POLL: WHICH IS MOVING? LIGHT OR CAR?

POLL: WHICH IS MOVING? LIGHT OR CAR?
And Solar angle analysis
July 1 2008

I'm having a hard time seeing any motion of this car, and in fact the light seems to be moving across the car. This video does use a cross-fade that isn't there, and it seems the original dimmer light remains while a brighter light shining closer to the car's front adds to and overwhelms it, holding for only one frame (action mode off, 3fps).


This is the car, in low res, sorry - a black, shiny one, and judging by its response, driven by a police or emergency responder-type, possibly off-duty. I estimate its orientation when still (a line running between the license plates) in the neighborhood of 20˚from north.


The angle of the light IS a very close match at least for the angle of light from the sun (azimuth, 113˚), just about perpendicular to the car's still position, meaning a reflection back along nearly the same line, roughly the same one camera 3 was on relative to the patrol car, and so registers a reflection pointing 'straight up." Geometrically, it all lines up, but the sun doesn't move like that. It can't be from the plane, as it happens at impact, over a second after the plane left that area. It's nowhere near a match for light angles from the impact area, so it's not the explosion that was happening then. At least not directly.

Any thoughts, anyone?
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Update: Well, looks like I've annoyed Farmer for the last time, and he hasn't the time to explain how the car is moving when it seems to not be. Because I'm an idiot I need to get a new extraction of the video to find similar flashes to this one, but the lo-res 5-min version I have contains none that I see, despite multiple cars passing the same spot. All reflect light dimly from a certain spot to a certain band on the canopy, but only this one has this bright flash. At 9:36:50 video time a dark car drives by the same area, no such effect. A 9:37:17 a white car casts a dim light all across as it passes, no single bright flash. Farmer insists the other flashes are there as other cars pass, and so I suppose they are. But I'll need to see it myself at this point.

On the other hand, I finally did vertical angle analysis based on the known solar altitude of 32˚above the horizon and it IS looking even more like sunlight after all. The tricky part of this for me was always deciding on the reflection plane incline of this unknown automobile. I'm not a car guy, but thinking in terms of a possible patrol car, I looked at a Ford Crown Victoria, which I hear is the standard model. Perspective aside, the incline angle here is about 34˚from vertical at mid-window, curving further at the top. Considering the gentle curve of the car's side panel, the angle from vertical would degrease down the side, until the near the bottom, where it would be zero at some point, and then curve inward just a bit at the bottom. We can't tell where exactly the light is reflecting from, but an incline of about 20-32˚is likely for anything in that zone.
23˚from vertical, roughly, is what's needed to bounce light from the sun up under the canopy. This is a likely incline at about door-handle-level. So this would tend to indicate, as the source, something bright and high along the same line as the one towards the sun. ie, car moving or not, both lateral and vertical analysis indicate this is just the sun after all, or a bizarre coincidence if not.

But the car really doesn't seem to move, it's already reflecting the same sort of dimmer light from a similar angle as the other cars that pass, and this lonely flash of sunlight happens right at impact when there's that bright fireball as well. So... mysteries remain, at least for me, but this not seeming direct evidence of the attack and not a core issue, I'm leaving it here. To the south end fireball light effect.

CITGO CAMERA MYSTERY

CITGO CAMERA MYSTERIES AND MYSTERY CAMERA
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
The Frustrating Fraud
First draft - April 6 2008
edits 4/8

Recently I started looking again into the layout of the surveillance cameras at the Citgo station/Navy Exchange, first using as a base John Farmer's graphic made after on-site inspection in 2007 [left - figure 4 in his Citgo video overview PDF, an informative read]. The green circles represent views present in the multiplexed video released in September 2006 [see below]. The yellow circle is the area lit up at about the moment of impact. Red circles indicate cameras there or said to have been but whose views were not included. These will be the main focus of this article.

