Author's notes:

Conspiracy theories are fascinating and the bread and butter of tabloid magazines and TV. This series explores these theories in a logical and scientific manner.

Conspiracy theories have been around throughout human history. Some, like the Kennedy Assassination, have been debated and written about ad infinitum. As a matter of fact, most of the major conspiracy theories have evoked documentaries where these popular opinions have been regurgitated and explored in detail. Many of these conspiracy ideas have crept up because of political ideology or even religious fervor. Almost all great events, including wars, assassinations, terrorist attacks, and murders of famous people, have spawned conspiracy theories. These populous reactions are the life bread of tabloid magazines and TV shows. In most cases, however, they remain as knee jerking speculation without any verifiable evidence. I wish to take a different approach and examine them from a scientific viewpoint. For this reason I will concentrate on the more recent events because the science is more attainable.

All rights reserved Copyright @ 2015. No offense to anyone or anything is intended. Much of this is my opinion, but I have made a great effort to verify the facts.

9/11 Conspiracy Theories

It's hard to figure out where to start here. It seems that all sorts of wild conspiracy theories bloomed right after the 9/11 attacks. I assume that readers are familiar with the event itself. Two commercial jetliners--American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 crashed into the Twin Towers in New York on September 11, 2001. American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon and United Airline Flight 93 was brought down in a field near Shanksville, Pa. 2,996 lives were lost, including 19 hijackers.

As it turns out, many events before and after the attack lend some credence to conspiracy concepts. However, some of these theories can be dismissed easily. One is that NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, issued a stand down order and deliberately prevented any intervention in the attacks. Yes, I know that Dick Chaney was responsible for NORAD. However, despite Dick, better known as Darth Vader, having something to do with it, NORAD was not designed to prevent an internal attack. This military branch was created to intercept Soviet bombers from invading Canada and United States. Soviet bombers don't take off in the Unites States. They come from Russia over the North Pole.

The fact that only 14 fighter jets were on alert in the 48 states is not surprising. We weren't at war with anyone. Think about the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor. The United States military gets careless and lethargic between wars. That's because most Americans hate war, as was proved by the extensive demonstrations about the Vietnam War.

Supposedly, there was a female F16 pilot that was ordered to take down Flight 93. She didn't have ammunition. Fortunately for her, the plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, and it wasn't shot down with a missile either because she didn't have missiles. The passengers were able to force the terrorist pilot to ditch the plane into the ground. The F16 pilot would have had to give her life to save others on the ground, unless she tried to use the Nazi pilots' method of trying to crash their fighter planes into the B17 bombers over Germany. The plan was to clip the tail off of the bomber and then bail out.

A foreknowledge theory is involved with every major event like this. Many people, especially in Europe, came to the conclusion that the United States, and president Bush in particular, knew that these attacks were going to happen and didn't do anything about them. They figured that Bush used this attack to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. We can dismiss the Iraq invasion idea because the reason for that had nothing to do with 9/11. The invasion of Iraq was blamed on the possibility that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. If Saddam did have WMD's he gave his chemical weapons to Assad in Syria and any nuclear technology to Iran. The American army didn't find any in Iraq. Bush and him administration can be blamed for this fiasco.

Afghanistan is another matter. That could have been a legitimate reason to engineer an attack. However, there is no credible evidence for this, at least not anything that can be verified. The Bush administration was as clueless as the rest of us when the attacks occurred. They were completely discombobulated. I doubt that Bush had the wherewithal to plan or execute anything this complicated, but that's just my opinion. I do know this though: it would require hundreds if not thousands of people to plan and execute a fake attack like this. Someone involved in this insane plan would take advantage of this and go to the media, which would gladly give millions for this kind of information. Think of Edward Snowden.

I'm sure that the Bush administration was warned that an attack was going to happen, but this is always the case. I think at that time there was a general feeling that the terrorists would not be able to do anything that devastating. It's a typical attitude in America. We're too big and powerful for anything like that to happen. Boy, were we wrong.

Some theories focus on the buildings themselves and how they were able to fall down so easily. People claim that the government planted explosives to make it happen. Here's where I can bring physics and chemistry into the discussion.

