Friday, November 30, 2007

MY INFAMOUS PENTACON REVIEW

MY INFAMOUS PENTACON REVIEW
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
The Frustrating Fraud
November 28 2007
working copy - last update 12/4 2 am


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Introductory Note:
This is not exactly the original as I posted it – I seem to have lost that unfortunately. But this is a version before I added some alterations to appease Craig Ranke/CIT and before I finally pulled it (back in July) for causing too much friction for my liking. I’ve repeatedly been accused of ‘conceding’ that my review was unjustified, etc. by virtue of pulling it, and this has been used by CIT to attack me as a disinfo/COINTELPRO/operative, or brainwashed nimrod sent to neutralize them, or whatever. This has some good reason, like that I attacked them first with the now-infamous phrase “Pentagon-sponsored disinformation.” This line is oft-quoted by Craig to justify his stance towards me. I honestly have no personal problem with their whole hard truth warfare thing (though it is troubling when coupled with other observations, like thse below). So for the record, I re-post it here in its original context with all typos and errors left in but notes added in this format.

And keep in mind I had just seen the video a couple of times and had little background information and somewhat less knowledge of all evidence in general. I was pretty sure a 757 impacted, but a bit stumped by the coherency of the north path testimony, and all I could really think of other than me being wrong on all points was coordination – and I said so. But the strength of Craig’s response, and too much attention on a piece that I didn’t write all that well left me embarrassed and wanting to pull it. But with the advantage of another nine months-worth of knowledge, I regret my initial suspicions less and less, and either way, in the interest of clarity, here is what I said before these guys ever had said a word to me.
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VIDEO REVIEW: THE PENTACON

Caustic Logic is forced to review: "The PentaCon: Eyewitnesses Speak, Conspiracy Revealed" (smoking gun version)
Update: March 5 2007

This rather troubling video opens with a CG rendition of the Flight 77 “flyover maneuver,” followed by the opening credits, which announce solemnly “Citizen Investigation Team is forced to present” … a grisly, over-the-top montage of foreign people killed at the hand of the US military. All this murder, justified by imperial greed and… the PentaCon! Both the video’s graphic fixation with the physical building and with the sins of wars planned from within those five rings, immediately bolsters my gut reaction that this is indeed Pentagon-sponsored disinformation. With this attitude wrapped around and supported by another set of dissolving claims, the video’s title is apt either way.

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Note:
I certainly don’t mean to belittle the suffering unleashed by the “World War IV” made possible by 9/11 and its string of unlikely 'failures.' I simply take issue with their manipulation of the emotional urgency this lends the debate to try and ram their conclusions through the BS detectors of ‘9/11 Truthers.’ Though true motives are impossible to divine for certain, the tingle of disinfo I got was real and has its reasons: as I added in a later update, this would serve as “a possible self-aggrandizement sarcastically disguised with demonization,” and using the anti-DoD citizen team would effectively mask the operation, if not a little too perfectly. Or it could just be my paranoia. Whatever.
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The first several minutes are spent with Aldo Marquis’ exceptionally smooth and relaxed voice endlessly setting up the official flight path, showing repeatedly the soon-to-be damning cover-story testified to by government lies and the physical evidence. This is said to conflict with just-discovered eyewitness accounts that again “prove” that, whatever exactly happened on 9/11, no 757 hit the Pentagon.

I watched the shorter, “smoking gun” version of the PentaCon, which promises to be far more popular than the longer research edition.* This one hour, twenty minute work draws on four separate accounts that place the attack plane unequivocally on a flight path different from the previous official one, well to the north and thus incapable of clipping the light poles on the official path or causing the extensive damage to the building’s lower floors. The main points giving these accounts enough weight to counteract the others we’ve heard, as Marquis listed them:

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* Note:
As of November, still not released.
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1 – The four accounts jibe with each other – at least on the one pivotal point they focused on, though on other points they still disagree, their flight paths don't match up terribly well (see below), and their descriptions of the plane differ.
2 – The question is simple – was the plane coming in to your right or left? (and which way were you facing? Oh wait, was that before the plane… no wait, I was over here, then…)
3 – The witnesses had the “best possible” vantage point to see the attack – not exactly, but three of the four had pretty good views.
4 – The witnesses are credible; two of them are Pentagon cops! *
5 – Their testimony was filmed on-location to accurately re-enact and recall what they saw, and besides...
6 – Everybody remembers 9/11 clearly, especially if they happened to see an off-white United Airlines 737 hitting the Pentagon from the northwest.

* Note: The other two have nothing like Defense Protective Services employment to cast leverage on their recollections, since they are naturalized immigrant citizens, with no secret, threatened deportation hearings or anything, or so we should presume.
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1) Edward Paik, an auto mechanic, was working at his shop just west of the Navy Annex, and saw the plane fly right over him and very low over the surrounding rooftops. His only salient description is of black wings (shadow? He would’ve seen it from below). His English proficiency is limited, and he seems a bit confused in his awkward, eight-minute testimony to Ranke, trying to keep his clipboard at one point. His account, all in all, placed the black-winged plane on a near-straight line from south of the Navy annex, the closest of the four to the official story, but sending it north of the Citgo.
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Note:
New graphic – Terry Morin’s account read literally (ie, wrong), the official path borne out by much evidence, Paik’s drawn path across the annex, and the CIT composite path merged from their four main witnesses. Note the different elements each got right or wrong; north-south location and compass heading. It’s my firm belief that Paik and Morin saw the same thing but just decribed it differently enough to create two out-runners near the official path, and that CIT took the northernmost of these two and morphed it yet further north to fuse with thir three main witnesses, below.
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2) Robert Turcios was at work at the Citgo station when he saw a large, twin-engine, wide-winged “gray” plane. He later clarified it was more silver, with no markings he remembered, which is roughly consistent with American Airlines’ nearly-paintless paint job. He was 100% certain it flew on the north, though he saw no light poles hit in the perhaps one second the plane was visible. Shortly before the building, he saw the plane pull up over a 20-foot-high over-road traffic sign - and thence, one would think, over the building. Turcios seemed confused and a bit annoyed when Ranke asked about a flyover and/or second plane; as Marquis’ voice-over explained, the witness still believes the silver jet hit the building, even though his account makes it “impossible." The subtle implication seems that Turcios is an idiot, but if pressed, the CIT folks would probably say he just had to believe it hit but that this bias does not adequately mar his testimony.
Note: Turcios' testimony had him at the station's south end, and running up the little mound to see the plane pull up. This is not shown in the proper view of the Citgo security video, which CIT strenuously denounce as irrelevant evidece regarding their Citgo-centered case. It was an anti-Turcios smear, they insist, first released just ten days after they first announced on September 5 2006 that they had a north path witness. As Craig explains, the video release was “done to discredit Robert Turcios since he is not visible in the video.” Another possibility is the video is real and their witness was simply not there to do what he says he did and his testimony is bogus. And again, besides Robert not being represented, there is a large shadow inserted consistent with a plane to the south of his (reported) position, when he had indicated it was just north. Proven manipulated? They had better hope so.
Some observations on Turcios’ account: was he even outside the station?
A unique intuitive reaction to the Turcios interview by StevenWarRan (apparently no longer up) noted the subject “gets upset in direct proportion to the pressure placed on him to say a certain thing in a certain way, I saw a common attribute hidden by its obviousness: the quick ins and outs, sometimes only a few words long, without any continuity, like computer viruses battling.”
John Farmer flash presentation: I’m not sure this is really Turcios here but it’s interesting nonetheless.
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3) Sgt. Chadwick Brooks was a Pentagon police officer on patrol at shortly after 9:00 am, when he pulled into a parking lot next to the Citgo to catch news on the New York attack. After he'd been there a while, the plane suddenly came in from the west, to the north of the station. He saw impact and fireball, presuming that the plane impacted building, but saw no light poles hit. He thought it was a 737, and emphasized to Ranke the plane’s size and large number of people on board. He saw no second plane.

