Is it all just conspiracy wingnuts?

[angledge]

Yesterday I spoke to a man who spent 20 years as an aviation accident investigator for the US Navy. He then joined EPA, where he works as an On Scene Coordinator. He was one of the first people to respond to the Pentagon on 9/11 - he got to the building just in time to be turned away by the Pentagon police, who said they thought another plane was headed for the building.

According to this guy - an eminently knowledgeable eyewitness - there is no way a plane hit the Pentagon. He said he did not see a single piece of an airplane anywhere. The damage was all wrong - the hole in the Pentagon shows no damage from wings, for instance. The fact that two lightpoles right in front of the building are still standing is impossible, according to him. Of course, there is an enormous amount of controversy surrounding this. There are internet sites that list eyewitness accounts of the plane hitting the building. There were two cell phone calls made by passengers on the plane, one of which specifically stated that the plane had been hijacked by six individuals.

Other points he brought up:

• Why was there never an FAA/NTSB/FBI investigation of any of the four planes that crashed? You know, the exercises we're all somewhat familiar with where they comb the crash site for every last piece of wreckage & then re-assemble the plane in a warehouse, checking the parts number on every piece & exhaustively considering every shred of physical evidence?
  
• Modern aircraft have ground-linked telemetry of almost all cockpit instrumentation. Why wasn't it immediately obvious that these planes had been hijacked?

My question: supposedly the Pentagon was hit by American Airlines Flight 77. If that plane never hit the Pentagon, where is it? What happened to the 64 people who were onboard?

I don't know what to think of all this. The guy I spoke to sounded very knowledgeable, but there are experts on both sides of the debate. How to sort through all the information?

Comments

[captainsblog.livejournal.com]

I posted about a documentary on this very subject a week or so ago.

It's called Loose Change, and while it doesn't answer the questions (and some questions have been raised about its own documentary integrity), the questions are definitely worth thinking about-

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2023320890224991194

[angledge.livejournal.com]

Yeah, my housemate funkyplaid told me about Loose Change. I don't know how much I trust documentaries - there's ALWAYS an agenda.

[thepikey.livejournal.com]

And they upped the scariness points in a big way by talking about how some agencies had planned a fake attack on Guantanamo to give us an excuse to invade Cuba and take down Castro in the 60's...