The first thing to note is that the twin towers didn't fall (topple) over as the terrorists had planned. Remember that an attempt was made to bring down one the towers on February 26, 1993 using 1500 pounds of explosives in a Ryder truck parked in the underground garage of the North Tower. This failed to bring the building down despite extensive damage. I believe that this is the reason the terrorists decided to use planes so that they could crash into the top section of the buildings to topple them. What they failed to realize is that the twin towers were designed to withstand earthquakes and therefore not topple over easily. They also didn't consider that a jetliner is just a thin aluminum tube with wings. A collision with anything at 400 to 500 miles per hour would make them disintegrate and not be a very effective wrecking ball, at least not against a building that has an outer shell made mostly out of thin steel beams and glass. I think that more damage could have been done if the outside was made from cement, like older skyscrapers like the Empire State Building.

Using explosives to bring down a building is not easy. It's an engineering science that's often used to demolish old structures. The idea is to make the building collapse, not topple over, which would constitute a disaster. In effect, the plan is to implode the building by strapping explosives to the main structural components in order to progressively weaken the top sections so that they fall straight down, taking out the bottom sections because of gravity. These explosives have to be strapped directly to the support beams and then tied together to cause a controlled collapse. They also have to be detonated in a series of explosions that are spaced to cause the proper implosion effect.

The World Trade Center twin towers were, at the time, the tallest building in the world. Bringing them down would take a lot of explosives strategically placed. That could not have been achieved without people seeing it happen. They would have had to demolish walls and the elevator structures to plant the explosives. It would have taken many people a lot of time to do this. So, the idea of this being a government-planned destruction is ridiculous.

There were reports that thermite dust material was found in the debris of the two buildings, suggesting that thermite based explosives were used. Demolition personnel that worked the site after 9/11 refuted this report. Also, the idea that there was molten steel in the debris is impossible because it would have damaged the excavation equipment that was used to search for bodies.

Thermite is a mixture of aluminum and iron oxide. Both of these materials would have been found in the debris of those buildings. Although the jet fuel fire could not melt steel, it would weaken it, and the collision damage would further weaken the support holding the upper floors. Once they gave way, gravity would cause the top section to begin falling down, causing a domino effect straight down. Also, a thermite-based explosive would have been too slow and unpredictable to implode a large building. The proper tools for imploding a building are high-grade dynamite or nitroglycerine. None of these could have been planted in advance without being seen, plus they're too unstable to be in place for days or weeks in advance.

Another idea is that there were explosives strapped to the planes. That's also ridiculous. Ground crews inspect the planes before they take off. They would have seen unexpected square boxes attached to the planes.

The airliners that crashed into the Twin towers were the following: Flight 11 was a Boeing 767 twin engine wide-body airliner that can carry 156 passengers, but the one that was employed in the attack only had 81 passengers. At the time of the collision it was loaded with 10,000 gallons of jet fuel and traveling at 465 miles per hour when it collided between the 93 and 99th floors of the North Tower.

Flight 175 was a similar Boeing 767 with only 56 passengers. It also was loaded with 10,000 gallons of jet fuel and was traveling at 590 miles per hour and collided with the South Tower between the 77 and 85th floors. The collision was captured on video because the media was covering the collision of the North tower.

First thing to consider is that the Twin towers were not designed to withstand the collision of a large jetliner filled with jet fuel. Remember that a B-25 collided with the Empire State Building during World War II, and the building survived. No one thought that it would be necessary to protect a building from a commercial jetliner collision.

The other thing to consider is that the insulation on the steel support beams were poorly installed (the adhesive used was inferior and flaked off over time), allowing the jet fuel fire to more easily weaken (soften) the steel support beans holding up the upper floors of the buildings. This is not uncommon in New York where the trades are tainted by corruption that's forced by crime syndicates. This insulation was sprayed on, and it wasn't done very well, at least not well enough to withstand a large fire from jet fuel.