The oddest part of Sgt. Brooks’ account is his recollection of the plane’s color, described as off-white or “champagne.” He thought markings were of a United Airlines plane, with blue letters, but UA planes have distinctive dark blue and mid-tone gray color schemes. And no one else has described a United plane, the official one of course being a red, white, and silver AA plane. Is he inserting the color scheme to fit with the airliner he thought (from news reports) had hit the building? Ranke doesn’t probe the sergeant on this, and the narrator fails to point out or explain anything as far as inconsistencies, instead moving on swiftly to their obviously favorite witness...

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Note:
The silver-white problem has been worked out – CIT has decided the plane is now white, the flyover white jet that apparently came down the river and looped in from the southeast and then north of the Citgo. Apparently anyone who said silver meant white, and anyone who said white (or near white) meant white, not silver. Lettering and design color issues are probably addressed somewhere too. I'm behind on the specifics here.
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Sgt. Lagasse and Brooks at the Citgo. Brooks has just drawn his flight path for Ranke.

4) Sgt. William Lagasse, a pentagon police dog handler, provided a rather solid presence to the northerly flight claims, having been already famous (in some circles) for his earlier testimony of the attack; the son of an aviation instructor, and familiar with all major plane types, he instantly identified the culprit undeniably a a silver AA jet, probably a 757. He had his dog in the car, which he was filling up at the Citgo station after chatting with some cops about the NY attacks, when he saw the blur perhaps 100 feet up and then heard it swooping down, in less than a second exploding against the building. No flaps or landing gear were down, and he could see shades pulled down on the windows as it came in from the north. He was pretty sure it actually hit with a “yawing” motion, having observed no pull-up. He saw no light poles seeing hit, but there were ones down so he presumed they were cut by this plane. He’s 100% “bet my life on it” certain that the plane flew over his left shoulder into the building, placing it to the north. Ranke did risk upsetting his interviewee by presenting him with a picture showing the clipped light poles, but Lagasse refused to believe it. Indicating the official flight path, he insisted "nothing happened over here. Period."

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Note:
Lagasse is not suffering from vague memory, but specifically wrong memory. He specifically pointed out on a map where at least two poles were knocked down on his path that did not happen. Indicating the area he would have had to drive right through to get there, he said "none of these light poles over here were knocked down. They were here. NONE of these were knocked down." He also indicated Lloyd’s cab in that area, hundreds of feet from where it really was. CIT chalks this up to denial-driven memory alteration. Anyway, when Craig says the 'official story' put the pole damage further south, Lagasse responded - incredulously - “what official story? The only official story would’ve been the Arlington County Police Report done after the event. There’s no official story other than that. That’s the After-Action Report that was written by Arlington County.”

Just from this, it seems Lagasse feels it supports his north-side recollection. If he hadn’t studied it closely before speaking, he should have, because then he’d know how deep the ‘cover-up’ went. The text is rather vague on trajectory, but in several graphics throughout it indicated the official path (arrow at impact point) and clearly lines up with what Craig termed the official story. (note location of "forward assessment") The downed poles are on this path. Did Lagasse never see this and have his memory jogged? ‘At the cloverleaf? Oh yeah, that IS where the cab was…’
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Lagasse also initially took them to the wrong spot, but then recalled on-camera his backing out from a different pump than he thought he was at, which Ranke notes with relief, as his testimony then matched his patrol car pulling out as captured on the Citgo’s security cameras. Lagasse had earlier cited that he was seeing the plane from the right side, meaning it was to his left, or north. This account at least is consistent with earlier, known testimony, but he clearly does not buy the no-757 theories, having repeatedly attacked the previous flyover theories of Dick Eastman. He can't be happy that his testimony is now being used to bolster - and quite well - another flyover theory. Or perhaps he's just doing his job as a link in the Pentacon disinfo web, having earlier earned anti-CT credentials in his spats with Eastman.
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Note:
This fascinating 2003 analysis by Jean Pierre Desmoulins helps shed some light on the Eastman/Lagasse back story. This discussion has flared up time and again (like here). Craig has informed me, based on his assessment of possible motives, any such conspiracy theorizing is loopy, unsubstantiated, and so nuts he was being responsible in never bothering to consider it. Regarding this possibility of organized, malicious error in the accounts, I recently asked Craig “why have you have (so far as I’ve seen) never addressed this possibility at all until forced to? If you have ever publicly aired doubts about the main content of their accounts, or the possibility of systematic deception, now’s the time to link to it. Otherwise, embracing one ridiculous possibility as a ‘smoking gun’ while rejecting another without even bothering to explain why, to dismiss it as if it never existed, is a rather suspicious way to carry out an investigation.” He responded “The notion is so completely absurd that my answer is an emphatic NO. Nobody who went through what I went through would consider such a ridiculous assertion.” Is this an admission that he’s simply too deeply invested to turn back now? If so, he and Aldo had to both just not consider it at the beginning either, at least long enough to get this far ahead.
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In concluding and synthesizing the accounts, Marquis explains some of the reasons the witnesses think the plane hit the building; they had been conditioned by news from NY to expect a plane to hit a building. This helped mask the plane’s flyover, and on the other side of the synchronous blast the plane simply blended in with normal air traffic, just nine minutes after all commercial flights were ordered to land, and slipped away in the rapidly thinning crowd to its own secret touchdown.
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Note:
As of writing, no other-side witnesses witnesses testifying a flyover have yet surfaced. One attempt at finding one is “Barbara,” whom Woody Box presented as "a witness detected by ME to counter [the] claim that the flyover was observed by NOBODY." On 395 near the Potomac, Barbara saw "on the left-hand side, there was a commercial plane coming in, and […] we saw […] it go down below the side of the road, and we just saw the fire that came up after that. […] I'm not sure exactly where the Pentagon, where it was in relationship to where the plane went down but they are relatively close to one another. ... whether it hit any part of that pentagon, I'm not sure." Going down and crashing doesn't sound like a flyover to me, but WB thinks it happened just on the other side, perhaps in the Pentagon's lagoon. Even considering this confusing and misread account, there is no direct evidence for a flyover anywhere, just the partial implications of the collected witness accounts CIT keep getting.
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The video also cites report of a second plane just seconds behind the explosion, which then veered off. These reports could've been those who saw through the con and witnessed the explosive "impact" and the plane flying off, but their presumption of two planes, in the official story, was then quickly “turned into” the attack plane and the C-130 ordered to scope the scene. But the C-130 was not seen until at least a minute later, so the “second plane” people saw was the flyover jet fleeing the scene. As for the identity of the flyover fool-people plane, the CIT’s investigation had decided on a hybrid plane with some AA features as the most likely possibility, perhaps a re-painted E4B airborne command center plane, since another one of these painted pure white was also seen in the area.
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Note:
They do not claim an E-4B, as I cited below, since no witnesses describe a 4-engie plane. However they do still claim the C-130 was sent in to confuse people who witnessed the flyover – it appears over the immediate area by radar and video about 2 min post-impact and way up there. Little confusion possible unless reports with things like 'moments later" are read too literally the wrong way. While the newly-released radar returns of the area matches an amteur video for C-130 path and time, but contradicts with recent testimony of the C-130 pilot given to Rob Balsamo and verified with CIT via e-mail. With this flightpath untaken in the CIT construct, its rough contours have been attributed to the charter boat captain's sighting of the white jet that then circled north and presumably flew over. I'm still hazy on this point, but something clearly isn't adding up. [graphic forthcoming]
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So besides the flyover AA-painted E4B and the later C-130 scoping out the area, there would have to be another explanation for both the light poles and the building damage. I had initially seen this as their weak point and wondered how they would handle it, but was rather surprised at the inadequacy of their explanation. On-site bombs were used to fake the airliner impact and the 300-foot-deep penetration into the building, the space that would later be filled with planted bodies, plane parts, and the very FDR that would “prove” the plane never hit the building. The tops of the light poles, marquis explains, were torn off at some earlier time and simply planted near their mangled bases, perhaps the night before, except the one that allegedly hit the taxi's windshield, but the hood was not dented also so clearly the ploe didn't fall on the car. I guess he jumped out and smashed the windshield himself just as the feds dopped the pole next to the car.
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Note:
This whole issue is very complex and my understanding of the taxi-pole issue is still only partial, but it seems to me driver Lloyd’s account does not add up. I’m far less certain than CIT as to what this means, however, and the rest of their physical case – especially at and within the building – is at least as elaborate and silly as I had suspected (see CIT Masterlist for my partial compilation of claims and debunkings)
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This theory leaves many questions unanswered; they admit they don’t know what happened to the passengers, for example. But these are not not enough to keep Marquis from summing up confidently “this is enough evidence to cast doubt on all of the circumstances surrounding 9/11.” The northern flight and planted poles made it undeniably clear that the attack was planned from within, and clearly radical changes will be required due to this “smoking gun” evidence. At least until someone proves them wrong. Their own eyewitnesses almost do this for them:

