Planes/No Planes and "Video Fakery"

By Jim Fetzer 

Perhaps no question within the scope of 9/11 research generates as much heat and as little light as questions that have arisen over the role of the aircraft on 9/11, which has come to be known by the name of “planes/no planes” and of “video fakery”. While I had long since concluded that no plane had crashed in Shanksville and that, while a Boeing 757 appears to have flown toward and then over the Pentagon, I was personally unable to bring myself to take the idea that no real airplanes had hit the North or the South Tower until nearly two years of being verbally assailed by Morgan Reynolds, who understood these issues far better than I, where his studies can be found on his web site, nomoregames.net, especially a response to criticism he has received for raising the issue during a FOX News appearance.  

Morgan has also authored excellent critiques of alternative theories of how the Twin Towers were destroyed.  It was the dawning realization that video fakery and real planes were logically consistent, since video fakery could have been used to conceal features of the planes or of their entry into the buildings, that enabled me to take a serious look to sort out what was going on here.  Even I initially thought the very idea was quite bizarre.

During the research I have done on this question, some of the most important reasons to question the use of planes on 9/11 are (1) that Flights 11 and 77 were not even scheduled to fly that day and, (2) that, according to FAA Registration records I have in hand, the planes corresponding to Flights 93 and 175 were not deregistered until 28 September 2005, which raises the questions, “How can planes that were not in the air have crashed on 9/11?” and “How can planes that crashed on 9/11 have still been in the air four years later?”

 We have studies (3) by Elias Davidsson demonstrating that the government has never been able to prove that any of the alleged “hijackers” were aboard any of those planes and research (4) by A.K. Dewdney and by David Ray Griffin demonstrating that the purported phone calls from those planes were faked.  And (5), as Col. George Nelson, USAF (ret.) has observed, although there are millions of uniquely identifiable components of those four planes, the government has yet to produce even one.  My purpose here is not to persuade anyone to believe the 9/11 planes were phantom flights on 9/11, but simply to lay out some of the evidence that supports that conclusion, even though I myself was initially unwilling to take it seriously.

Flights 11 and 77: The BTS Tables

The first to notice that American Airlines Flights 11 and 77 were not even scheduled to fly on 9/11 was the brilliant Australian jazz musician, Gerard Holmgren, who was interviewed by David West on 27 June 2005.

Others, such as Nick Kollerstrom, “9 Keys to 9/11″, have also reported the same difficulty with the government’s official account.

If AA Flight 11 did not even take off from Boston’s Logan Airport on the morning of 9/11, then it cannot possibly have hit the North Tower around the 96th floor at 0846 hours and thereby brought about the death of its 92 passengers.

And if AA Flight 77 did not take off from Dulles International on the morning of 9/11, then it, also, cannot have crashed into the Pentagon at 0940 hours and thereby brought about the death of its 64 passengers.

Yet that is what the data that Holmgren discovered in the Bureau of Transportation Statistics shows to have been the case.  In his new book, 9/11: ENEMIES FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC (2011), Edward Hendrie has published the data tables for both of these alleged flights, where it turns out that the BTS subsequently revised their tables with partial data in order to cover up their absence.  For Flight 77, for example:

The tables for AA Flight 77 can be found in Hendrie’s book on pages 9 and 11, while similar tables for AA Flight 11 can be found on pages 8 and 10.  The case against the use of planes becomes even more powerful when we realized that, as David Ray Griffin, THE 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT: OMISSIONS AND DISTORTIONS (2005), explains, Waleed al-Shehri, whom the government claims was aboard AA Flight 11, was interviewed after 9/11 by a London-based newspaper and spoke with the US Embassy in Morocco on 22 September, which would have been remarkable for someone who had died when the plane he allegedly helped to hijacked hit the North Tower. 

And the same is true of Ahmed al-Nami and Saeed al-Ghamdi, both alleged to have been aboard Flight 93 and were interviewed by multiple sources, while the Saudi Embassy in Washington, D.C., reported that three other alleged hijackers, Mohand al-Shehri, Salem al-Hazmi, and Abdulzaiz al-Omairi, were all alive and well and living in Saudia Arabia (page 19).  Salem al-Hazmi was supposed to have been aboard AA Flight 77 and al-Nami to have piloted AA Flight 11 (page 20), which reinforces the BTS data.

