this witness’ second plane is NOT the C-130, then his failing to notice the C-130 in addition to it is at least slightly odd. And finally, he had second plane pass but not impact after the crash there. This clearly complicates Brooks’ impact after flyover interpretation and Lagasse’s simultaneous passage – of the paper’s proposed readings of Lagasse, Brooks and NEIT 428, at least two have to be wrong about the order of events.

Mole's 757 "over the mall"
And the fourth remaining witness in this sorry parade finally gives us something a bit more promising, but it’s an anonymous online source. Back in March 2002, Screen-name “mole” posted at the techguy forum the following:

“My Team Leader came in to say as he was coming in to the building, he saw a 757 flying in a peculiar location roughly over the Mall. (We now know that was the 757 that hit the Pentagon as it did circle downtown DC, supposedly looking for a target, possibly the Whitehouse which is not as easy to pick out from the air as the Capitol or the Pentagon, before heading west again, then turning east for its final run at the Pentagon.)”

This account is not scientifically precise, and in fact dead wrong on 77 being over the capitol (it was a common urban legend at the time) but it is probably legit as evidence and worth a look. Timeline is key, and the original post does make clear that before hearing this report, mole’s wife “called to tell me there was smoke showing from further down the Mall in the direction of the Whitehouse,” almost certainly the smoke from the Pentagon, further in that direction and the only smoking thing in the area at the time.

The timeline after is less clear, but I might guess he saw the E4-B pass at 9:46, eight minutes after the Pentagon strike. This craft is based on a 747 mode, not 757, which is interesting since mole explained how after this “I saw the outline of a 747-400 flying slowly south to north nearly directly over head at a low altitude. Planes never flew there as it is restricted airspace, almost over the Capitol.” Radar later showed this craft passed the capitol mall a second time at 9:49, but north-south near the mall’s west side, and he says it flew south-north, as it did on the first pass at 9:45:30 before turning left and passing E-W just a few blocks north of the White House.

Therefore, it seems likely after all to speculate that the “757” seen before this was NOT the E4-B, and quite possibly a post-77 second plane. Or it could be 77 itself, with “mole” or his team leader misreading the location clues to put it over the capitol rather than across the river. That might seem like a stretch, but considering how little over-the-mall evidence there really is, it can’t be dismissed. Despite these ambiguities, Farmer has no problem stating of mole’s account:

“With witness statements like this, it is clear that the 911 Commission failed in its job to fully explain to the American public exactly what happened at the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.”

No, sorry. It’s clear that we need some clarification on this. The author “knew” Flight 77 was looping over the capitol, but since then we’ve learned it did not, at least officially. Did this “knowledge” compel him to remember hearing it was over the Capitol, when really no location was stated? What we have here is an anonymous unverifiable account passing on a second hand report of a “757 […] roughly over the mall” at some unspecified moment around the attack time, before or after. And it was taken by mole as supporting the crash of that plane. For any other purpose, it's anecdotal evidence, weak and not able to be strengthened ever.

Conclusion: Gravel
So that’s my panning of half the paper, the other half being the video clues I’m not done with yet. Farmer’s optics and video analysis skills are no help on this side, his law-enforcement “extensive experience working with witnesses” has been of little help either, and his statistical insights failed to tip him off to the low odds that this would all pan out. The process of panning is to separate valuable ore from ordinary rock, and at risk of carrying the metaphor too far,, after watching all this gravel sift out the bottom, I’m left with a keen sense of how empty my pan is. A couple faint sparkles of fool's gold, I'd guess. Does it get any better than this?
ETA: Re-considered then in light of this paper never meaning to have argued anything concrete, and the fact that it clearly does argue something pretty cogent, it seems this notion was being floated, or offered as a possibility with some potential value. Or what, John? A thought exercise, a little mad-libs imagination moment just couched in serious terms for effect, a prank to amuse yourself? In the peer review sense, I have to offer my best assessment of your intelligence and intentions, and hope the last is the case.
ETA 7/27: In fact, perhaps this was just a strawman CIT parody disposable construct for that idiot Caustic to joust to the ground triumphantly, which I guess would be amusing. If so, it was fun on my end too, and thanks.