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Note:
This graphic missed the reported turn that merged Paik’s path to the others, leading Craig to call it “the most deceptive idiotic confusing piece of crap ever.” CIT’s final synthesis, unless they’ve updated it, is this:

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This vid is clearly more fraudsterism at heart, as evidenced by the thanks list at the end of the video, a veritable who's who of no-757 activists: Dylan Avery, Dick Eastman (surprise?), April Gallop, etc. Kat Turner, an actress who starred in Inland Empire (directed by Pentalawn-awed Loose Change fan David Lynch), was thanked for providing voice-overs for the PentaCon's research edition.
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Note:
Avery had a falling out with CIT later on and is now ‘agnositc’ on what happened at the Pentagon.
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Nonetheless, its evidence, along with the recently-released Flight 77 FDR evidence might have forced me to rethink the Pentagon attack and start allowing for a second plane. But even that isn’t the case made here - their theory is much simpler and dumber than even that. By denying the actual attack plane altogether in another frivolous overflight theory that treats the actual attack and its victims (both on the plane that hit and in the building that was hit) as secondary factors to explain away, they blew any chance of convincing me of this new flight path.
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Note:
I still stand by that assessment, though how I worded it was manipulative sounding. I mentioned the dead - once! Un-provable black ops and ‘total control of the scene’ is explanation for any physical evidence that contradicts their theory, perpetrator control their explanation for other data that effectively conflicts. On the other hand, simple error is their reason for the bits of ‘fakery’ done wrong enough (like no foundation damage, the generator gouge, the poles laying the wrong way, fooling the north path witnesses into seeing an impact but not the right flight path) that they try to prove the impact impossible with it.
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Curiously, the CIT don't even call on the new Black Box animation evidence despite its government pedigree and partial validation of the witness report, other than a brief nod to the PBB video by their "brother organization, Pilots for 9/11 Truth." This is one more clue that something is wrong with that aspect of the new fraud flight path, an analysis of which I'm well-into and will be posting more on soon.
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Note:
'North path data' is illusion only: the FDR recorded the 'official path,' all but a few seconds of it. The NTSB animation seeming to show a course remarkably similar to what the witnesses described has been shown by me to be a rotation of the fial map, adding 20 degrees of heading and north of the Citgo apparently on accident. Luckily Craig disavows the FDR as governmnt-controlled data, but fiercely supports the anomolograhy of it done by his Pilots for Truth cohorts.
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Thursday, November 29, 2007

LIGHT POLE ANALYSIS: POLES ONE AND TWO

LIGHT POLE ANALYSIS: POLES ONE AND TWO
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
The Frustrating Fraud
November 29 2007
working copy update 11.30 1 am


The first two light poles of the five downed in the Pentagon attack were along the west side of Route 27, about 1000 feet from impact. Note here (graphic quite approximate, will be replaced soon) three green dots along the width of the flight path: pole 2 furthest north, pole 1, then a VDOT traffic camera pole that was left standing but suffered a superficial 'smudge,' presumably from the right wing tip. Effective wingspan across this line is approximately 210 feet. My intent here is to determine what I can about pole 1 and 2 damage to help me determine effective roll (wing bank) at that point, or what the fakery was trying to show, take your pick.

Pole 2
First, let's look at pole 2, the least clearly seen of the five downed. Russell Pickering's analysis at Pentagon Research.com compiled the few shots with it visible, peeking out from behind the bushes on the left side of the bridge mound. As this montage I made of the avaiable shots shows, this almost looks slender enough to be the smaller truss arm that holds the lamp head, or more likely the pole itself – its narrow upper end. The left wing would have hit it, and much too low to have directly caused that bend – presumably a secondary effect. There are no photos I'm aware of showing the main damage anything like what the other poles show.

Update: A previously unseen photo I ran across later may hold a clue to this pole, and vice-versa.

Pole 1
The first pole downed, numbered 076, is the famous pole that is said to have speared Lloyd England's taxi windshield, covered in some detail at Pentagon Research.com. There is much, much written about this case - the inconsistencies in Lloyd's story, the damage inside the car and to his windshield, the lack of corroboration for his take that this long pole segment was completley sticking out of his car and was then removed by himself and a silent stranger. Most people who look into the case decide the story does not add up, but there are different theories as to what actually happened and to the significance of this mystery.

Update: It seems by a closer look at the damage to the cab that Lloyd's story is not as unlikely as I had thought.