Flight 11: On-Site Evidence

If AA Flight 77 was not even in the air on 9/11, then we should expect to find indications of  one or another kind of video fakery in the evidence.  As the term should be properly understood, “video fakery” encompasses any use of video to convey a false impression to mislead a target audience.  Although Hollywood specializes in the presentation of impossible events, its films do not generally qualify as “video fakery”, insofar as they are not intended to mislead their audience.  The situation on 9/11, however, appears to qualify.   Indeed, remarkably enough, Jules Naudet, a French filmmaker, just happened to be in the vicinity doing a modest documentary about New York Firemen out looking for a “gas leak”.

Indeed, as Leslie Raphael has explained, that a cameraman should have been in precisely the right position to film this event depended upon a rather large number of conditions—either as a matter of coincidence, as the government would have us believe, or by design.

If this occurred by chance, it’s improbability is astonishingly small. An odd flash occurs just as the flying object makes contact with the building, which may have been the trigger for a prearranged explosion to create a pattern of damage to the side of the building, which turns out to have anomalies of its own.

Both AA Flight 11 and United Flight 175, which is alleged to have hit the South Tower, were Boeing 767s, while AA Flight 77 and United Flight 93 were both Boeing 757s. While individual images are too blurry and indistinct to be even be identifiable as a commercial carrier, much less as a Boeing 767, a time-sequence of the image in motion as it approaches the tower—which was prepared by Rosalee Grable—reveals that it does not bear even a faint resemblance.  She has speculated that it might be an arrangement of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

And when you compare the pattern at the time of impact with what we see subsequently, there does not seem to be lot of room for doubt that they do not appear to be the same. How can four impact points–which suggest that it may be four UAVs–that constitute an extended “Z” have been turned into an impression in the side of the building that has now become an elongated “V”?  That video fakery was involved here appears to be difficult to deny.

Flight 77: On-Site Evidence

There appear to be more than a half-dozen arguments against the official account that a 757 hit the Pentagon, which appears to be a fantasy. This “hit point” was too small to accommodate a 100-ton airliner with a 125′ wingspan and a tail that stands 44′ above the ground. The debris is wrong for a Boeing 757: no wings, no fuselage, no seats, no bodies, no luggage, no tail! Not even the engines, which are made of titanium and steel, were recovered.

According to the official account, AA Flight 77 approached the Pentagon on an acute north-east trajectory, barely skimming the ground at over 500 mph and taking out multiple lampposts, which would have ripped the wing off and caused the plane to burst into flame. The aerodynamics of flight, including “downdraft”, moreover, would have made the official trajectory–flying at high speed barely above ground level–physically impossible, because a Boeing 757 flying over 500 mph could not have come closer than 60 or more feet to the ground, which means that the official account is neither physically nor aerodynamically possible.  And the only image that the Pentagon has ever produced of an aircraft approaching the building cannot possibly be a 757:

Russ Wittenburg in the DVD “Zero“, an experienced pilot who flew the planes alleged to have been used on 9/11, states that the Boeing 757 can’t go 500 mph hour at sea level because the air is too dense. Robin Hordon, an air traffic controller, in the same film, explains that the Boeing 757 cannot do the maneuvers attributed to it.

The official story thus appears to entail violations of laws of physics, of engineering, and of aerodynamics, insofar as the damage to the building, the absence of debris, the clear, smooth, unblemished lawn and now its alleged performance are incompatible with a Boeing 757.

Moreover, if a Boeing 757 could have traveled at 500 mph at ground level, it would have caused enormous damage to the grass and the ground, including producing substantial furrows from the low hanging engines. At this point, it appears to be “pilling on” to observe that data from a flight recorder provided to Pilots for 9/11 Truth by the National Transportation Safety Board corresponds to a plane with a different approach and higher altitude, which would have precluded its hitting lampposts or even the building itself, which means that, if the NTSB’s own data corresponds to the Boeing 757 that is alleged to have been flown toward the building, it would have flown over the Pentagon rather than hit it.  For more, see Pilot's video studies, “Pandora’s Black Box” and “Pentacon“, which offer additional substantiation.

What about Flights 93 and 175?

As Greg Szymanki observed, “Two 9/11 Airliners, Flight 93 and 175, Were Only Just Recently Taken Off The FAA ‘Active’ List” (26 November 2005), both of the United airplanes that were supposed to    have crashed on 9/11 were  only ‘deregistered’ in September “after snoopy 9/11 researchers questioned FAA officials a month earlier”.