ANOTHER SIX BACK? THE 9:32 CASE

PENTAGON ATTACK TIMELINE QUESTIONS PART 2: ANOTHER SIX BACK? THE 9:32 CASE
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
The Frustrating Fraud
Nov 13 2007, 3pm
Last Updated Nov 17 1am

Now that we’ve established that accepted times associated with the Pentagon attack have previously proven false, let’s turn our attention to the current attempt by some researchers at another shift in the impact/explosion time back again to about 9:32. Most well-known and visually convincing among the evidence backing a 9:32 event at the Pentagon is a pair of stopped wall clocks recovered at there: the one on the left was found in the heliport outside the building but near impact point, stopped at 9:31:30. At right is a clock from an office inside or near the damaged section, stopped at 9:30:40. It would be rather a coincidence for a 9:38 event to find two clocks roughly synched 6-7 minutes behind at the military’s lockstep headquarters. It stretches the imagination, and seems almost certainly significant and worthy of examination.
I’m not sure when the first 9/11 researcher discovered or commented on these clocks, but I would guess they were noticed one at a time almost immediately upon publishing. The earliest mention I’ve seen of both (exactly as pictured above) is by Pentagon no-planer Ralph Olmholt, who had noted back in late 2004 that “two stopped Pentagon clocks point to approximately 9:31, as do a variety of other reports and quotes. The dog didn’t bark on cue.” [1] After apparently simmering a while in obscurity, the 9:31-9:32 meme has amplified since then, trying to write itself a page in history in 2006.

Honegger’s Historic Moment
This timeline revision has been fueled most specifically by its prime champion, Barbara Honegger, a top journalist at the Navy Postgraduate School and oft-cited 9/11 researcher. Her recent works include The Pentagon Attack Papers, written September 2006 and published as an appendix in Jim Marrs’ The Terror Conspiracy. [PDF link - html link] In this, she argued against a big plane, using the “legion evidence that Flight 77 did not hit the Pentagon" provided by clowns like Karl Schwarz, and for a traditional bombing that, she's certain, happened at 9:32.

Anything happening at the official time of 9:37 was some sort of cover – possibly the impact of “an airborne object significantly smaller than […] a Boeing 757,” most likely an A3 Skywarrior as identified by Schwarz. [2] That as I see it serves no purpose but to get the wrong plane parts inside and trick the witnesses with the wrong plane hitting at the wrong time. Too bad the debris and witnesses really agree on a 757 much better than a tiny A3, and that no one has reported any plane flying into an already bombed and smoldering building. Whatever the overall logic of Honegger’s case, the 9:32 evidence stands on its own to some extent and forms the core of her piece, which opens hyperbolically:

“The San Francisco Chronicle commemorated the 100th anniversary of The Great Earthquake of 1906 with a series of front-page articles headed by a single icon—a charred clock frozen at 5:12 am, the exact moment “The Big One” hit. A century after that devastating event, the stopped clock serves as both the ultimate evidence and the symbol that “captures it all.”

Again, almost 100 years later, clocks frozen in time at the Pentagon on the morning of September 11, 2001 both “capture it all” and are the ultimate evidence that shatters the “Official Lie” of what happened that terrible morning. The Pentagon was first attacked at 9:32 am, much earlier than the 9/11 Commission and official cover story claim.”

The reason Honegger offers for the official timeline lie is shaky; she found that NORAD commander Gen. Larry Arnold sent one of his fighters on a low-level recon mission after the attack (the pilot “reported back that there was no evidence that a plane had hit the building.”) She concludes “this fighter jet—not Flight 77— is almost certainly the plane seen on the Dulles airport Air Traffic Controller’s screen making a steep, high-speed 270-degree descent before disappearing from the radar.” The loop would also match the near-circular loop shown in the Flight Data Recorder attributed to Flight 77, in Honegger land probably the fighter’s track set into the context of black box data, as it was copied over elsewhere.