There are also smaller parts visible (top shot, left: truss arm and lamphead, as well as another small straight piece further to the left, but for now I'm interested in the length of this prime piece of history; the '40 foot pole' that could not have fit in the cab – how long is it really? Unfortunately I can only get a range on original pole dimensions; Pickering says 28 feet, other say 30, and some say 40. After measuring photos back and forth with different numbers, ratios, I’ve decided on these proportions as a best fit, though still approximate:
Pole height: 32 feet
Base height: 16 inches
Full height to cap: 33.333 feet
Pole diameter at base: 8 inches
I also found the proportions of 1990s model Lincoln Town Car, which this seems to be: 77x219.” With al this, rough ratios were set, roughly averaged, estimated, and the apparent length of fragment on the roadway is 20-23 feet - perhaps a bit longer - about 14-16 feet of that straight.



It's probably not even new, but I've decided the part of pole 1 seen by Lloyd's cab is about 20-23 feet long, missing perhaps ten feet off the top, including the parts where the truss bolts down. Where that top part wound up is something I haven't looked into, but they could be simply the pieces on the road nearby, depending if the straight piece measure out right. It's also possible that a sizable chunk disappeared into the jet's engine (see below), causing the gray smoke visible trailing behind Flight 77 at impact.



This graphic, based on another light pole in the area, shows two impact scenarios that geometrically could explain the damage seen, including that unique bend, and the separation of the two parts. I'm not sure kinetically and forensically if either makes sense, just throwing it out there.






Attack Profile: How The Poles Fit In

Putting pole 1's damage into a larger framework that's half-done. While pole 2 is inconclusive, pole 1 damage - a curve and a shear - fits other clues as to the plane's altiude and right-high bank at that point. effective wingspan cutting across Route 27 – 205-215 feet – poles about 140 feet apart – I placed the light poles approximately into a graphic I was working with – between the camera mast scuff and tree damage alone I had a pretty good image of the plane. As it turns out a scaled 757 profile does fit. And the poles don't really mess it up. Perhaps I placed pole 1 a bit wrong, or underestimated the perspective a tad, because the bend of the pole also corresponds roughly with the engine's lower edge. All these points line up to have pole 2 clipped by the outer left wingtip 14-16 feet above ground, and give the plane about the same bank recorded in the damaged facade one second later as well as the generator, fence, retaining wall, and possibly foundation damage between.

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

FIREBALL FAKERY: CHALLENGE TO CIT

FIREBALL FAKERY: CHALLENGE TO CIT
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
The Frustrating Fraud
November 20 2007
pretty much final Nov 21 3 pm


In the interest of critical thought regarding fakery of the Pentagon plane impact, I’d like to address the massive fireball unleashed when the plane *supposedly* struck the building. This was reportedly unleashed from the exploding fuel tanks of the 757 that impacted at a 39 degree angle traveling 530 mph or more. By the laws of physics, the motion of the expanding fireball would be determined by some combination of its general expansion (in all directions,) the forward momentum it retained from its flight there, and the angle of deflection and as such should spread across much of the building face, especially to the left (north) of impact, pressing against limestone and glass alike on its way. It would also have some tendency to rise and roll forward over the facade, igniting the roofing materials.

If there was a staged overflight with on-the-ground explosives and pyrotechnics used to create the fireball, it would either somehow have to mimic this pattern, or reveal the deception with inconsistencies. Ignoring for the moment the likelihood of this fakery, let’s look at some of the evidence of this event and its aftermath; whether it was stage-managed or simply crashed into, what does the building and the scene reveal about what actually happened?

The Crappy Video Evidence
First, let’s look at the famous and much-questioned CCTV security gate video of the attack. These choppy sequences of images (video at one frame per second) were captured by two cameras near each other at a security post just north of the supposed crash site. They show the plane (in black or white, depending on how one sees it) for one frame, about 600 feet from the cameras and closing at an oblique angle, less than a second before a bright flash at impact in the next frame, followed by a surging orange fireball that engulfs the building (below). That seems to make sense. The silhouetted structure is the heliport tower. Note this for later.


Note the deflagration's apparently triangular or conical shape, peaking just to the left of the building edge. I’ve seen this taken as a static, Christmas tree-shaped mass of fire, rising straight up from an epicenter in the building – as if the upper floors weren’t there, proof of obviously bad photo-editing. Another explanation is that the incandescent mass is rolling forward with plane’s momentum – from right to left of course and also somewhat towards the camera, if the ‘official’ trajectory is any clue. And a third possibility is that it was Photoshopped right to look like it should, which would look the same as the second option.

If the blast originated within, as a flyover would indicate - and the video were honest – I feel it would look something more like this (at left): an apparent fuel explosion (I'm not sure) inside the building five minutes after impact radiating out from the first and second floor impact wound. What we see here is indeed consistent with a fireball rolling forward with plane’s momentum – from right to left of course and also somewhat towards the camera (see below). The glowing mass spreads along the façade to the area behind the heliport – it’s certainly difficult to imagine any inside-the building incendiary package actually doing this.Debris movement as seen in the video is another clue; some fragments hurtling out and ahead of the fireball seem to move backwards, but the larger pieces go forward, and presumably towards the camera, another clue of its overall momentum. As so many have said before, of course, this controlled video footage would have been easy to doctor, and so we're left with the old question - is it live or Memorex?


Post-Attack Photos
For whatever reason, photographs of the scene are not as often accused of fakery, but in fact they are easier to doctor. But ignoring the pit of paranoia that opens, here is a photo of façade burns after the impact and collapse, taken from an angle similar to the gate cameras. In fact, the cameras are in and in front of the small foreground buildings. The taller structure between them is the heliport/fire station. Compare the burn area to the left of the collapse zone to the narrower area to its right (not so clear in this shot). Also note for reference the security camera in about the middle of the wide left area.

This face-on early shot taken by Steve Riskus shows the area before the collapse, just minutes after the impact. Already we see that even after the fireball has passed, there are rectangular patches of fire that has somehow gotten inside of widows, and much further to the left than to the right (heliport cropped off the left side). This is yet more evidence of a fluid combusting with forward momentum consistent with a path from the southwest combined with expected deflection angle.


Upper Floor Fires
And in this picture, again after the collapse, note the same asymmetry and also the fires flaring out from inside on upper left, some of those that raged and smoldered inside for over a day. I’m not certain of the official take but would guess these are believed to be caused by the impact fireball breaking out windows in the un-renovated wedge two, and entering the upper floors though these breaches.

ASCE, Pentagon Building Performance Report, 2002:
“Clearly, some of the fuel on the aircraft at impact did not enter the building, either because it was in those portions of the wings that were severed by the impact with the facade or with objects just outside of the building, or because it was deflected away from the building upon impact with the facade; that fuel burned outside the building in the initial fireball.” [p 41] "Windows that had not been upgraded generally were broken for several hundred feet to the north of the impact point." [p 28] "A large fireball engulfed the exterior of the building in the impact area.Interior fires began immediately." [p 20]

These observations of the ASCE would support the theory that these upper floor fires far from impact were injected by this possible engineered inferno. The following passage however is confusing: "Most of the original windows in a vast area of Wedge 2 were broken after the fire was extinguished. It is probable that some of these windows were broken by the fire or by firefighting efforts rather than by the effects of the impact." [p 44] This gives little clue of just how the fires got started behind these intact windows. With the fire unable to spread laterally through walls from the actual wing impact points, let alone up through floor slabs, it seems likely the fire came in from outside.