The twin towers were built in order to provide more office space. The way they did this it to have the central elevator tube core section provide most of the support, but there were perimeter steel beams on the outside to provide load-bearing strength by means of steel floor trusses that ran from these vertical support beans to the center section. These steel beams were designed to allow flexibility so that the building could sway in the wind, and there were dampers to help absorb the sway. What happened on 9/11 is that the jetliner collisions damaged these support structures and the fire of the jet fuel and the combustible materials in the offices heated the poorly insulated support beams to 1000 degrees, and this ultimately caused the collapse, aided by gravity. Basically, the twin towers fell down because of screw-ups in their construction and the terrific damage of the plane collisions and the burning of jet fuel. Remember that the flooring was made from concrete slabs. Seven to twelve stories of concrete, steel beams and office equipment would definitely have enough force to crush all of the floors under them.

Some have said that one of the planes exploded before it hit the building or that there was a missile seen hitting the buildings. This idea is bases on crappy videotape from that time. The recordings were not made in HD like we have now. They were at standard definition which 720 X 480 pixels. The recordings were not made at high speed, which will not capture fast motion well. Additionally, the flashes on the buildings after the planes hit are the results of windows popping from the fire causing pyroclastic flows. Those are like what comes out of a volcano.

The other issue is that Trade Center building 7 collapsed. A plane didn't hit it. That's true, but it sits right next to the Twin towers and believe me when those huge buildings collapsed they caused a lot of structural damage to building 7. The pressure field generated from that much material hitting the ground would knock the crap out of anything. Also, the collapse generated fires in that building, which also aided in making it fail.

Another ridiculous theory is that the planes were robotically flown. That technology wasn't perfected then. This is not science fiction.

There was insider trading (put options) on the airline stocks. This meant to theorists that the wealthy investors who did this had prior knowledge. I think it's obvious that someone did, but most of them were from outside the U.S. One thing that I would fault about the Bush administration handling of this fiasco is that most of the hijackers were Saudi citizens, and yet there was nothing said about the Saudi's being involved in this. They are our oil buddies. We wouldn't want to offend them. If there was a cover up on this event, this was certainly on the top of the list.

Another theory is that Jewish workers were told to stay away from the Twin towers on that date, suggesting that the Israeli government knew that it was going to take place. They might have, but there were between 270 and 400 Jewish people killed by the attacks, so if a warning did go out, not everyone received it.

The other main theory is that a missile, not a plane, caused the Pentagon destruction. What's with these missile theories? The theorists base this on the fact that the hole that was made in the Pentagon is smaller than the plane. The fact is, the plane hit and sheared off one wing before it hit. The terrorist flying the plane didn't really know how to do it correctly. He didn't have enough experience to fly a plane at over 500 miles per hour and hold it level just barely scraping the ground. First of all, even if the plane had struck the pentagon outside wall perfectly square it wouldn't cause a cookie-cutter hole. At that speed the plane would disintegrate and be in pieces. The pentagon was designed and built at the beginning of World War II to withstand an enemy attack. That's why it's a pentagon shape with sections in a concentric spacing arrangement. In order to destroy it completely, you would have to use many bombs dropped together or an A-bomb. Believe me, this theory is not valid. Experts that study and know about plane wrecks studied the damage and recreated the exact manner in which the destruction was made. Anything beyond this is a stretch.

There is a possibility that the investigation involved some cover up of this event. This probably happens in many cases like this. However, the major theories of this event are not valid in my opinion. That there was foreknowledge by the CIA, the NSA, the FBI or the more secret military organizations is a possibility. However, at the time these agencies didn't communicate with one another. This is another failure by the government. It's amazing to me that no one questioned young Saudi men taking flying lessons and not caring about how to land, only to take off and fly. This should have raised a red flag. You would have thought that after the first attempt to bring down a Twin tower building, that someone would realize that they were going to come back and try it again. The other thing that was lacking on that day is good security at airports. No one cared that young Saudi men were carrying box cutters onto planes. What did they think they were going to do; send gift boxes to their grandmothers?

I think that 9/11 was caused by as series of mistakes, miscues, apathy, and bungled government agencies. It could have been prevented if someone had been paying attention to the signs. I'm sure that other governments realized that something like this was going to happen. It was just a matter of time until it did. As to the fact that it was a conspiracy; I doubt that the government had the ability to engineer a complicated fake like this. Someone like a Snowden would have detected it. Could it have been realized and ignored on purpose; that's a possibility, but I doubt that we'll ever know for sure.

Thanks for reading.