The numbering for the cameras is based on multiplexer slot labeling and verified by the view shown from each (see sample screen below). Cameras 5, 6, and 7 watched the inside of the store, while 3 and 4 looked from its outside walls over the canopy/pump areas. The #1 label is somewhat arbitrary since its view is not represented, but there is a slot for it on the final screen - labeled '1 ICE' [upper left corner in the screen below]. That spot is filled by the composite screen in miniature, which means, to Farmer, that the camera was offline at the time of recording. His site photos confirm an ice machine at the south/east entrance, so this is the best guess for camera 1.

The main focus of this article will be on the two camera positions on the north canopy's west edge. These were left unnumbered in Farmer's graphic, since there was no spaces for them in the multiplexed image as released. For reference, I chose to call them 8 and 9, with 9 at the corner and 8 closer to the store. Below is Russell Pickering's drawing after on-site investigation in August 2006 [source], labeled by view title, not camera number. The one I've called 9 is labeled here 'missing camera.' Indeed, its place in these graphics is honorary; no camera has ever been photographed in that spot to my knowledge.

Pickering explained the reason this spot was included with such a label, at the Loose Change Forum in September 2006:

"According to the manager of the Citgo [...] They were evacuated for about two hours from the Citgo and minutes after they reopened the camera was taken. She never viewed the video herself. [...] The Citgo manager physically took me out under the canopy and showed me the location of the removed camera. It was pointed at pump 2. [...] The manager described this one as having had a clear view of the Pentagon wall and quite a bit north as well." [emph. mine] [source]
Previously most researchers had believed the video, not the actual camera, was seized 'within minutes' of the attack. But Pickering found out on the pivotal group-research trip that it was actually taken hours afterward, along with one of the actual cameras, for uncertain reasons. In this Pickering photo (above, pink labels by me, black and red by him) we can see the indicated location of the one said to have been taken by the FBI, as I've labeled it, camera 9. Camera 3 is also visible here, labeled but not important, and camera 8 is nestled at the pillar with its own view that was also not present in the final. Note the position of this camera when looking at the photo below, also by Pickering [source]. In this view, again, pink is mine, we can clearly see another camera even closer to the store (labeled by me "?"). It's featured in neither Farmer's nor Pickering's layouts. Also no view present in the video, of course.


This opens up new possibilities; the removed camera was later replaced but in a different spot - it was never taken at all, just moved over prior to August 2006 - it was not even moved, with the manager yanking Pickering's chains pointing to an empty spot where they never had a camera. Although it seems a prime spot to have one.

There are obvious time line issues and no certainty that the video set-up was the same from 9/11 to 2006 or 2006 to 2007, or till now. All we have is three contended camera positions along the north canopy's west edge, two cameras in 2006, and no views from any of these three locations in the Citgo video (only cam 3 covered the north canopy). This is admittedly a bit odd. Considering all photographed and alleged camera positions, however many were there and online on that morning, this is the slate as I see it (below). There is a definite asymmetry here. (red camera angles rough, based on above photos, black line deduced as a logical angle for the missing camera).


In this context I can see why people would suspect views were removed; the alternative seems to be that on September 11 as Flight 77 flew by on whatever side, all the camera views towards the Pentagon and/or the north path were just off-line, like the VDOT's cameras are said to have been. Considering field of view and resolution issues I doubt any of them would catch anything that was much above the ground or any more than a few hundred feet away. Thus little was likely missed, but it looks kind of like they're fostering mystery here.

But then again camera 4 was left in, or painted in, whichever you prefer... and it shows what's almost certainly the shadow of Flight 77 following the ground south of the station.

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

CITGO VIDEO ANALYSIS

CITGO VIDEO ANALYSIS
(working version posted June 28 2007)
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
The Frustrating Fraud
Last Updated September 9 late pm


The Nexcom/Citgo gas station was the last real building near 77's flightpath before the Pentagon. Its security video was confiscated by the FBI on September 11 2001 (apparently NOT within minutes of the attack but rather a few hours later). It was held for five years and then released pursuant to FOIA requests on September 15 2006 to Judicial Watch.

