The Evidence on the Table: Putting the 9/11 Record Where People Can See It

A follow-up to The Unfinished Inquiry

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Why This Article

In The Unfinished Inquiry, I asked whether the cases of Congress, 9/11, and the USS Liberty deserved to be closed. I concluded that 9/11 was unfinished. This morning I kept rambling, and I came out with a lot of questions. Where did the jet fuel go? Was the landing gear preserved? Where did the parts come from? Could a video be faked? How did a plane disappear into the ground in Shanksville? How big was the hole in the Pentagon?

Then I caught myself and said something I want to put right up front. It seems crazy when you trust conspiracy theories more than you trust your government. But that's where a lot of us are. When the data isn't put in front of people, they fill the gap with speculation. That's not a character flaw. It's what an observer does when the feedback loop is broken.

So this article has a simple job. It lays the actual evidence on the table, plainly, so nobody has to guess. Some questions may settle. Others will show up as genuinely open. Either result is honest.

I'll use the same four labels as before. Documented means it's on the public record: recordings, photographs, court exhibits, published reports. An official finding is a conclusion of a government body or its engineers. An allegation is a claim that hasn't been proven. Disputed means credible people still disagree. My own opinions will be marked as mine.

1. Chief Orio Palmer: A Voice From the 78th Floor

Let me start with the testimony that moved me most this morning.

Here's what's documented. Battalion Chief Orio Palmer of the New York Fire Department was a marathon runner. On September 11th he climbed the stairs of the South Tower, World Trade Center 2, all the way to the 78th-floor sky lobby. That was the bottom of the zone where the second plane hit. His radio transmissions were caught on a 78-minute tape found later in 5 World Trade Center. The New York Times reported on it in November 2002, after federal prosecutors agreed its release wouldn't harm terrorism prosecutions. Until then, it had been widely believed no firefighter got higher than about the 50th floor.

On the way up, Chief Palmer reported stairway walls "compromised" on the 73rd and 74th floors with "no smoke or fire problems." Then, on the 78th floor, he said: "We've got two isolated pockets of fire. We should be able to knock it down with two lines." He reported "numerous 10-45 Code 1s," the department's code for fatalities, and numerous injured civilians. He asked for two engine companies. Lieutenant Joseph Leavey of Ladder 15 answered from the B stairway that they were trapped and had to "put some fire out" to reach him. The times were about 9:52 to 9:56 in the morning. The tower fell at 9:59.

What do these transmissions show? First, the 78th floor was survivable enough for firefighters to reach it and work. Second, at the moment and place Palmer stood, the fires he could see looked manageable to an experienced chief. Third, people were dead and hurt there, which matches a violent event on that floor.

Why didn't he mention a plane? In my ramble I took that as a sign that no plane struck the building. That's my personal inference, not a finding, and I want to be fair to the other side of it. Palmer was on a working fire radio. Every firefighter in the city already knew planes had hit both towers, and it was all over every channel. Radio discipline means you report what the next crew needs: conditions, the stairs, the fire, the casualties. "A plane hit here" wasn't news to anyone listening. So his silence about the plane is weak evidence either way.

What his words do raise is a fair challenge about fire intensity. If the 78th floor had two isolated pockets of fire, how hot was the tower overall? The official answer from NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is that the South Tower's major fires were higher up, on the 79th through 83rd floors. The hottest were in the northeast corner of the 81st and 82nd floors, above where Palmer stood. That's a reasonable answer. It also means Palmer's floor can't settle the question by itself. His testimony is important, it's real, and it deserves a permanent place in the official record. But it describes one floor, not the whole impact zone.

2. Where Did the Jet Fuel Go?

This was my question, and it's a good one.

NIST's official finding is that when each plane hit, a significant part of its roughly 10,000 gallons of jet fuel ignited inside the building, and much of it blew out the windows in the fireballs we all saw. NIST says most of the jet fuel was burned up within the first few minutes. The fuel's real role, in NIST's words, was as a primer. It lit large fires on several floors almost at once. After that, the fires were fed mainly by office contents: desks, paper, carpet, partitions. On average that was about four pounds of burnable material per square foot. NIST says typical office furnishings could sustain intense fires for at least an hour on a given floor.