So 9:32 is verboten because lacking a radar track for a 9:32 plane, officials decided at one point “to pretend the blip represented by Arnold’s surveillance jet approaching just before 9:37 was “Flight 77.”” Now however they’re caught in a loop from this and “the Pentagon cannot acknowledge the earlier 9:32 time without revealing an attack on the building prior to the alleged impact.” [3] This doesn’t make much sense, but the clocks do not stand alone; She cited “converging Lines of Proof of a 9:32 Violent Event at the Pentagon,” a mixed bag of evidence that does indeed have a compelling correlation of time if not of total logic. She provided four points to directly support the clocks, which I’ll address in the next post.

Gaffney: 35,000 at 9:32?
One more credible mind that bought Honegger’s case and helped elaborate on it is Mark Gaffney, introduced in the previous post. Having previously explained the documented presence of a top-secret E4B doomsday plane over DC, in his follow-up part II, Did the US Military Fudge the 9/11 Timeline? Gaffney nods to Honegger and verifies some of her points, though refreshingly, he disagrees with her on the evidence of a 757 strike, citing “the recovery of Boeing 757 parts from within the Pentagon” and that “the flight recorder data shows […] there were no interruptions in its flight path.” Gaffney cited Honegger’s clocks as Compelling physical evidence; “it appears that the powerful shock wave that occurred at the moment of impact knocked the clocks off the wall," stopping their hands "within a minute of the same time. Were they both running 5-6 minutes late? I think not.”

Gaffney's mental gymnastics in supporting a 9:32 event are not clumsy, but not enough to pass the hurdle of proof. He cited the 9/11 Commission, reporting that "the first notice to the military that Flight 77 was missing [...] had come by chance" when NEADS made a call TO the FAA's Washington Center at 9:34. The Commission had concluded ‘radar’ contact was lost at 8:56 am when the transponder was switched off – meaning a 38-minute FAA delay getting this information to the military, and even then only when they called for news. But looking at the transcript of this 9:34 call, Gaffney decided that it seemed to indicate contact was just lost, and notes the "Washington staffer [...] mentions, almost in passing, that Flight 77 was at 35,000 feet when it disappeared from radar. Seeing this, the average reader will probably conclude that Flight 77 was still at cruising altitude when Washington Center lost radar contact at 9:34 AM.” [4]

The doomed flight apparently was still airborne, but not this high. If this were true, it would then have to dive from 35,000 feet to basically sea level and impact altitude in less than four minutes, a feat that I hope ‘the average reader’ would discern as implausible. But this hypothetical false impression that no one I know of has ever had, Gaffney notes, would be a ‘misreading’ - therefore the staffer “was merely restating the plane's last known altitude, data that was current some 38 minutes before, […] Yet, the above transcript is ambiguous enough to reinforce the false impression that the plane was still aloft and cruising at 9:34 AM.” [5]

As covered in the previous post, he offers that the original time of 9:43 was set to provide cover for the E4B apparently circling DC at that time, so it could be said to be Flight 77 just before impact, though the un-acknowledgeable craft actually seems to have passed three minutes later than the time they set. Presumably fearing they’d stepped too far from the real time of 9:32 for which evidence might surface, or concerned that 9:43 indicated too slow a response, did they slide on over to the safer time 11 minutes earlier? No, they settled in the middle with 9:38, apparently afraid of straying too far from covering the E4B, though now eight minutes prior to its appearance, and apparently ignorant that conflating 77 and the E4B would lose all meaning once radar and FDR data became known to show 77 never did fly over DC anyway, despite the official over-DC flight path disinformation that some, like Gaffney, believe occurred for this same reason.