The station had multiple cameras multiplexed together onto one screen. Some of the best views were NOT included in this compressed multi-camera screen. Whether this constitutes manipulation/forgery or some more inoccuous explanation I can't say for sure. But it is suspicious, and some of the cameras themselves seem to have been removed since then.


Youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LJvFjsl6zk&mode=related&search= An analysis of what the remaining low-resolution screens show is in the works. Previously I'd said it showed "more nothing than anything yet," but in fact there are good clues in there. Of special interest are three camera views, mapped out on the model below.

Dual-Pump Camera and the Canopy Flash
Just looking at the view from the "dual pump side" camera (the north end of the station) we see a flash at 4:44 in the video, or 9:40:38 by the video's internal clock (app. set about 3 minutes ahead). The white car there most of the time at the pump is Sgt. Lagasse's. The sequence here: a black and white patrol car pulls in and sends the flash of light, reflected from somewhere else apparently to the south, onto the underside of the canopy, at which point the patrol car speeds away, possibly towards the Pentagon

My video - part 1 of the Citgo analysis, just the canopy flash.

Youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ChV5gxYfrc#GU5U2spHI_4

Here is a photo of the station's north end - parking, hedges, canopy and pumps - with the Pentagon visible in the background. Compare to the camera view above.
Before getting to angles, I must note that some north-path proponents contend this flash is either from the plane but glancing off the car's roof, or simple sunlight reflected in a flash as the patrol car started rolling (see comments at the Youtube link for my video). It does seem to start inching forward just just a hair early - too subtly it seems to account for a sudden flash, but enough to make this interpretation seem feasible. The angle the light is coming from seems about the same as the angle of natural sunlight at that time, but a different part of the car also catches sunlight a few frames later in a different position. (I intend a fuller anlysis on the timeline of all these events). John Farmer's rebuttal and my counter-rebuttal: link.

However, as I will expand on in this space and with further short videos, there was also a noticable flash of light on the south side of the station a split-second earlier, clearly not reflected from the south side of a car on the north side of the station. There's also employee/customer reactions indicating something happening to the south, and a large shadow also visible on a roadway south of the Pentagon. These will be explained and even if the canopy flash is just sunlight, it somehow seems to show the same thing the other clues do: something other than the sun was sending light to /blocking light from the Citgo, from the south and southeast just before people started gawking towards the Pentagon. A high-speed, low-flying silver AA 757 is one possible culprit for at least one of these clues...

East Entrance (south) View and the Double Flash
This "East Entrance" camera is at the southern edge of the southeast canopy looking back at the store to monitor customers coming and going. Note at left the lightening on the left-hand side, on the narrow east-facing edge of a wall there. This "flash" seen at 9:40:37 is longer in duration than the one off the patrol car half-a-second later, and perhaps better described as a "double-pulse." In slow-motion (video coming) there is an intial pulse just before the canopy flash, which washes in top-to-bottom and fades just as another pulse of light blankets the spot and then fades. Duration: unsure at the moment but seems to be about one second. The light source is roughlly to the east, and could be from either a plane heading from the north or the south.


Below is the video of this flash. Sorry for the glitch - it hangs up just before "slow-motion." Maybe I'll re-post it.


The Shadow
Thanks to John Farmer's interesting work, I can see the shadow now. It's visible in the south-side "Single Pump" camera, and cast on the roadway behind the station (South Joyce Street), divided in two by some invisible obstruction (possibly a median/divider). It appears at 9:40:35 (about 2 seconds before the flashes) by the video's clock and remains for about 8 frames, 1/4 of a second (though it appears stationary, apparently a still frame taken at 4 fps). All-in;all it's a large shadow. A 757 is one possibility.