So in the official account, "the jet fuel melted the steel" is wrong. The claim is that the impact knocked fireproofing off the steel and severed some columns, and the fuel set the contents on fire across whole floors at once. NIST says those fires reached as high as 1,000 degrees Celsius in places. The heated floors sagged and pulled inward on the outside columns, the columns bowed in, and the collapse began. In the South Tower that happened on the east face, which NIST says was confirmed by photographs and by police helicopter observers in the half hour before the fall.

The critics' strongest point is this. NIST's work explains how the collapse began. It doesn't model in detail how the rest of the building came down so completely and so fast once it started. NIST argues that once the top section began to fall, nothing below could stop it. Critics argue that's an assumption, not a demonstration. That gap is real, and it's disputed.

3. The Plane Debris: What Was Found and What Wasn't Matched

I asked whether the landing gear was preserved, and then I said we really don't know where the parts came from. Here's what the record shows.

It's documented that aircraft parts fell on lower Manhattan. Pieces attributed to United Flight 175, the plane that hit the South Tower, include landing gear and fuselage at 45–47 Park Place and an engine at Church and Murray Streets. A landing gear fragment found at West and Rector Streets, south of the North Tower, was attributed to American Flight 11. Photographs of these parts have been public for years.

In April 2013, surveyors found a five-foot piece of aircraft wedged between buildings at 51 Park Place, near where the Flight 175 debris had landed. At first it was called landing gear. Boeing identified it as a wing flap support from a Boeing 767. That's the right type for both planes. The New York Police Department said it could not be matched to a specific flight.

Here's the honest gap. As far as the public record shows, there's been no public release matching the serial numbers on recovered parts to the specific airframes of Flights 11 and 175. Aircraft parts carry such numbers, and doing this would have been routine in a normal crash investigation. The 9/11 Commission also reported that the flight data and cockpit voice recorders from the two planes that struck the towers were never found. So the parts are real and photographed, and they're consistent with Boeing 767s. But the step that would close the question for good, a published match to the specific aircraft, isn't in the public record. That's a documented gap, and it's exactly the kind of thing a proper investigation would have published.

4. Holograms and Advanced Technology

I asked a direct question. Could someone produce a video using a hologram and pass it off as real? I also said I'm not letting go of advanced technologies. I'll treat that respectfully, because questions deserve answers, not ridicule.

What's technically possible? Video can be edited, composited, and faked. That's true today, and it was possible in 2001. A free-floating hologram you can see from every angle in open daylight, the kind you see in movies, isn't a demonstrated technology even now. Real "holograms" at concerts use projection onto glass or screens in controlled settings.

The hardest problem for the hologram idea is the number of independent observers. The second plane was filmed live by several television networks from different directions, and by many private people who didn't know each other, some of whose footage surfaced years later. Thousands of people on the streets saw it with their own eyes. Faking all of those at once, from every angle, without a single leak, would be far harder than the event itself. And the debris, the casualties on the 78th floor that Chief Palmer reported, and the damage pattern all have to be explained too.

That's the strongest case against it, and I'm putting it here fairly. My stance, and I'm marking it as mine: I keep the question of advanced technology open, as a question rather than a claim. An honest observer can hold a question open while admitting the evidence for it is thin.

5. Shanksville: Did Flight 93 Disappear Into the Ground?

I asked whether the plane just disappeared into the ground, or whether I was missing data. It turns out there's a good deal of data, and much of it is public.

The official account is that United Flight 93 hit the ground at high speed, nose-down and rolled nearly upside down, into soft soil on reclaimed strip-mine land. A plane hitting a hard building leaves a wreck on the surface. A plane driving into loose fill buries itself and shatters. According to the National Park Service, the FBI excavated a crater about 85 feet by 85 feet and 27 to 40 feet deep, and sifted the soil for evidence. Most pieces were the size of a notebook or smaller. The largest were parts of the two engines and a piece of fuselage.