And, indeed, Szymanki had it right.  FAA Registration data shows that they were not officially reported to have been taken out of service until 28 September 2005, which is more than four years after they had “official” crashing in Shanksville (United Flight 93) and crashed into the South Tower (United Flight 175):

Notice the “Reason for Cancellation” in each case is simply “Cancelled”.  No pretense that they might have been destroyed in crashes four years earlier.  Just as we discovered in the case of the BTS data for American Flights 11 and 77, where replacement records were created to add those flights to the data based where they were previously missing, that form of documentary fakery was also perpetrated in the case of the FAA Registration records, where both of the planes that were associated with those flights also appear, but with deregistration dates of 14 January 2002 and the purported “Reason for Cancellation” in their case of “Destroyed”:

As we found in the case of AA Flight 11 at the North Tower and AA Flight 77 at the Pentagon, the on-site evidence does not confirm that United Flight 93 actually crashed in Shanksville or that United Flight 175 hit the South Tower, which, as we are going to discover, is far and way the most interesting of the forms of fakery surrounding the planes that are supposed to have been “hijacked” on 9/11.

Pilots for 9/11 Truth Corroboration

Indeed, the evidence that United Flight 93 did not crash in Shanksville and that United Flight 175 did not hit the South Tower has been considerably strengthened by new discoveries from Pilots for 9/11 Truth.  By means of meticulous research on electronic communications between those aircraft and air traffic controllers, they have been able to establish that United Flight 93 was in the air in the vicinity of Fort Wayne, IN, and Champaign, IL, at the time of the alleged Shanksville crash.  Since no aircraft can be in two places at one time, it is difficult to imagine more conclusive proof that the Shanksville crash of Flight 93 was another fabricated event:

Even more surprisingly, however, Pilots has also determined that United Flight 175 was in the air in the vicinity of Harrisburg and Pittsburgh, PA, at the time it was purportedly crashing into the South Tower in New York City.  This may come as quite a shock to those who watched as it entered the South Tower on television.  Indeed, when an FBI official was asked why the NTSB, for the first time in its history, had not investigated any of these four crashes, he replied that it wasn’t necessary “because we saw them on television”.  Well, we didn’t see the Shanksville crash or the Pentagon crash on TV, which leaves us wondering what we did see on television on 9/11.

Flight 93: On-Site Evidence

Just as America Airlines planes were supposed to be Boeing 767s, both of these United planes were supposed to be Boeing 757s. A Boeing 757 weighs about 100 tons with a wingspan of about 125′ and a tail that stands 44′ above the ground. 

It would have been overwhelmingly larger than the trucks in this photograph, where the alleged crater from the crash was situated. Compare this crash site with those from bona fide crash sites to begin to appreciate the enormity of the deception involved. “This is the most errie thing”, the coroner observed at the scene. “I have not, to this day, seen a single drop of blood. Not a drop.”

FOX News reporter: It looks like there’s nothing there, except for a hole in the ground.

Photographer Chris Konicki: Ah, basically that’s right. The only thing you can see from where we where, ah, was a big gouge in the earth and some broken trees. We could see some people working, walking around in the area, but from where we could see it, there wasn’t much left.

Reporter: Any large pieces of debris at all?

Konicki: Na, there was nothing, nothing that you could distinguish that a plane had crashed there.

Reporter: Smoke? Fire?

Konicki: Nothing. It was absolutely quite. It was, uh, actually very quiet. Um, nothing going on down there. No smoke. No fire. Just a couple of people walking around. They looked like part of the NTSB crew walking around, looking at the pieces…” – FOX (09/11/01)

An alleged eyewitness, Val McClatchey, who resides less than two miles from the purported crash site, claims to have taken a photo showing a plume of smoke from the crash site. There are good reasons to suspect that her photo was faked, however, and that Ms. McClatchey has to have had reasons of her own for taking such a deceptive public stance. 

The plume resembles those from detonation explosions more than it does fires from crash sites, for example, and estimates of the location of the plume from the location the photo was allegedly taken place it over a pond, which suggests that this is yet another fake photograph in the 9/11 inventory. Indeed, there are many good reasons to suspect that 9/11 was staged with Hollywood-style special effects.

The virtually complete absence of any debris from the Shanksville “crash site” was explained on the basis of the claim that the ground had been used for mining in the past and was therefore “very soft”, where the plane simply disappeared into the ground. Some accounts even have it that the plane disappeared into an abandoned mind shaft. But we know what to do with miners trapped in mine shafts: we bring out the heavy equipment and the bright lights and dig 24/7 in the hope that, by some miracle, someone might have survived. But that was not done in Shanksville, where no effort was made to save anyone or even recover the bodies–and for good reason. There were none.