I know this is crap quality to be blowing it up so big, but hey,
it's there. It can be (roughly) measured.
Youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hF-GcL8hR68

General Thoughts
Quotes from north path/no plane supporters: would these researchers talk about this key evidence like this if they thought it supported their theory or was irrelevant? (most from the inital Loose Change thread spurred by Russell Pickering's analysis)
John Doe X: "Talk about chasing shadows...lol." link
Aldo Marquis/Merc: "I believe the Citgo video was released SPECIFICALLY because of the Citgo witness and his account. I no longer believe this as a possibility, but as an unforunate reality. A counter chess move if you will. [...] This is a clever trick in response to the Citgo employee's account. Simply more bad video with a few editing/graphic/lighting tricks, just like the others." link
Undertow: "You know, I started to analyze that flash 4:44 (mov time) but it's just worthless in all its pixelated compressed crappyness. I don't know what anyone can possible get out of this video besides a migrane." link
(John Farmer's quote removed - I'm not so sure now he belongs on this list)
Craig Ranke (Lyte Trip): "No serious 9/11 researcher would take this video at face value. It makes zero sense." link
Craig Ranke to me: "Evidence tampering is a Federal offense and if you insist on supporting this dubious data that is supplied from the very individuals that you accuse of this crime you are just as guilty as they are." link

So naysayers aside, and all concerns of legitimacy vs. fakery taken into account (the grain of salt one must take this with), the analysis continues.

NEWS: MICHAEL MOORE, 9/11, AND THE PENTAGON CAMERAS

MICHAEL MOORE, 9/11, AND THE PENTAGON CAMERAS
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
The Frustrating Fraud
6/26/07

Previously having shied away from the issue directly, superstar documentarian Michael Moore recently gave a video interview to 9/11 Truth activists that expressed support for their inside job beliefs. Two reporters from We Are Change.org and Infowars.com captured the interview and published it on June 20. This interview is big news on the internet in 9/11 circles for what the Infowars-affiliated Jones Report called Moore's “clear departure from the 'government negligence' picture he painted in his film Fahrenheit 9/11.” Since he made that film about three years ago, Moore told his interviewers, he’s had firefighters tell him of “explosions” at the World Trade center. He remarked that official investigations thus far “haven’t even told us HALF the truth,” and expressed hope for a new investigation.
Google video link to interview

Then he said “lemme just give you one thing that I’ve asked for for a long time,” and turned to and lingered on the Pentagon attack. Noting the well-surveilled nature of the area, he told the interviewer “I wanna see the video, I wanna see a hundred videos that exist of this. Why don’t they want us to see that plane coming in to the building?” This is of course the prime driver of suspicions over that strike – the fact that we haven’t seen it, except two low-res and dubious frames and trace only in another of the four videos released so far. Video masterlist Moore is aware of the other lines of questioning as well – the precision approach that we’re told took the plane into the Pentagon’s ground floor but without marking the lawn: “to hit a building that’s only five stories high that expertly uhh, I believe that there will be answers in that videotape and we should demand that tape.”
Moore talks animatedly about Pentagon video secrecy

The usual implication of video secrecy opponents is that they must be hiding something contrary or embarrassing. Personally I’m not so sure the tape would show us much other than what the witnesses and building damage have been saying so far. Even a precision guided 757 looks the same on video. But Moore is too vague on this to be called a fraudster just yet and to his credit, he neither agreed nor disagreed with the interviewers about another major no-757 issue - the ever-shrinking entry wound. When asked if he was aware the “the [impact] hole is about eight feet wide,” he said “I’m not very good at the physics [inaudible], but believe me, I intend in my own way to find some answers. Thank you for whatever you’re doing.”