The Running Eyewitness Evidence
The rolling deflagration was reported by eyewitnesses, including Fort Myer firefighters Alan Wallace, Mark Skipper, and Dennis Young, close enough to have to run for their lives as it billowed towards them. On duty at the Pentagon’s heliport (which has a mini-fire station beneath it and an on-site engine, ‘foam tender 161’), Wallace and Skipper were outside the station, inspecting 161 they had just parked against the Pentagon’s outer wall. As Newsweek reported:

“The two looked up and saw an airplane. It was about 25 feet off the ground and just 200 yards away -- the length of two football fields. They had heard about the WTC disaster and had little doubt what was coming next. "Let's go," Wallace yelled. Both men ran. Wallace hadn't gotten far when the plane hit. "I hadn't even reached the back of the van when I felt the fireball. I felt the blast," he says. He hit the blacktop near the left rear tire of the van and quickly shimmied underneath. "I remember feeling pressure, a lot of heat," he says. He crawled toward the front of the van, then emerged to see Skipper out in the field, still standing. "Everything is on fire. The grass is on fire. The building is on fire. The firehouse is on fire," Wallace recalls. "There was fire everywhere. Areas of the blacktop were on fire." [source: "Washington's Heroes - On the ground at the Pentagon on Sept. 11," Newsweek, 9/28/01. http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/F77penta04.html]

Wallace’s account is interesting in that his image of its trajectory and altitude indicated imminent impact; and being so close to its said impact location, he’d have the perfect vantage point to see it work its flyover magic, (80 feet off the ground minimum to pass over). But being so close to its anticipated impact point from 25 feet up and 600 feet away, he was running with his eyes pointing away from it at the time. At any rate, it’s a good thing they ran instead of standing and fighting the fire like men. It would have won. This is Foam 161 afterwards, at the spot they were standing when the plane first came into view. Jon Culberson photo, Smithsonian

By the flyover hypothesis championed by some, however, this palpable pressurized explosion was not the effect of impact, but something engineered beneath the steeply pitching plane.

The Challenge
The usual proposal for non-plane damage is a truck bomb out front, or bombs inside the building. Any number of explosive materials could be used – including a jet fuel element to simulate a 757 strike – and different mechanisms employed to create the angle of the engineered fireball. Who knows, huh?

Well, for people who claim something to that effect actually happened, it would be useful to have some guesses at hand. So I challenge Craig and Aldo of the Citizen’s Investigation-ish Thing to offer a plausible method for how this was all faked. An unseen incendiary catapult hidden behind the generator to hurl a fireball against the wall as the explosives blew outward? I seriously challenge them – describe the least Rube-Goldberg-esque contirivance, the least exotic weaponry they feel may have been actually used. Diagrams, specifications, numbers, guesses as specific as they’re willing to get. Brainstorm on it. People are watching.

Simply branding it as another point that could be done any number of ways will not suffice. Sure, they’re investigating people with theoretically unlimited power and they’ve said before they don’t need to explain how, since their witnesses prove this was all staged somehow. While that presumption remains contested, if this fireball fakery was another of the many points of deception, it had to happen in some way, by some mechanism, or it wouldn’t happen. Columns can be bombed. Poles can be clipped or torched down and hidden. Fences can be torn down. Generators can be pushed, etc. But what on earth could hurl a fireball like that against the façade of the Pentagon? I’d love to see any guess as to what, other than a crashing jetliner, it could have been? Or failing that another tap dance routine will suffice.

I'm not trying to push this as some smoking gun debunking either, just a good point to offer a firm challenge on. And Aldo, you aren’t banned here. Feel free to comment.

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

LC_FC ON THE PENTAGON: PREVIEW

LC_FC ON THE PENTAGON: PREVIEW
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
The Frustrating Fraud
Last Update Nov 13 12:23 am
Working post - will be updated


Well, it's been seeming a while that thanks to the dilligent efforts of Russ Pickering (who was given a lot of influence at the Loose Change forum) and others, and the self-dicrediting antics of Citizen's Investigative Team, and whatever other factors, the guys behind Loose Change had come around from their missile-at-the-Pentagon days and had at least become 'agnostic' on what happened at 9:38. Recently their Final Cut of Loose Change was wrapped up, over two years since their first re-working (which dropped the pods but kep the missile). The much-awaited new edition is backed by a reported million-dollar budget, over two hours long, and done with researcher Jason Bermas bosltered fact-checker David Ray Griffin. What would be their new take on the Pentagon? Did a 757 even possibly hit the building? I haven't really kept up, but here I will track what I run across until I can actually see it and offer a proper review.

See the trailer/promo made for the six-year anniversary below: Some incredible graphics and over-the-top theatrics are in store it seems.

Loose Change Forum: What's Loose Change Position On The Pentagon?

On the 11th it's to be released for sale, and has already been shown publicly and is being reported on. This was posted Nov. 5 by Mick Meaney at RINF Alternative News:"Saturday, 3rd November, 2007, saw the British preview screening of the much anticipated 9/11 truth blockbuster, ‘Loose Change Final Cut’. Before the screening began, Tim Sparke, executive producer of Loose Change 3, gave us a brief thank you and intro, he welcomed us by saying: “By the end of this, you’re going to be knackered!”" Meaney reports the new edition is re-worked from the ground up, and 'comprehensive," covering a broader range of issues including intelligence failures more in-depth, 9/11 truth protests, health effects at WTC, etc. I've never heard of Sparke. Shows how much I've kept up.

Regarding the Pentagon, Meaney reports "obviously the Pentagon attack is called into question, the lack of video evidence and eyewitness statements are touched upon." Lack of witnesses? To what, the impact? How many witnesses are there to anything else? "How Flight 77 was unusually only 30% full and most of the passengers were government employees" is another point reportedly made. This is obviously a hint at remote controlled drone work, which is worth considering, but I doubt that's how they treat it. "We also see some of the flight recorder data which proves without a doubt, there has been a cover up," Meany concludes, with that sentence linking to a page selling Calum Douglas' new DVD.
...
Update 11/13: I heard the video in its entirety at Google video, but the link was dead by the time I checked it. I'm guessing they're having unauthorized postings removed, which is fair. Here is a good meaty preview with other material, an hour long, and posted by Dylan himself - but posted over a year ago.
First notes: Interview w/Leuren Moret at 13:38 discussing elevated radiation levels - 90x normal - downwind from the Pentagon. A Depleted Uranium expert and anti-DU activist, Morethas previously stated "what happened at the Pentagon is highly suspicious, leading me to believe a missile with a depleted uranium warhead may have been used..."
At 30:30 DC-area freelance videographer Bob Pugh, who only arrived at the scene five minutes after the attack, talks for a long time about confusion surrounding Flight 77's crash location, lack or discernable debris, water instead of foam being used to the fight the fire (which I believe is wrong), and an inexplicable spiel on the 'sixteen foot hole," unmarked lawn, etc., and possibility of a truck bomb, the light poles, all of it (good part where he sounds like a no-planer drone at 51:17). Video acompaniment at key times. Interesting and nuts.
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Tuesday, November 13, 2007

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.