Flight 175: On-Site Evidence

The footage of the South Tower hit exemplifies several anomalies, including a Boeing 767 flying at an impossible speed, an impossible entry into the building (in violation of Newton’s laws), and even passing through its own length into the building in the same number of frames it passes through its own length in air—which is impossible, unless this 500,000 ton, steel and concrete building posed no more resistance to its trajectory in flight than air.  Some have claimed that this was a “special plane” that could fly faster than a standard Boeing 767, but no real plane could violate Newton’s laws.  The structure of the building, moreover, meant that it actually intersected with eight different floors as
follows:

Each of those floors consisted of steel trusses connected at one end to the core columns and at the other to the steel support columns. They were filled with 4-8” of concrete (deeper in the v-shaped grooves) and posed enormous horizontal resistance. (Imagine what would happen to a plane encountering one of them suspended in space!) The windows were 18” wide and the support columns one meter apart, while there were no windows between floors, which means far less than 50% if the plane should have entered via them. But as Jack White has shown here, that is not what the videos display:

Notice that the plane completely enters the building before its jet fuel explodes, when one would have thought that, insofar as most of its fuel is stored in its wings, they should have exploded on entry—which is comparable to the failure of the 757 at the Pentagon to have its fuel explode when its wings hit those lampposts.

And while some have sought to support the claim that this was a real 767 based upon the engine found at Church & Murray, those who were fabricating evidence in this case did not get it right:  the engine component did not come from a 767 and, if this FOX News footage is authentic, appears to be a plant, as another of Jack’s studies reveals:

Indeed, as John Lear, perhaps our nation’s most distinguished pilot, has observed, the plane in these videos does not even have strobe lights, which are required of every commercial carrier. But how can a Boeing 767 possibly travel at an impossible speed (as Pilots for 9/11 Truth has confirmed), enter a steel and concrete building in violation of Newton’s laws, pass through its own length into the building in the same number of frames that it passes through its own length in air, and not have its fuel explode as it makes contact with that massive edifice?

Even the frames from the Pentagon show a huge fireball upon impact. If that was true of the 757 there, why is it not also true of the 767 here? It looks as though, in this respect, the fabrication of Flight 77 fakery was just a bit better than the fabrication of Flight 175 fakery.

The Use of Video Fakery

Since we all saw United Flight 175 hit the South Tower on television–and many also claim to have watched it happen with their own eyes–what was actually going on in New York City? What did we see on television or, assuming we take the witnesses at face value, with their own eyes? There are three alternative theories, which involve the use of computer generated images (CGIs), the use of video compositing (VC), or the use of a sophisticated hologram, respectively.

That third alternative may sound “far out” until you realize that many witnesses claim to have seen a plane hit the South Tower with their own eyes, which would have been impossible if VC or CGIs had been the method that was used. Since we are dealing with visual phenomena, here are some videos that illustrate what I have been talking about in relation to “video fakery”:

“9/11 Fake: Media Make Believe”

The serious question that has to arise at this point, of course, is “Why?” Would it not have been far simpler just to fly a real plane into the North Tower and another into the South?Where the answer turns out to be, “No”. Pilots for 9/11 Truth discovered that it is extremely difficult to hit an edifice 208′ across at more than 500 mph. After 20 or more tried it repeatedly, only one was able to hit it once. In addition, a real plane could not enter all the way into the building before it would explode.

But that was a requirement of the mission, since otherwise there would have been no pseudo-explanation for the subsequent “collapse” of the buildings due to fire. And equally important, the explosions that were planned for the subbasements to drain the towers’ sprinkler systems of water so they could not extinguish the relatively modest fires that would remain after the pre-positioned jet fuel was consumed in those spectacular fireballs. The plan was to explain them away effects of jet fuel falling through the elevator shafts–a flawed theory, but good enough for a gullible public.

“The Theory of a Ghostplane”

                         “Proof Plane that Hit was Hologram”

The mission required something that looked like a real plane but could perform feats that no real plane could perform by entering the building before it would explode, which would have  been impossible with a real plane. And that had to be timed to coincide with explosions in the subbasements that, even with the most meticulous planning, would inadvertently take place 14 and 17 seconds before the planes officially hit the buildings.

It was an audacious plan, brilliant in design, and nearly perfect in execution.  But those who were working this out did not realize that they were also creating the image of a plane that would turn out to be traveling faster than a Boeing 767, violating Newton’s laws, and passing through its own length into the building in the same number of frames it passed through its own length it air.

As in the case of the Pentagon, they thereby violated laws of aerodynamics and of physics that gave their game away.  And those blemishes, subtle as they may have been, have provided the opportunity to expose a fantastic fraud, which has been used to justify wars of aggression and constraints upon civil rights that our nation continues to endure to this day.

Jim Fetzer, a former Marine Corps officer, is the founder of Scholars for 9/11 Truth and McKnight Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota Duluth.