HUNTING THE BOEING! (AND FINDING IT)

TESTING MY PERCEPTIONS AGAINST THE MEYSSANS
Adam Larson
Caustic Logic/The Frustrating Fraud
4/21/07

Thierry Meyssan’s use of the new medium of the Internet included a visually based website run by his son Raphaël, called “Hunt the Boeing! And Test Your Perceptions!” First posted in February 2002 as a prelude to the book “The Big Lie,” the site offered curious photos of the crash site that most of the world had never before seen, with some interesting observations tainted with sloppy analysis and unwarranted leaps of logic. It has often been taken as a starting point by American conspiracy theorists, one of whom, the Versailles, Missouri-based Dave Von Kleist, found that HTB “drew some very serious questions as to what had really happened at the Pentagon.”

When I finally took a closer look at the site itself, I started getting some questions all right. “Take a look at these photographs and try to find evidence to corroborate the official version.” The website urges. “It's up to you to Hunt the Boeing!” I accepted the challenges. Below are the questions posed and my own answers:

Q1) "The first satellite image shows the section of the building that was hit by the Boeing. In the image below, the second ring of the building is also visible. It is clear that the aircraft only hit the first ring. The four interior rings remain intact. They were only fire-damaged after the initial explosion.
Can you explain how a Boeing 757-200, weighing nearly 100 tons and travelling at a minimum speed of 250 miles an hour only damaged the outside of the Pentagon?"


A1) No, because while it may seem “clear that the aircraft only hit the first ring,” the damage was actually much deeper, extending all the way through the ground floor of rings E, D, and C – although E was the only one damaged enough to collapse and all the other damage was invisible from above. A fuller explanation here.

Q2) "The two photographs in question 2 show the building just after the attack. We may observe that the aircraft only hit the ground floor. The four upper floors collapsed towards 10.10 am. The building is 26 yards high.
Can you explain how a Boeing 14.9 yards high, 51.7 yards long, with a wingspan of 41.6 yards and a cockpit 3.8 yards high, could crash into just the ground floor of this building?"


A2) Yes and no. The tailfin and outer right wing hit and damaged/entered the second floor, and the main fuselage damaged the floor slab but along with the engines fit entirely into the first floor. Entry wound analysis.


Q3) "The photograph above shows the lawn in front of the damaged building.
You'll remember that the aircraft only hit the ground floor of the Pentagon's first ring. Can you find debris of a Boeing 757-200 in this photograph?"
A3) Nope. While all the substantial parts entered the building, there were aluminum fuselage scraps photographed in other shots, some bearing parts of an AA paint job. But at the angle and distance of this photograph, it's true nothing is visible.

Q4) "Can you explain why the Defence Secretary deemed it necessary to sand over the lawn, which was otherwise undamaged after the attack?"

A4) Not precisely, but there are numerous prosaic reasons he might (like the need for greater vehicle access) and few good conspiratorial ones I can think of - we'd already seen the "telltale" unmarked lawn, so it wouldn't do much good to cover it up after the fact.

Q5) "The photographs in Question 5 show representations of a Boeing 757-200 superimposed on the section of the building that was hit.
Can you explain what happened to the wings of the aircraft and why they caused no damage?"

A5) Again, yes and no. It would seem they exploded, entered the building partly, and were left on the lawn in small pieces otherwise as we’ve seen. I can’t explain why they caused no damage because I’m too busy documenting the damage they did.

Q6) (Extended quote from the Arlington County Fire Chief shortly after the attack) "Can you explain why the County Fire Chief could not tell reporters where the aircraft was?"
A6) No, nor do I care what one guy knew at a particular moment, nor how much sleep he'd had, etc. Next Question...

Q7) "The two photographs in question 7 were taken just after the attack. They show the precise spot on the outer ring where the Boeing struck. Can you find the aircraft's point of impact?"


A7) This is indeed the precise spot, but it’s not visible in either shot due to fire hose spray - in almost any other photograph, the answer is yes.

Conclusion: The site sums up triumphantly by posing to its viewers this false dichotomy of tested perceptions:
"How did you Do?
Did you find the Boeing? Can you still defend the official version of events?
> Well done! Remember to get in touch with master of illusion, David Copperfield. He'll be glad to hear from you!
You found the official version lacking in something (like a Boeing, for example):
> If you begin to question whether a Boeing really did crash on the Pentagon then, no doubt, you'll be wondering what happened to the aircraft that disappeared. You will probably ask yourself why the US government even told you this story in the first place and you'll start asking yourself lots of other questions besides. Don't worry! This is perfectly normal!"