Saturday, November 10, 2007

HOW THE CITGO VIDEO CONTRADICTS THE NORTH SIDE CLAIM

AN ANALYSIS OF... FLIGHT 77'S SHADOW?
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
The Frustrating Fraud
First posted October 30 2007
Last update 6/26/08, 1 am


PLEASE NOTE: The solar angles I had used for my original detailed analysis were not accurate. My presumption of steady change during the day seems to be at fault. Steady change would create a triangle waveform of change - /\ - which is not how the sun moves. In reality the pattern is curved, and so degree change minute to minute changes in a steady non-linear pattern that I don't know how to calculate, so I've used a solar calculator as recommended by helpful comments from a knowledgeable reader (please see comments section below). I've found, as the commentator did, an altitude of 32°, not 25, and an azimuth of 113°, not 126. I have update ALL my math, graphics, and text to reflect this. Distance/speed has not changed at all, but my original altitude of 72 feet above the shadow has been increased to 115 feet, and pitch issues have been raised. See below for details. All other findings stand as is.

Dylan’s Loop
Starting to lean towards a 757 impact at the Pentagon, or at least to a more 'agnostic' position than the missile theorizing of Loose Change version 2, Director/narrator Dylan Avery started a thread at his Loose Change forum in August 2007 asking “why does the Citgo video contradict the North Side claim?” The significance of this of course is that the ‘official’ south-of-the-Citgo flight path allows the downed light poles, impact and internal damage (as well as plane debris and the flight data recorder) to be caused by the plane, while the north-of the-Citgo flight path attested by Citizen’s Investigative Team (CIT) and their ‘PentaCon’ witnesses rules this out, implying a flyover and all damage staged in real time.

The answer Dylan provided to his question was to be seen in a short segment of the station’s security video (9:40:37-9:40:39 by video timestamp) which shows a flash of light at the northwest end of the station, and a subtle darkening of one interior camera’s field of view, as well as a less-noted soft double-pulse of light reflected off a wall on the station’s southeast end. These are usually taken as a glint from a plane on the south side of the Citgo and the shadow of same falling over the station. Though Avery failed to elaborate on what exactly the video shows, an endlessly-looping 3-second animated gif was left up to drive the vague point home. [1]
A frame of video showing the canopy flash (upper right large screen, camera 3, 'dual pump') and south end light pulse (top center small, camera 2, 'east entrance'). The interior 'shadow' was captured by camera 7, 'register 2,' lower right.

The thread is a fascinating and frustrating read, with the video’s authenticity immediately questioned by CIT cohorts Aldo Marquis and Craig Ranke and their forum compatriots, primarily via the “proven” manipulation of the video to remove key frames (a point we’ll return to at the end), and the timing of its release last year to “discredit” their then-new north path witness Robert Turcios by editing him out. At any rate, even looking at the content, a lot of doubts were aired in that thread that seriously question Avery's original 'findings.'

Rob Balsamo popped in to ask “the dim of the lower right cam for one frame is what is being argued here? Really?" It was. His piloty opinion, echoed by others, was that "that dimming effect in the lower right cam is not a "shadow" of AA77 or any other aircraft.” [2] Craig concluded “the content of the data isn't anywhere close to definitive in regards to whether or not a plane flew on the north or south side. No "fakery" at all was necessary because of this,” he announced, but was willing to entertain “low level fakery of a slight dimming in ONE view or what might appear to be a reflection or two.” [3] Researcher John Farmer (spcengineer), alongside his flaying CIT for their dishonesty, abuse of his work, and ‘delusions of grandeur,’ agreed “I do see evidence for the north side claim. I also see evidence of the south side claim […] there is not enough evidence to be dogmatic about either.” [4] Discussion of light angles was inconclusive, but enough to question the path they evidenced. After the original post, there was no defense or explanation from Dylan, despite some pleas for clarification. The poor quality video, endlessly hammered charges of alteration and irrelevance won the days, with CIT supporters slapping down grinning emoticons like silver dollars at happy hour.

I agree with these general findings that the effects captured in this loop in fact do NOT contradict the north side claim. The interior ‘shadow’ captured in camera 7 (Register Two, lower right) happens synchronous with the two lighting effects – uniform in nature and effecting one camera only, my best guess is it’s a brightness adjustment triggered by the flashes, and not a shadow cast by an airborne object. Immediate reaction of customers/employees inside and the black police car just after it sends the flash onto the canopy indicate these light bursts are at the moment of impact, not of the earlier pass over the station. This would put any plane reflection at or very near impact – so despite what I’ve published before, it may tell us tells nothing about north or south path, as both converge at that point. These light effects will require additional analysis and are beyond the scope of this piece, but the main reason I’ve identified them with impact will be fairly clear by article’s end.

The Real Shadow
Ironically, the best clue mitigating against the north-side claim in the Citgo video is one little feature Avery’s loop missed - seen onscreen just before the loop starts, at 9:40:35. Here is a video I made to help illustrate (please note this has editing effects and is less-than-clear: Do NOT use this video for in-depth research):

Here is the highest resolution still of that one frame I could find, provided by Farmer, who also helped me first locate the dots. This is still not very good by any measure, but briefly a large shadow – or set of shadows – appears on and then flickers away from the ground south of the station. This is the view captured by camera 4, labeled “Single Pump side,” multiplexed into the video screen above as a very small view. It was set beneath the canopy at the east edge of the southwest end of the station, looking southwest. Interestingly, this is the same camera view Robert Turcios is said to have been edited out from. Just beneath the canopy edge across the right half of the view are two large patches of darkness stretched across on the white background that seems to be the surface of South Joyce Street.

The only early mention of this in Dylan's thread was made my Aldo: “A ways back, I noticed a couple of dots that pop up in the street in the south side camera. John Farmer points this out as well. It is inconclusive and could actually just be a flaw in the video.” [5] He'd better hope so, because the object(s) casting such a shadow would be further southeast of that in the sunlight at that time and location – in fact, roughly in the space Flight 77 is said to have passed through at about that time in the official story.
The first thing to establish is the size and location of this area of shadows. The fisheye effect of the lens clearly a factor, but not one I feel impacts the general findings, so I’ve essentially ignored it. In this montage of two site photographs kindly provided by John Farmer – taken on his research trip there earlier this year – exact feature correlation is hard to pin down. The security camera was set higher than this and looking more down, but at about this lateral angle. Using the 100 ft scale from Google maps, I measured the south parking lot at about 75 feet long and therefore the area occupied by shadow seems at least 45-50 feet across.

Subdividing the camera's view in 4 for reference, and approximating its field of view on a satelite map oriented north, I have placed the shadow here, on South Joyce Street:
Timeline Clues
Each camera captured in the multiplexed video has an “action” setting that seems to increase frame rate when it detects a certain level of motion. This mode is off for camera 4 as the shadow passes, so it is only visible for one frame. My non-expert analysis with iMovie shows this image holds for 10 frames of standard video (at 30 fps), so the original video would have been 3 frames per second. A plane traveling at a reported 530 mph would cross 777 feet per second, or about 260 feet per video frame – therefore we should expect just one frame to capture any meaningful part of it passing over this patch of ground.

