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

[karstyl.livejournal.com]

I have seen this a few time before, my opinion is about 50/50 yes/no.

On no plane side I have seen pictures with no plane parts and analysis of the whole and the size of the plane that supposedly hit. And the lack of a black box. I also don’t intrinsically trust the government, historically most(all?) governments are corrupt so the chance of this one being otherwise is almost nil. Also having them put the story out on the conspiracy sites is a sure way to make sure it is ridiculed.

On the pro plane side is the fact that I could easily remove plane parts from a photo to put on a web site, there are some eyewitnesses that saw a plane in the vicinity that day, there have been very few real-world tests of what a big plane crashing into a big building would look like and what debris it would leave behind. And the fact that at least two other planes hit buildings that day. Which could also go to the no-plane argument, if there was a plan to fake an attack on a military target it was a good time to do so and have it believed.

Of course it could be Cthulhu, I remember the Illuminatus Trilogy, they might have been keeping people out of the area so they could redraw the line, or so they did not get eaten by the beast that escaped. Of course I think they were a bit slow and it took over the minds of the country already, blindfolded the people with flags. Explains so much.