RADAR = VISUAL = SOUTHWEST

RADAR = VISUAL = SOUTHWEST
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
The Frustrating Fraud
June 6 2008

I could have posted this sooner, but it deserved some careful prep, and I’ve enjoyed CIT’s maneuvers in the interim. Sorry fellas – I did set it like an ambush, but didn’t expect it would actually work so well and so quick.

Recently I was able to contact FAA’s Colin Scoggins about his 9/11 report of a plane seen (I presumed) on radar southeast and/or southwest of the White House just prior to the attack. I was thrown for a loop when Scoggins told me it was a visual sighting from FAA HQ in the Capitol, and it seemed he was saying it was therefore NOT a radar report.

That wasn’t even my original question, but I poo-pooed this notion, given the great distance to see it. I did do up some scale experiments that indicated “they certainly would be able to visually pick it out" - barely, as a speck - "if they were first tipped off by, say, a radar report of a plane five miles southeast, er, southwest. But to notice it with no prompting makes little sense to me.”

In the comments at the above link, Craig Ranke of CIT showed his enthusiasm for this revelation and his own idea for the prompting in question:

“So Scoggins is 99% sure it was a visual from FAA HQ in downtown DC! Wow. Great work! Clearly that destroys the NTSB and supports EoP.
[…]
It wouldn't take a "hawkeye" on the DC flight path if they saw it pass their building over DC and kept following it and this does not make any sense AT ALL with the NTSB or alleged radar data!
[…]
>>>>You'd guess they were prompted by the over DC path to keep following it then?
If there is any truth at all to the this visual reference then it is the only explanation. Naturally any plane at all in P56 airspace would alert attention.”
[how about the outbound C-130 over the mall’s south edge? Any witnesses outside the plane?]

Ranke even started a thread at their forum, the last before the valuable threads posted later on “Tramsoccalpra” and “Hydrociault” that were REMOVED! (Censor Nazis ;))
DC flight path - East of Potomac evidence, further confirmed by ATC Colin Scoggins, about how “CIT obsessed Adam Larson did a little investigating of his own and ended up CONFIRMING our claims!” He presented a fuller argument that does make sense given the state of the evidence yesterday, used my graphics, and even linked to the original as a valuable piece of research, if riddled with obfuscation and whatnot. Amazing. Cue the sparkly CIT lyte trip-hop music, this goes in the revised how they forgot to scratch Lloyd's hood and other addenda video...

As far as Ranke’s interpretation that a visual encounter supports the DC flight path, this does make some sense, depending on how much evidence there really is for it being over DC before this (hint – it’s a CIT claim). For CIT it’s a no-brainer since they already believe it was over DC and THIS is what prompted them to follow or project it south, southwest, and so on. But here’s a different, more informed insight, from another Scoggins e-mail just as Craig started posting stuff:

"This [is] taken from the USA Article I mentioned. This is the TELCON I beleive I was on. I am 99% sure. The call came from FAA HQ, and they were on the West side of the FAA HQ building, and Dave Canoles must have been on the North side, so Dave's office was a corner office or it was real close to the corner. "

Cue the record-scratch sound. Indeed. I had heard this article mentioned but hadn't read it, and apparently neither had Ranke. The whole article, from just after 9/11, is still available here. These are the relevant excerpts:

At FAA headquarters, less than a half-mile from the White House and Capitol, Dave Canoles paces before a speakerphone. The head of air traffic investigations, Canoles has set up phone connections with air traffic facilities. […] Now, about 9:35 a.m., he and others on the conference call listen as an official watching a radarscope tracks the progress of the jet heading for Washington

So my either-or impression was a false one based in my ignorance of this piece. Canoles is probably the muted voice we can hear behind Scoggins in the NORAD tapes, and he was first tipped off by another person elsewhere watching the radar track. This makes perfect sense, and then the visual part comes in, prompted by radar. Is there a clue in this to what the returns said?