Among the Chat Monkeys
For a while there the 9:32 meme was all the rage at the Loose Change Forum; while I’ve been active in recent months, members JackD, SPreston, and others have jointly rallied around the clocks and other clues as evidence of a massive timeline cover-up. Example thread: Best Evidence Of The Time Of Pentagon Explosion. This revision has been championed there most forcefully by multi-forum ‘thesis monkey’ “Terral.” Using flawed reports, ‘expert’ testimony, ‘well-known’ but un-illustrated ‘facts,’ biblical scripture and deep theology sandwiched between blunt insults, silly rants, over-labeled under-comprehended graphic analyses, and the ‘proven’ time of impact of 9:31:39, he seeks to prove an impact by a cruise missile that crimped off the light poles with its ‘bowed shockwave’ of air, trailed by a decoy flyover, which he seems to believe is exactly what happened at9:31:39, the time proving the event and vice-versa. The graphic below shows the ‘before and after’ from his initial event and a ‘9:36’ follow-up A3 attack ala Honegger, just to get some jet fuel outside and engine parts inside to create the ‘three punch-out holes.’ Terral hammers away at a nine-point list of evidence for his 9:31:39 missile impact, based on Honegger’s five-point list of a pre-plane bombing, and dismisses any Pentagon theory that doesn’t carefully cite this time as the “official Bushie/Rove / DoD 9:38 AM 'First Explosion' Cover Story,” pushed by what he calls “the DoD and their Cover Story Operatives.” Terral also says “LC members running from thread to thread doing DoD dirty work," including myself perhaps foremost, "have the same innocent blood on their hands” as the perpetrators, and are afraid to confront the overwhelming 9:32 evidence, which is exactly what I will wrap my bloody hands around in the next post and we'll see how well it holds up (hint - the clocks are as good as it gets).

Sources:
[1] Olmholt, Ralph. "The Dog Should Have Barked." Pentagon Research.com. Undated (html creation date: Dec 22 2004). http://www.pentagonresearch.com/098.html
[2] Honegger, Barabara. “The Pentagon Attack Papers: Seven Hours in September: The Clock that Broke the Lie”
Appendix to The Terror Conspiracy by Jim Marrs. Publication date, Sept. 6, 2006. html version: http://johnmccarthy90066.tripod.com/id206.html PDF link: http://blog.lege.net/content/Seven_Hours_in_September.pdf
[3] See [2].
[4] Gaffney, Mark H. The 9/11 Mystery Plane (Part II): Did the US Military Fudge the 9/11 Timeline? Rense.com. July 5, 2007. http://www.rense.com/general76/wdb.htm
[5] See [4].
[6] Terral. Posted Oct 15 2007, 04:02 PM. Loose Change Forum->9/11 Research->The Pentagon ->Best Evidence Of The Time Of Pentagon Explosion. Page 1.

THE ELASTIC TIMELINE

PENTAGON ATTACK TIMELINE QUESTIONS PART 1: THE ELASTIC TIMELINE
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
The Frustrating Fraud
Nov 9 2007, 11pm
hopefully final update 11/13 1pm

An 18-Minute Error
Recently I had the minor pleasure of witnessing a notable timeline alteration regarding the collapse of the damaged Pentagon section. Still reported in some spots as occurring at 10:50 am EDT, it has generally been placed (9/11 Commission, ASCE, etc.) almost an hour earlier, at 9:57. But it turns out numerous better sources converge on a collapse time of 10:15 am – an 18 minute difference only sorted out by 9/11 researchers six years later. Notable mention in updating this must be give to Russell Pickering and LCF member Honway, whose work with time-stamped video provided evidence that unlocked the timeline mystery and soon more buried evidence was found. I’m now comfortable stating the collapse happened at 10:15, with earlier reports referring in confusion to an order issued to firefighters to evacuate the area in anticipation of collapse.

A 5-Minute Error
Not that such minutiae was or is very important to most, but a similar shift had happened with the more important impact time attributed to Flight 77, but that story changed five minutes backward and did so early in the game. Despite CNN having first broadcast about an explosion at the Pentagon at 9:39, in the days after the attack, the essential official story was an impact at 9:43 and generally taken as fact. Some examples: 9:40 graphic - 9:45 graphic - 9:43 CNN - 9:43 Patriotic site - 9:43 Christian Science Monitor - 9:43 CBS - 9:43 still repeated in 2007 - Etc…