Again, the answer is yes and no. The only reason I even took interest in this theory is that I do NOT buy the official story, and I find it lacking much. But despite these initial best efforts and all the elaborations on the theme since early 2002, a Boeing at the Pentagon is not one of them.

THE FRENCH REVELATIONS (besides Meyssan)

The Frustrating Fraud
Last Edited 4/19/07

Whatever the Truth, those who would challenge the official story in the early days after 9/11 saw a weak spot in the military’s façade and were soon focused on the collapsed section of the Pentagon, hoping for another, metaphorical, collapse. Much of the skepticism would come from overseas, and notably from France, and Thierry Meyssan was just the beginning. Okay, the main event really, but he had helpers.

Meyssan’s Direct Supporters in France:
- Emmanuel Ratier: Regarded a nationalist, right-wing journalist obsessed with Masonic and Jewish conspiracy theories, Ratier worked for various newspapers (Le Figaro, Valerus, Minute, of which he was a writer in chief in charge of investigations). Since 1996 he’s published semi-monthly “Faits & Documents: confidential Newsletter of Emmanuel Ratier.” [1] It was in this forum that he published Thierry Meyssan’s first piece on the Internet on October 18, just a month after the attacks. “On 21 March,” Desmoulins noted, “it was in fact to him that Le Monde and Actualité juive gave first prize for this incredible news, illustrated with a series of photographs entitled: No plane crashed into the Pentagon.” [2]

- Jean Guisnel: co-author of the Big Lie who helped Meyssan put his theories into words. Guisnel is a well-known journalist, the author of several books in French on the intelligence community (including “Cyberwars”), writer for Le Point and defense specialist for the French daily Liberation. [3]

- Pierre-Henri Bunel: A military expert who wrote a complete chapter of Meyssan's book explaining why the explosion captured in the Pentagon’s CCTV video is from high explosives and not jet fuel. [4] Here is a website @ Globalresearch where he explains this again after the CCTV video release in 2006. Rather silly it seems to me, on seeing his graphics as used for Pentagate.

- Raphaël Meyssan: “9/11 The Big Lie” was widely promoted and widely found by independent skeptics via the Internet. Meyssan’s use of the new medium included a visually based website run by his son Raphaël, called “Hunt the Boeing! And Test Your Perceptions!” First posted in February 2002, the site offered further evidence, including extensive and highly curious photos of the crash site that most of the world had never before seen, with some interesting observations tainted with sloppy analysis and unwarranted leaps of logic.

(Short review of site removed to form into its own post: Hunting the Boeing (and Finding it!))

Three More for the Pentagon Fraud:
- Jean Pierre Desmoulins: Fellow traveler and unofficial historian of the French revelations Jean-Pierre Desmoulins noted of Hunt The Boeing: “This web site has an enormous impact on american internauts. As a matter of fact, the book of Meyssan is not yet translated into english, and this little web site is the first publishing in english which puts a doubt on the official version of this crash.” [5] I once exchanged e-mail with him over his videos of a silver plane near the Pentagon scene, and he seems a nice enough guy. One of his sites describes him as a resigned Christian and non-Muslim Islamophile who settled on the Baha’i faith. “I have no strong political engagement and am not member of any party," he wrote. "I didn't vote for Jacques Chirac […] willing not be party to an african style plebiscite. […] My personal conviction is that a new world order must be settled and rule the relations between the nations.” [6]

His websites have a variety of names, including : “Pentagone le 11/9/01: la fraude!” The English version noted: “the cover-up of what happened in Washington D.C. on 9/11 is obvious. The official thesis of the suicide of an Arab hijacker, Hani Hanjour, flying a Boeing 757 and striking the Pentagon's front in a perfect horizontal flight doesn't stand when all evidence is examined.” As for skills he brings to this Pentagon analysis, Desmoulins cites his engineer’s training, professorship, and hobby of running flight simulations: “for fun, I crashed several times against the World Trade Center towers before Mohamed Atta, just to see the subjective effect.” [7] I’ve looked little at his evidence, but found at least one spot where he seems to be wrong on the Pentagon evidence where he saw a tiny 3-foot wide engine clearly not from a 757.