Vehicles passing down the street seen at other points in the video come from a great distance and take something like 60 frames or about 2 seconds to pass off-screen. The shadow, however, takes one frame to be gone, indicating that it was either crossing the road - not running down it - or moving at tremendous speed, or both.

Even more interesting is what happens after the shadow blinks off-screen again. The flashes of light and the interior ‘shadow’ featured in Avery’s loop, by my analysis (using iMovie), start happening 65 frames after the shadow first appears – 2.167 seconds, yielding a speed of around 530 mph, or just what the flight data recorded found inside the Pentagon says. I will explain this more fully below, but so far it seems this is lining up quite well with the ‘official story,’ whatever exactly that means.

Two Smudges Ain’t a 757 Shadow
The first obvious problem for this line of reasoning is ‘the shadow’ appearing as two separate dots and entirely too small to represent the outline of a 125-foot-wide 757, and far too short as well. As LCF member Avenger argued when I brought up my first awareness of the issue in Avery’s thread (link at top, page 13) “two little spots can not be the shadow of a 757,” he said. “For one thing, they are too small, and for another, there are TWO OF THEM!!!” [6]

Would it be a cop out to suggest optical effects? Factors at work to counter a clear view of the shadow include edge fuzzing due to altitude and refraction, road reflectivity, angle of view and surface topography, camera resolution, transfer resolution, and of course the shape of the object casting the shadow, in this case supposedly a twin-engine airliner. Farmer seems comfortable referring to them a single shadow and told me regarding its appearance:

”A lot of it has to do with image quality and poor quality CCD... That is the big problem, people try to see more than the system is capable of revealing. Alone the dark "smudges" mean nothing. Together with angle of sun, predicted location and altitude of plane, and other factors combine to identify it as a shadow (exactly where models predict it should be). Alone, it is just a smudge...” [7]

I've found two photos that help us understand what would be seen in this video if a 757 passed over South Joyce Street in front of the camera. I'm not allowed to repost them, or apparently to even link directly. But if you right-click this link and search for ["Mark Wilson" shadow air] you can view them. They both show a different angle relative to the camera and probably different model craft. Note the angles of the wings and engines, and the effects of minor topography; in the second picture, the slight rise of the roadway seems to have snubbed off the nose of the plane.

And here is a perspective model I made with a 757 shadow to scale. Note also how in the foremost section the fuselage shadow and engine shadows, if divided from the rest, would appear as three separate shadows, one of which disappears once distorted along the lines of the video view, the parts at the top hidden by perspective, the lens, and the canopy (bottom).

Extreme contrast reveals all the clues this crappy video has to offer as latent mid-tones pop out more sharp. It seems part of the shadow may also appear on the far right, on the other side of the support pole – If this is so, then we have big dot – small dot – big dot – line. Note that the left spot extends further towards the station’s sunken parking lot, and seems warped in shape, possibly from its interaction with the raised sidewalk, obscuring its true length on the roadway behind that.

The blue arrow in this graphic shows not only the direction but also the rough location of the “official” flight path. I re-did the shadows here, elongating the southern one to flesh out what I wanted to see and to reflect the likely sidewalk effect noted above. In this scheme, big dot – small dot – big dot – line – becomes fuselage – wing root - engine - wing edge of a plane on a heading of about 60 degrees. I’m entirely open to suggestions that I’ve read this wrong, but as far as I can see this is a good overall fit.
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Update 11/13:
Here is yet another rendering closer to what the camera would see, (it's tricky making perspective models with 2D image editing software).

I do realize by my fusealge-engine-60 degrees interpretation, part of the nosecone shadow would extend past the sidewalk and onto either the south edge of the parking lot or, more likely, onto the grass beyonfd that. This is a problem for this interpretation, as no such extension of the shadow is visible in the video. Keep in mind then reading the rest that shadow shape, as revealed in the video, is the weak point for this construct. It's the shadow itself, its location and timing and general size, not its apparent shape, that is most telling.

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Having possibly explained the ‘two dots’ as two of a 757’s three leading prongs, the absence of everything else also needs to be explained. This is more tricky, but my best guess is that only the shadow falling on the darker roadway came through, while everything on or behind the narrower, lighter-colored median (see above) is effectively invisible. Supporting this possibility is how the visible shadows line up fairly well with a cut-off line at the median curve, and that the median appears nearer the top edge of the video frame; its foreshortening and fisheye distortion are worse. It seeems feasable that some combination of optical effects has left everything from there back invisible on the video even though it was there in real life.

Solar Geometry: Location and Altitude
Regardless of how exactly it came out looking, the best evidence for this being from Flight 77 is what the sun can tell us about its location. Here are the sun angles for 9/11/01 at the Capital, verified with this this solar calculator.
Azimuth is the direction to the sun measured in degrees from north. Azimuth change from sunrise (84° or just from the north of due east) to solar noon is 96° in 379 minutes, an average change of about .25 degrees/min. Presuming steady change between these, a mid-point of 132° would be reached at 9:57 am, and it would be at 126° at 9:38. However, the change is not steady and linear but follows a curve, and in this case reaches an azimuth of 113° by the official impact time of 9:38.

The plane placement here is based on the mechanical damage path, and verified by the black box magnetic heading (60.0°) and ground track true (61.2°) averaged and traced back from impact. I drew the sun angle from the shadow location to points intersecting that flight path and there is where I placed the plane at the moment that shadow was recorded. The dots actually appear slightly offset on the road, matching the wing axis at this heading. The shadow seems to be about 190-195 feet from corollary spots directly beneath the plane (all approximate). From this and sun altitude angle we can deduce the plane’s altitude.

Solar altitude (also called elevation) is the angle of solar rays relative to the horizon (0 at sunrise and sunset, highest at solar noon, 55.5° at 1:05 pm at the Pentagon). On its curving path, at 9:38 the sun would have reached past its mid-point from sunrise to high solar noon, beaming down at about 32°.
The distance from shadow mid-point to a corollary spot directly beneath the plane being about 195 feet, a vertical line beneath the plane the right height to cast a shadow that far away happens to be something like 115 feet higher than the shadow, perhaps 105 feet above ground level, which seems to be several feet higher under the plane than under the shadow. The area has a general altitude of 50-65 feet above sea level compared to about 30 at the Pentagon.

Speed and Pitch: More Math and a Slight Problem
The distance from shadow-casting position to impact point, measured again, looks like almost exactly 1560 feet. With something like 130 feet descended as well, I’ve used a total distance of 1,690 feet.
Speed – 530 mi/hr = 777.3 ft/sec
1690ft / 777.3 ft/sec = 2.174 seconds
Compare this to the 2.167 seconds between the shadow’s appearance in the video and the first light effects on the building.
Working the other way back, we get
1690 / x = 2.167 -- x = 779.88 ft/sec = 531.7 mi/hr
Compare this to the ‘official speed’ of 530 mph.