It was only on September 18, a week after the attack, that NORAD announced a revised crash time of 0937(estimated) [1]. It’s not clear what this was based on, but NORAD were suspected by some of fudging it back to minimize the delay of defense indicative of a stand-down. However Col. Alan Scott, a NORAD officer active on 9/11, told the 9/11 Commission in May 2003 the time was shifted first due to an “entry camera for the parking lot, which happened to be oriented towards the Pentagon at the time of impact, and the recorded time is 9:37. And that's why the timeline went from 9:43 to 9:37, because it is the best documented evidence for the impact time that we have.” [2]. He also noted “it took about two weeks” to find this footage, so NORAD’s source as of 9/18 might have been something else. The 9/11 Commission accepting this time is often cited as evidence it was a lie, but one also supported by the Flight Data Recorder, the last frame of data at 9:37:45 (alternately rounded to 9:37 or 9:38). The radar record (see below) also supports this time, as do the NORAD tapes, and other points to be addressed in part 4.

9:43 Event Evidence Addressed
I spent a long time digging for all reports I could find for reasons 9:43 was first offered as Flight 77's crash time, and found almost no evidence at all directly indicating it. One possible exception is longtime CT researcher,founder of 9/11 Citizen's Watch, and DC resident John Judge, who later offered Paul Thompson ’the Flight 77 timeline’: “a 9:41 crash time into the Pentagon. I still say it was later, but certainly not at the 9:37 NORAD claims (and shouldn't they know?). I put it at 9:43 earliest, 9:48 latest, but maybe my clock is off. I did hear it hit and looked at the time.” [4] Earlier he'd explained that from his home in DC, 1/2 mile away, he heard a blast loud enough to shake his windows. [3]

A secondary explosion, like the ones widely reported by ear-witnesses, is one likely explanation for Judge's timeline. A few examples: “Two explosions, a few minutes apart, prompted me to start walking.” “Those fleeing the building heard a loud secondary explosion about 10 min. after the initial impact.” “secondary and third-order explosions started going off. One of them was a fire department car exploding.” On-site news reporters and others compiled by Arabesque back this up. At least one powerful blast with erupting fireball was photographed by Daryl Donley within a few minutes of the attack (above - note this fireball is erupting as the area is already damaged and smoldering. Ralph Olmholt found a source somewhere indicating "jetting flame from an underground utility bunker, presumably a broken gas main" was said to be responsible for Donnely's "dramatic picture," a theory he doesn't seem to buy. [4]

This harrowing account by survivor Kevin Shaeffer, originally published in Shipmate magazine, and re-posted 9/11/02 at Citizen Smash/Indepundit, seems to support the original time:

“In a flash, at exactly 9:43 a.m., the entire Command Center exploded in a gigantic orange fireball and I felt myself being slammed to the deck by a massive and thunderous shock wave. It felt to me as if the blast started with the outer wall facing my backside, blowing me forward toward Commander Dunn’s desk. I never lost consciousness, and though the entire space was pitch black, I immediately sensed that I was on fire.” [5]

I'm not enough of an explosives expert to say if an orange fireball moving inward in the building and igniting him is indicative of any type of explosives package, but it does fit the profile of jet fuel hurtling inward. So this would seem more likely to be the initial impact than the 9:43 blast of what seems to be burning fuel moving outward. Whether he was watching the actual time and had seen it turn to 9:43 just before the event, or filled it in later based on the flawed initial reports is not clear.

It could be the loudest explosion was the one at 9:43, louder than the crash itself – loud enough it shook Judge’s windows a half-mile away – while for whatever reason he didn’t hear the earlier crash. Other DC residents may have heard the same thing, triggering a rash of calls taken as the most likely point just due to this noise factor - it was likely flawed intelligence echo chambered in the initial confusion that got the first timeline off by five minutes. It was probably not a sinister cover-up.

Or was it a cover-up? If the secondary explosion were, for example, engineered for some reason, as some have speculated, there would be reason for them to say that was the hijacked jet crashing. Hmmm.... Discussion at the Loose Change Forum was inconclusive on the cause of the explosions, although member Honway provided this highly relevant screen cature:
Gaffney’s 9:43 Cover-Up Evidence
Another possible reason for a cover-up has been offered by Mark Gaffney, a noted environmental and peace activist and published expert and author on ‘Gnostic Secrets.’ He wrote a seminal piece posted at Rense.com called The 9/11 Mystery Plane, regarding the E4B ‘doomsday plane’ seen and filmed over the Capitol. There at about the time of the attack across the Potomac, this airborne command center is thought by some to have been running the remote control for the Pentagon attack plane. As worthy as this analytical piece is, Gaffney followed it with The 9/11 Mystery Plane Part II: Did the US Military Fudge the 9/11 Timeline?