Later Desmoulins made an about-face on the Pentagon evidence, siding with those who sa plenty of evidence for a 757 there, an admission of error that's all too rare - if not unprecedented - among pushers of the fraud.

- “Silent but Deadly” – Anonymous French researcher, creator of the Pentagon 3d test website, which ultimately and scientific-like deduces that a 757 was quite unlikely. In the selective quotation section, is noted an edit: “sam danner said he lied, so statements are removed. Nevertheless, the best version is still the globalhawk one,” among the dumbest theories, and only reported by ONE eyewitness - Danner.

Alain DeClercq: Perhaps it was an effort to reconcile Mike Walter's accounts of both an A.A. airliner and a cruise missile that led to this art installation: “American Airlines,” a 2003 piece by Paris-based conceptual artist Alain Declercq. The fiberglass missile, about eight feet long and painted with American Airlines stripes and insignia, was part of the exhibition at Palais de Tokyo in Paris. An art review site explained how a video was shown of a workshop in which the missile was being so painted by workers in full-body protective gear and gas masks, interspersed with scenes of the 9-11 attacks. [8] While the Meyssan family’s approach is as hard and fragile fact, when done up in the arena of conceptual art, I take this as semi-literal metaphor, and I appreciate it.

Incidental Frenchmen, non-Pentagon-related, catching rare footage of the WTC:
- The Naudet brothers: They were the only camera crew to capture the first plane’s impact, and they were French. They had been in New York filming a documentary about firefighters and were near to wrapping it up when they happened to be filming a fireman in downtown Manhattan. Their camera captured the impact that everyone first thought was accidental, and it was finally obtained from them and shown on TV on the evening of 9/11. Their footage has been widely used by conspiracy theorists, who the brothers later sued for using the footage without permission and for causing people to think they were conspiracy theorists too.

- Anonymous French cameraman: An unknown Frenchman was alleged in April 2005 by Karl W.B. Schwarz to have captured unambiguous footage of a 737, not a 767 as we all saw, hitting the South Tower. Originally released in the non-9/11 related documentary Barbarians at the Gates, so far I’ve heard no news of its verification as of early 2007. Guess he's saving his "smoking gun" 'till the 2008 election season to blast a path to the White House.

Sources:
[1] "Emmanuel Ratter" (mis-spellin on original page) Wikepedia, translated from French by Google. http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&u=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Ratier&sa=X&oi=translate&resnum=1&ct=result&prev=/search%3Fq%3DEmmanuel%2BRatier%2B%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26safe%3Doff%26sa%3DG
[2], [4], [5] Desmoulins, Jean-Pierre. “Background of this research.” http://perso.orange.fr/jpdesm/pentagon/pages-en/his-backgnd.html
[3] "About the Author: Jean Guisnel." http://www.perseusbooksgroup.com/basic/author_detail.jsp?id=1000015653
[6], [7] Desmoulins, Jean-Pierre “Who is the author.” http://www.earth-citizens.net/pages-en/his-whoiam.html
[8] Conrads, Martin. “Dangerous it is not! The Renewed Emergence of Activism in Art - "Hardcore" in the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.” Posting date unlisted. Acc Nov 4 2005. http://www.springerin.at/dyn/heft_text.php?textid=1332&lang=en

ONE RING DAMAGED: EARLY ARGUMENTS

To understand the dry humor with which I take the following arguments, it helps to understand the depth of Flight 77’s penetration of the Pentagon. The world'slargest office building consists of 5 sides with five corners and five concentric rings, labeled A-E; Each ring, when viewed from above, is separated by a space for light and air. The massive Flight 77 hit the outermost E ring, on the southwest-facing side at a 45 degree angle from the south and disappeared inside the building, according to the official account burying itself over 300 feet into the building through rings E, D, and C, terminating between the C and B rings, in a ground-level roadway known as the "A-E Drive." (just about dead center in the picture above)

One evident mistake on the original Meyssan-produced Hunt The Boeing site that has reverberated through the works of others is the contention that since only the E ring showed signs of damage when viewed from above (see right - and 'damage' seems to mean total collapse), “it is clear that the aircraft only hit the first ring. The four interior rings remain intact. They were only fire-damaged after the initial explosion." The younger Meyssan asked his readers "how a Boeing 757-200, weighing nearly 100 tons and traveling at a minimum speed of 250 miles an hour only damaged the outside of the Pentagon?”