“Canoles sends an investigator who works for him to an adjoining office with a view to the west. "See if you can spot it," he tells him.
"Six miles from the White House," a voice on the phone says.”
Canoles glances outside, through a window facing north. He wonders if he and his co-workers are in danger. At 500 mph, the jet is traveling a mile every seven seconds.
"Five miles from the White House."
No way the FAA is a target, Canoles thinks. It can't be.
"Four miles from the White House."
They'd never choose to hit us. No way.
"The aircraft is circling. It's turning away from the White House."
Where? Where's it going?
Then: "It's gone."
In the adjoining office, the investigator spots smoke to the west of the city. The jet has hit the Pentagon. The time: 9:38 a.m.”

Scoggins feels this account “flat out tells me that it is visual,” but I don’t really see it. There is talk of windows and attempts to see, which is a hint it might have gone there, but the only thing that’s clearly mentioned actually being seen is the smoke afterwards. Now since the investigator is in an adjoining room a phone bridge seems unnecessary, but it is possible he’s the one on the phone giving the updates based on what he’s seeing out the window. And it’s at least as possible, not knowing more, that these are from the same radar operator that got them started.

It’s not clear from this alone if there was ever a visual sighting of the plane, but Scoggins also heard what Canoles actually said, in the telcon we only hear murmurs of, and he is left 99% certain there was such a contact. I’m inclined at the moment to believe him. So treating this as an eyewitness case, let’s first note that the USA Today piece mentions a view to the north, meaning Canoles’ office was on the building’s north side – he had an investigator go into an adjoining, but different office, with a view to the west – a corner office.
It’s not clear if any sighting would be before the plane turned fully southward from its original path or after the loop and up to the final approach. The witness would not be able to see the farthest reaches of the loop (darker green, below) between these points at all without binoculars. He may well have had binoculars though, come to think of it. He could then have seen perhaps the entire loop, or any portion of it, all from that office with a view to the west.
Now, how can this visual sighting “further validate the east side evidence” if it’s taking place from a west-facing office, prompted by a radar report of a plane in that direction? Originally I offered the quite reasonable and well-supported guess that the southeast report was simple error in reporting a radar track. Then it seemed there was a visual contact instead of radar, which complicated things. Then I learned that this observance was spurred by radar and confirmed southwest, and while we still aren’t sure where the momentary inversion of east and west came in, it is looking pretty much out the window as evidence.

A VISUAL ENCOUNTER?

A VISUAL ENCOUNTER?
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
The Frustrating Fraud
June 4 2008 2am

Colin Scoggins was the manager of FAA’s Boston Center as the attacks of 9/11 unfolded around him nearly seven years ago. He played an unexpectedly crucial role relaying information between the FAA, NEADS and others, as one can hear listening to the NORAD tapes released in 2004. Perhaps most famously he was the one who passed on the much-speculated on and unfortunate report at 9:21 am that Flight 11 was still airborne. I’ve been sent a copy of an off-line, detailed account Scoggins wrote, and was even able to make e-mail contact recently with Scoggins himself.

While I’m still trying to get his take on my own Flight 11 theory, he’s given me a puzzling insight into a lesser erred report he had to relay, which I had already covered in six miles southeast, as it related to CIT’s East-of-the-Potomac case. The call Scoggins made, at 9:35:41 am, was essentially this: “Latest report, aircraft [inaudible] six miles southeast of the White House,’ a report soon changed to “six southwest, six southwest of the White House and deviating away.” It was clear that he was passing on information from someone else, but how those people had become aware was not totally clear. I had presumed he was passing on a seen radar track, and that the change from SE to SW was a correction, providing a "brilliant indication" that the path released by the NTSB was “the one seen by radar controllers on 9/11” - a plane deviating away six miles southwest of the White House. When I asked Mr. Scoggins about it, however, it turned out more complex than I thought it would.

I asked, again presuming a radar track, “was the plane your people were watching ever on the east side of the Potomac? Was SE->SW an error->correction or correct placement->update situation?” He wasn’t sure at all on the reason for the change, which stands to reason given the general overload of the morning:

“I immediately called NEADS, and was advising them what I was hearing. They changed the direction so I repeated what I heard. […] So the real question is did AAL77 cross the Potomac, I don't know. I'm 99.9% it did slam into the pentagon, on what route of flight I have no idea, other than what has been published.”