This could prove interesting. If Moore adds his weight to the cameras issue, we may just finally see better what they’re hiding. Now taking bets! Oddly enough, Scott Bingham at Flight77.info, a pioneer in the video release field, is not terribly sanguine about this development:

Michael Moore wants to see the the 100 or so videos from cameras that ring the Pentagon. In our original lawsuit we asked for every video the government has. If there are indeed 100 or so videos with some of those showing the plane in flight as Moore suggests, I don't know how a person can (working within the system) get those videos if the government states they don't exist (as they have stated within our lawsuit). Again, I think the "9/11 Truth Movement" should focus its efforts away from the soup that is the 9/11 Pentagon story.
Source: http://www.flight77.info/
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THE WHITE BLUR

OF SMOKE AND MIRRORED SURFACES
February 7 2007
Last Updated 5/23/07

despite their overall poor quality as evidence (serving better as a Rorshach test for pre-existing 9/11 theories), the surveillance video stills released in 2002 can yield some screts to the patient eye. I admit that's not normally me, but I've taken a crack at it; Prime among the features that stand out is the “white blur” which inhabits the stationary background briefly – for one frame – before it disappears into a brilliant fireball on the building’s façade in the next. Passed off by the official story as proof of a plane, it has most often been interpreted not as the plane but as the vapor or smoke trail behind the plane, which is mostly hidden behind the security box in the center.

For example, “Cat Herder” at Above Top Secret, in an otherwise sterling and pivotal mega-post “9/11: A Boeing 757 struck the Pentagon” (posted mid-2004, up to more than 4,000 responses now) took this tack, seeing an oddly black plane emitting a white vapor trail. To be fair, CH did admit: “this is entirely subjective and the image quality [...] is not good enough to form a factual opinion.”

I'm sure it was addressed somewhere in the thread, but a 757 shouldn’t have a vapor or smoke trail behind it if it crosssed the Pentalawn. The normal contrail seen behind jets in the sky is a result of high altitudes, and does not happen near ground level. I didn’t know this until I learned of it from Karl Schwarz of all people, but it seems to be true anyway. Thus the vapor trail meant a missile, which burns rocket fuel that does leave a trail at sea level (although that doesn’t seem to explain an A3 Skywarrior any better than it does a 757).

Mike Wilson’s animation of the attack helps explain and visualize the source of smoke as consistent with a 757 with engine damage, proably from ingesting a light pole "luminary." But like Cat Herder, I believe he got the plane and this smoke confused in the still analysis. Again as have most others, he identified the plane as hidden behind the security box - what they show as tailfin is the same tall part of the horizon line, and what I believe is the plane is shown as the engine smoke.

Allow me to explain: there are things we can tell from these stills if we look close. The first thing is to look not just at the first still but at all five to get asense of motion. the five frames below are closely cropped on the area in question, slightly enhanced, with the fisheye effect uncorrected. I've looked for movement and stillness, measured by changes in pixels from one frame to the next. Spots that match up in frame after frame I've taken as stationary objects/background and the few that don’t I've taken as things that are moving. The plane/missile was moving, so clearly we look for pixels that change suddenly. for the moment I'm ignoring the black tailfin to simplify this stage of the analysis, but I'll get back to it shortly.

Frame One This is the key frame that supposedly shows the vapor trail - I would note the dark pixels on underside that could well be its shadow on the lawn – if a smoke trail it's pretty dense. If a 757, recall the angle of attack, and that the alleged plane was silver, and NOT in the building’s shadow yet, so it should show up brilliant white with sun beaming right on it, and possibly affected by glare to look larger.

Second frame, one second after the first. Already we can see that where the white pixels were there is now “vapor” or more likely smoke, running evenly gray up to the building. The dark green horizon line is steady in all shots – none of the darkness there is part of the craft, unless it left some black bits of itself floating behind in mid-air, now obscured by suddenly-gray smoke that had been bright white a second earlier.



Frame three:
Again this is about one second after the previous. Note the gray smoke hasn't changed much, even as the fireball evolves, rises slowly, and darkens.







Frame Four:
No significant change in color of smoke, projectiles working their way up through the cloud and emerging.






Frame Five: Same. gray smoke,expanding and darkenin explosion. the little white "nosecone" some have seen peeking out from behind the security box is still there, attached to the box.





So then lets revisit the first frame here in simplified cartoony colors – background, forground, building and shadow, check-point, and the “blur.” Looking also at the color of “smoke” in the red sample area from the five stills, we see a sudden shift from white to gray, which stays gray for the next four seconds. Clearly the white is NOT smoke, most likely the plane itself.