Likewise, Australian 9/11 Truther Gerard Holmgren looked at this building layout and decided less than two months after the attack “I have estimated the depth of the ring itself to be about 32 feet [note his use of the singular “ring”] and the open space behind it, about the same.” I estimated closer to 45-foot rings and 30-foot spaces, but he may be closer. Whatever. The point is, his contention that “the outer ring collapsed, leaving a total depth of about 65 ft that the plane could potentially have fitted into, considering that the second ring of the building was intact.” Indeed, many skeptics, especially early on, saw only one ring collapse and presumed only one ring was damaged. Raphael Meyssan said precisely that, and an intrepid few no-planers pained themselves to look on the ground between the rings and saw no debris or damage there. The ground there is clear, so the attack object never entered the other rings and never left the outer E ring.

Likewise, Zionist-JFK assassination obsessed Eric Hufschmid has made this same exact case (in at least one exception to the Franco-German War construct). This I found in his intensely researched and richly illustrated book Painful Questions, released September 2002. The "Flight 77 Hits the Pentagon?" section of his book also carried headings like "the airplane was larger than one floor," "where is the airplane debris?" "Two pieces of the airplane were discovered," "where is the aircraft debris?" "the terrorists were the world's best pilots," "the CIA drones," and "if it looks and acts like a drone..." He also cites two explosions, one from "the missile," and the other from "a bomb inside the Pentagon." The illustration at right is a scan right from the book, where he too sees only one ring penetrated, clearly nowhere near enough space to fit the missing plane. He did show the punch-out hole inside the C-Ring, but mistakenly cited it as on the inside of the impacted, outer E-Ring. Such a gaffe is noteworthy, in that any place for the plane to hide is "squeezed inside the red area of figure 9-10" and inside the red-flag area of worse-than-worthless 9/11 theories.

This is the punch-out hole Hufschmid cited on the inside of the E-ring. By 2004-05 most people had figured out it was actually on the inside wall of the C Ring, right on the A-E drive (hence the no parking sign next to it). But for the plane to get there, they still saw six walls’ worth of the stuff smashed through in the "E" and "C" rings. But this ignores another key fact – that it only had the two heavy walls to contend with (explained in my “nine feet of steel reinforced idiocy” post). Meyssan, Hufschmid, and Holmgren at that time could not see that the spaces between the rings wasn’t ground but roof over the second floor, and the plane pierced the building at the first-floor level. There is no ground-level exit on the inside of the E-ring. The spot Hufschmid showed does not exist on this building.

But that was 2002 - I checked on the current status of Hufschmid's argument in Painful Deceptions, his video first released in February 2005. He no longer shows his red area of the E-ring, but still says “the passengers and debris from Flight 77 were confined to a very tiny area” and implies neither was present at all, arguing forcibly for a Global Hawk drone strike. At 17:53 his narrator says "it is obvious that whatever hit the Pentagon was not big enough to be a Boeing 757." He showed a location shot described as “the corridor between rings. There is nothing in this rubble that looks like Flight 77 or pieces of luggage.” All that’s there is broken glass and intact (reinforced) windows that fell from their moorings. But that’s to be expected. It’s the back side of the E-ring’s third floor, which was badly shaken but never entered by the plane. What he seemed in 2005 to take as the ground level between rings is actually the roof of the second floor, well above the plane’s massive damage. He seems to think this photo is of a spot near his misplaced punch-out hole, which he then shows and points out again no plane wreckage, but no longer specifies just where it is in the building’s ring structure.

Despite the slight back-off on this embarrassing gaffe, Hufschmid still clearly qualifies as a Frustrating Fraudster of the first order. His case at the Pentagon at least is stupid and flat wrong, and I will cover it more in-depth in an upcoming post reviewing Painful Deceptions' take on that evidence in total. If you'd like the review to seem more relevant, feel free to watch the video yourself first. I haven't looked into Holmgren's current take, but from the way all these guys operate, once they've staked out an argument, it becomes their trademark and their turf, and they never abandon it no matter what. I'd bet money he hasn't modified anything significantly either.