Still eschewing overt silliness in favor of a relatively even keel, it elaborates on reports of the mysterious white jet over or near DC’s restricted airspace around 9:40-9:45, and alleges official flight path misinformation (vague at best) to allow us to believe this was Flight 77 before impact. Supporting this is live CNN footage from 9/11, where White House correspondent John King reported around 09:52 "about 10 minutes ago, there was a white jet circling overhead.” Gaffney summarizes “I believe that the US military announced the original 9:43 AM Pentagon crash time to conceal the presence of the E-4B over Washington.” [7]

However, recently released 84 RADES data, viewable here in stunning video form with Air Defense audio, shows nothing over DC at 9:43. An aircraft labeled “M3_0310” crosses just north of DC, flying west, at about 9:46-9:46:40, heads north then loops back south passing east of DC around 9:49. The E4B is also said to have passed the capitol twice, so it seems blip M3_0310 that skirts that airspace is this same craft.

This data must be approached with the proper caution due all evidence, but so far I see no particular reason to doubt it aside from its conflicts with 'CIT-compliant' eyewitnesses. But regarding this separate craft, if this is accurate and represents the white plane, it would seem King was rounding up when he said it passed the mall ‘ten minutes ago.’ Interestingly, its takeoff time – from Andrews Air Force Base - as seen in the video is 9:43:43, so if true it would have been on the ground at the official impact time as well as the 9:43 window. If this jet truly did not pass until 9:46, placing the impact time three minutes prior would have been a silly and risky gambit. This radar data has never been seen until now, but the cover-up might at any point have been exposed by any class of data: 911 calls, other call records, time-stamped video, etc. Or alternately, if other evidence supports Gaffney's claims, then the RADES data might be shown altered to conceal the true time of its flight.

Back Six More?
The RADES video linked to above also shows Flight 77 disappear from radar just short of the Pentagon at 9:37:12; this is consistent with its final dive to official impact 33 seconds later, and one more point of evidence that the shift from 9:43 to 9:38 was justified. But a sporadic attempt at another shift back of six minutes in the impact/explosion time - to about 9:32 – has been afoot for a while now and seems to have a lot of evidence backing it. Is it time for me to shift the timeframe back another six minutes, or is it not? This is my main reason for delving into timeline questions and the case for a ‘9:32 event,’ supported in part by Gaffney, will be introduced in the next post and its points of evidence directly addressed in the following one.

Sources:
[1] North American Aerospace Defense Command. “NORAD’s Response Times.” News release. September 18 2001. Accessed via: http://www.standdown.net/noradseptember182001pressrelease.htm
[2] National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. Second Public Hearing, panel 1. May 23, 2003.Hart Senate Office Building, Room 216, Washington, DC. Witness: Col. Alan Scott (Ret.). http://www.911commission.gov/archive/hearing2/9-11Commission_Hearing_2003-05-23.htm
[3] Judge, John. The Pentagon Attack and American Airlines Flight 77. February 21 2004. http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/JohnJudge/PAandAAF77.html
[4] Olmholt, Ralph. "The Dog Should Have Barked." Pentagon Reasearch.com. December 22 2004? ('date created' in html info) http://www.pentagonresearch.com/098.html
[5] Account of Kevin Shaeffer. Shipmate magazine. Original URL (non-funtioning): http://www.usna.com/News_Pubs/Publications/Shipmate/2002/09/Ring.htm. Accessed via: http://www.indepundit.com/archives/2002_09.html
[6]
[7] Gaffney, Mark H. The 9/11 Mystery Plane (Part II): Did the US Military Fudge the 9/11 Timeline? Rense.com. July 5, 2007. http://www.rense.com/general76/wdb.htm