Not that I can't see what people think is a tailfin, and I admit the pixel change here is significant. In fact looking again I've decided I may have been wrong in blending it into the horizon, and so I'm working on clearing this up with more analysis. I'm seeing not only a remarkably sharp vertical aberration, but also a notable blue-shift in the dark horizon area that happens to correspond exactly with it. The color enhanced inset helped reveal at least some of this is apparently in the pixels themselves, appearing over the whole image, and also present in the other frame from this camera, perhaps a digital artifact (orange lines illustrate edges of rectangular areas tinetd blue and orange, respectively). We see the white emerging from the tail end as we would if the right engine were damaged. But again, this would be amazing shadow-casting white-then-gray smoke... and if the tailfin were at that location, at least by my mapping of the scene, it would be sticking out to the left of the box, probably beyond the security box lip's ability to hide it.

I had rebelled against the "black tailfin," insisting on seeing only a slight, irrelevant extension of an already high point on the skyline, but this really does look like a tailfin. When it comes to the chassis, I'd expect sunlit silver glare to dominate, and certainly not the all-black plane Cat Herder saw. But looking on the north side and as the plane was beginning its starboard bank, the visible side would be in shadow. But again, how could the whole plane, including its massive banking right wing stay hidden in that blind spot without peeking over or to the left? Is the high point the banking right wing and engine? No - the wing would catch sunlight at almost any angle but sideways, and the engine would glint at any angle. Only the tailfin can do this darkness trick, which makes the tailfin there seem possible and makes the white again seem like smoke.

In short, I'm confused again. Nonetheless...
In May 2006 the full video the stills were taken from, along with a second video from a different camera that has no such obstruction of view, was released by Judicial Watch. In this new view, besides a horrible glare and what looks like a splat of bird crap, we see the blur alone and unobstructed, if just the tip of it at far right. In this shot at least this is clearly NOT a smoke or vapor trail unless of an invisible craft, and strangely about the same color as the possible smoke recorded by cam 2. Although less of it is visible, we also see more clearly a shape to it. It looks like it's again underpinned by a shadow. Even adjusting for light distortion, this looks much bigger than a Global Hawk or other smaller craft often cited.

But the shapes do seem to fit nicely, giving us something like this, resembling a giant ghost Albatross. I can't tell you how exactly this must be a 757, nor can I see how anything else could be readily identifiable in this ill-defined cluster of optic distortions. But it's of a good size, the largest number of eyewitnesses described an AA liner, and something like a 757 seems to have damaged the building and killed nearly 200 people there within the next couple of seconds. You do the math. My best guess still, after looking at all this, is the "tailfin" is nothing more than some kind of digital "artifact" after all. But I'm still looking at it...

PENTAGON CAMERA FISHEYE CORRECTION

Well, it looks cooler but seems less useful than I thought it would. In analyzing the footage from the Pentagon's CCTV security cameras, I had been concerned with the distorting effects of the fisheye lens, the kind like on your motel room door. The cameras are designed to monitor car traffic coming into the northwest entrance, but do have a good view to the south of the large west lawn and heliport. Here is an original, uncorrected shot of a police car pulling into the gate just seconds before Flight 77 screamed across the lawn. The red lines show distortion caused by the lens.

I opened the shot in Photoshop, used an elliptical selection tool lined up with the rounded corners at the bottom, and applied the spherize filter, full inversion (-100%) and got this, again with lines to show the correction. It's not perfect, but helps some.
The rooflines still has a bit of a curve to it, so I tried anti-spherizing it again.

And clearly this isn't helping much. It also appears the effect diminishes with distance. Countering the fisheye effect on the white blur frame itself doesn't add much to our analysis except shrinking the scene some and starting to distort the plane with the edge effect. I'm not even going to bother showing separate frames for comparison - here they all are together: lowest level is uncorrected, middle layer de-spherized once, top layer done twice.