He told me off the bat that “I never saw the plane, our radar doesn't go down that far,” meaning south, as he later clarified “our radar only goes down part way through New Jersey.” The information was being handed to him on a Telcon, a telephone (?) conference, with others at FAA, and passing it on to NEADS, where it linked to military response/lack thereof. He’s not certain who he was talking to or where they were calling from, but seems pretty sure who and where through some personal research (though he isn’t telling me yet). On Scoggins’ advice, as he said in an interview with JREF member Ref, NEADS made a call to Washington Center, where he thought there’d be better intelligence.

“NEADS did turn around and immediately called Washington Center, and advised them that “Boston Center reported and aircraft six miles from the White House”, the response from the Washington Center person who received this call was unbelievable, “How would Boston Center know if an aircraft is six miles from the White House” “CLICK” they hung up.”

I was under the impression Washington center was tracking, or aware of Reagan National's tracking of 77 at this time (about two minutes before impact, near the end of the loop), and would have been the source of this intel. But apparently they rejected it when it was handed to them from the outside. Perhaps they were just too busy tracking the plane to take accurate but minutes-old hearsay about it? But it’s a good question, and the one I was asking; “How would Boston Center know if an aircraft is six miles from the White House?” Scoggins told me:

“I was on aTELCON and there were people who were actually looking at their window and saw the plane, they were speaking it verbatim on the phone to the TELCON. So it was a visual encounter, I assume they were in FAA HQ on Independence AVE. I know one persons name who was there and according to a USA article on around 9/20/01 I have an idea who said it on the phone, and he is the same person that I received the Phantom 11 call on.”

Was he just confusing a human voice saying it for a human eye having seen it? I asked for clarification “are you pretty sure it was not radar that was giving this info?” I would guess FAA headquarters had a link to radar controllers, if not their own screens. He clarified “when they say six miles they probably would have meant statue miles, not nautical,” which would equal a slightly lesser distance. He also pointed out that “they were estimating on a visual of an aircraft moving pretty quick,” and that

“I don't know what office window they were looking from, I've always felt it was FAA HQ […] I am 99 % sure that the statement was made by visual, the same person who stated that this aircraft was 6 NM southwest, is the same person who told me that AAL11 was still in the air.”

I still have to doubt that this is so, Colin being 99% sure or not, because when you turn this into an eyewitness account it falls apart. The main reason is distance: I took a crop of the picture CIT took from witness Timmerman’s apartment, which shows the Pentagon in the mid-distance and the Washington monument clearly visible across the river at 2.4 miles. But its height of 555 feet is 400 feet greater than the length of a Boeing 757. Here is how Flight 77 would have looked if it were flying near the monument, nearly 2 1/2 miles distant:
And here is an experiment in reverse, a view west from atop the Monument. The location the other photo was taken from is marked with a red eye on this 400-foot-wide building. Again, a 757 is slapped in to scale just above the building, 2.4 miles away.

Now here’s the building Scoggins thinks the call came in from – FAA Headquarters on Independence Avenue in DC. At about a mile south of the White Hose and fairly near the Washington monument, they were calling in a report of a plane about five miles away from their ten-story building. Considering the experiments above, what would a witness at FAA HQ see five miles distant? Enough to report as a plane doing this and that? It's as likely to be reported as a gnat on the window, IF the witness was staring an inch from the pane. they certainly would be able to visually pick it out if they were first tipped off by, say, a radar report of a plane five miles southeast, er, southwest. But to notice it with no prompting makes little sense to me.

So I guess it doesn't really matter, but Scoggins could just have a false impression or imprecise memory, and then again he could be right. It is possible that some hawkeye saw it happening not terribly far away. It's possible but unlikely, and radar still seems right for this accurate but briefly inverted report of Flight 77's location.