So that's a perfect fit, and next we’ll look in greater detail at pitch, or ascent/descent angle; a level plane has a pitch of 0 degrees, while nose down pitches are recorded in degrees minus. From its altitude of 115ft AGL just south of the station, a required average pitch of about -6° would be required to reach impact altitude. A steady descent at that pitch would not allow the plane to hit all the light poles as happened, so changes of angle would be required. If it was descending at roughly –8.5° as the shadow was cast, leveling to –7° and to about –6 one second later, and over the next second passing through -5° and finally settling on –3° as it crossed the lawn and knocked down the last pole, this yields a 2.5° change and one of 3 degrees in the two seconds before impact. As seen below, it doesn’t look insane or anything, but we must remember the plane would have been moving quite fast and this distance and all this change covered in a hair over two seconds.
(r-click, open in new window for larger view)

How plausible is this steep-then-shallow pitch playing out this fast? When I’d mentioned a shallower change rate than this, Rob Balsamo told me it would rip the plane’s wings off. 8.5° is a steeper than usual pitch angle, and this overall curve is in fact extreme by my cursory look at pitch readings recorded in the FDR.

So I looked closer at the period of final descent seen in the CSV file, about 9:20 till last numbers. For the first ten minutes of this, pitches between –4 and +4 predominate, mostly at fairly mild angles of between 1 and 2 degrees from level. Pitch changes during most of that period are also subtle, fractions of a degree, with 0.0-0.2 deg/sec prevailing. This steadiness and moderation of angles begins to break up noticeably around 9:33 as the plane nears the ground, with second-to-second changes of 0.5, 0.7, 0.9° and higher creeping in. The pitch activity is fairly steady then during the grand right hand loop from 9:34-36 after which larger shifts of 1.2, 1.4, and higher become more common along with more extreme pitches like 6, 7, even 9° degrees from level recorded. The single largest one-second change I located was at 9:37:19-9:37:20, where a 2.1° decrease follows immediately after a 0.9° increase in pitch (-2.5 –1.6 –3.7 –4.9).

So by previous trends the required actual pitch changes required for that shadow to be real and properly located in my analysis - 2-3 degrees per second - seems extreme and unprecedented – just more so than the frames before, and just less so than the impact that followed. And what might seem a troublesome pitch forecast for my overall case, considering the slight fudge factor inherent in placing both the shadow and the flight path above, and that previous readings prove at least 2.1 degrees is possible, this curve doesn’t seem at all to be off in the realm of “Bush lie” sc-fi. The fudge factor of this ballpark approach could shift the numbers closer to or further from the ‘official story,’ depending, but not by a very large factor. We’re looking at an extreme but quite possible curve here.

It’s true no such changes are not reflected in the final recorded seconds of FDR data, 9:37:40-9:37:44, which shows angles between 4.9 and 6.7 degrees minus, and changes of 0.9 or less. Of course it also shows the wrong altitude and wrong bank angle for the wings to fit the above profile. But some clues, like location recorded in the L3 file 'readout 2', and John Farmer’s comparative analysis of FDR and radar records [PDF link] place it nearly a mile short of the building as those pitch numbers were recorded, so this could in fact have happened after that unexplained truncation. (This is its own whole fascinating and troubling issue far beyond the scope of this piece). Judging by much evidence, there’s a good chance it did just that, and was pitching at an average of -6° between this shadow and the final video captured at the Pentagon showing it low and fairly level from about the location of the last light pole.
Conclusion: Valid Evidence?
Charges or hints of image manipulation started from the CIT end as soon as the Citgo video was first released last September. They have no problem asserting Turcios was edited out from this same frame to weaken his testimony, but Craig has been strangely reticent to address this shadow which had to be inserted into this same camera view by his theory. Instead he’s taken to writing off the video entirely and forfeiting the chance to analyze this twice-over fakery more closely.

Their case for this dismissal rests largely on others having ‘proven’ the video altered via key cameras views not included in the final video when they were apparently on the original tape, and the cameras themselves being phyisically removed. This take is attested by the station’s manager, the same one who offered up Turcios, and taken, as Craig explained in his ATS ‘thread,’ as “Proof The Citgo Security Video Was Manipulated.” The findings of Russell Pickering, John Farmer, and CIT ally ‘Interpol’ are said to support this finding, though Farmer and Pickering have both lodged complaints with CIT, both during the course of Dylan’s thread, for using their findings to imply this.

So it appears that Aldo and Craig are in a fairly lonely spot in believing this, and rather than using the evidence for anything, they’ve declared the data irrelevant. As Craig explained to me when I brought this shadow work up at Above Top Secret, “no legitimate investigator would accept data controlled and provided for solely by the suspect as valid evidence in support of the suspect's innocence.” [8]

The finer points of this argument are too much to address in detail, and I’ve not had the time to dig into the issues, so I’ll remain agnostic for now on how much of a case there is to be made for manipulation. Likewise I leave it up to the reader to decide whether or not these possibilities render the data totally invalid or make it something that should be looked at as it is, in its proper, somewhat ambiguous context. Whether real or inserted, it seems to show Flight 77, or whatever plane we’ve been calling that, the one that pierced deep into the Pentagon two seconds later.

And however likely this shadow being inserted truly is, it appears that Aldo and Craig must continue to argue it’s either unreal or irrelevant, because if it’s authentic, this single camera’s view clearly and fatally contradicts their witnesses’ north-of-the-Citgo testimony. If true, that would leave the only question as HOW these erred recollections managed to line up so on something consistently contradicted at every other turn.

So considering we don’t know if this shadow was actually recorded or airbrushed in later, Avery's original question of why the video counters the PentaCon must be left open. The real question should have been how exactly it does so, but this was not explained until I popped into the thread on page 13 nearly two months after Dylan’s first and last post. I hope this analysis sheds some light on how the video actually does contradict the claim, just one more point in an already imposing roster of clues that should leave any rational person, at the lest, doubting CIT’s claims that their overall case is ‘proven’ in any way.
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Above Top Secret Thread - more discussion
9/11 Blogger post with interesting comments
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Updates 6/25/08 The case for video dismissal is weaker than I thought. Video on the way, using slightly different numbers - altitude above shadow now appears about 105 feet, under 100 AGL. It's all approximate.
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Sources:
[1] “Why does the Citgo video contradict the North Side claim?” Loose Change Forum -> 9/11 Research -> The Pentagon. Posted by Dylan Avery August 9 2007, 02:21 PM.
http://z10.invisionfree.com/Loose_Change_Forum/index.php?showtopic=13548&st=0
[2] See [1].Posted by Pilots For 9/11 Truth. Aug 10 2007, 01:32 PM. http://z10.invisionfree.com/Loose_Change_Forum/index.php?showtopic=13548&st=20
[3] See [1]. Page 5. Craig Ranke CIT. Posted Aug 11 2007, 01:39 AM.
[4] See [2]. Page 10. Spcengineer. Posted Aug 14 2007, 02:51 PM
[5] See [1]. Page 2. Aldo Marquis CIT. Posted August 10 2007, 01:23 PM
[6] See [1]. Page 15. Posted by Avenger October 5 2007, 06:35 PM http://z10.invisionfree.com/Loose_Change_Forum/index.php?showtopic=13548&st=280
[7] E-mail from Farmer to me: Wed, 10 Oct 2007 15:52:01
[8] Above Top Secret.com -> 9/11 Conspiracies -> Flight 77’s Shadow?.-> Page 5. Post by Craig Ranke CIT. Posted October 29 2007 @ 11:04 PM. http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread311324/pg5