The local fire chief estimated that about 95 percent of the plane was recovered over 13 days, more than 50 tons of material. It was later stored by United Airlines and, in 2018, buried at the memorial. In a final search that year, investigators and families found both mangled engines and more than 600 personal objects. Both flight recorders were recovered within two days of the crash. Every person on board was identified through dental records, fingerprints, or DNA. The FBI says it found hijackers' passports, notes, and a knife.

The trial of Zacarias Moussaoui in 2006 is a key documented source. The federal court in Virginia put all of the more than 1,200 admitted exhibits online except seven that remain sealed or classified. They include material from Flight 93, and the cockpit voice recording was played for the jury.

The disputed part is light debris found at Indian Lake, about a mile and a half away. Some people point to it as a sign of a shootdown or a midair breakup. The government denies any shootdown, and investigators said the light material was carried by the wind after the impact. Neither side has proven its case on that point, so it stays open. But the core question, whether the plane vanished, has a documented answer: it was dug up, piece by piece.

6. The Pentagon: How Big Was the Hole?

This one has me stumped, so I went to the engineers. The American Society of Civil Engineers wrote the Pentagon Building Performance Report in 2003, and NIST published it. Its numbers are worth reading slowly.

According to that report, the severe damage to the west face of the Pentagon was about 120 feet wide. Measured straight across the plane's path, which came in at a steep angle, it was about 90 feet. Inside, the most severe damage ran in a tapering band about 90 feet wide at the entry, and debris traveled about 310 feet diagonally into the building. The Boeing 757's wingspan is about 125 feet. So the opening was smaller than the full wings. The engineers' official finding is that the outer parts of the wings didn't enter the building. The right wing hit the strong second-floor slab and was sheared off. The wing tips, being light, shattered against the reinforced wall rather than cutting through it, and in places the wall gashes match the wings' position.

Why do the famous photos show a small hole? Many of them were taken before the upper floors collapsed, which happened about 19 minutes after impact. They were taken through smoke and spraying fire-fighting foam that hid much of the first-floor damage. The plane mostly slid in at the first-floor level. Another well-known hole, a round opening in the inner C-ring wall about 310 feet from the entry point, is documented. The engineers describe it as where debris broke through, not a nose-shaped punch.

Then comes the open issue. The FBI collected videos from cameras around the Pentagon. In a sworn statement in a freedom-of-information case, FBI Special Agent Jacqueline Maguire said the Bureau had 85 potentially relevant videos. She said most didn't show the Pentagon at all, and that only one, the parking-gate camera, showed the impact. The government released those parking-gate frames, which are blurry and don't clearly show a plane. Footage later released from a nearby hotel showed the explosion but not the aircraft. Whatever the other tapes show, they haven't all been released for the public to judge. If they show nothing, releasing them costs nothing. If they show something, the public has a right to see it.

7. The Steel That Was Shipped Away

Before any engineer could study most of it, the steel was gone.

This is documented, and it came from inside the fire service itself. In January 2002, Bill Manning, editor of Fire Engineering, one of the oldest professional journals for firefighters, wrote an editorial called "Selling Out the Investigation." He wrote that for more than three months, structural steel from the World Trade Center had been "cut up and sold for scrap," and that "crucial evidence" was "on the slow boat to China." He called it "astounding ignorance" of the value of a thorough scientific investigation. He said the national fire investigation standard, NFPA 921, had no exemption for destroying evidence from buildings over ten stories. The New York Times reported in December 2001 that leading engineers were calling for a broader inquiry. The early team, they said, had no subpoena power and couldn't even get detailed blueprints at first.

The official response is that NIST later collected and cataloged 236 pieces of steel, which it says covered all the important types. That's a small fraction of the roughly 200,000 tons in the towers. Whether it was enough is disputed. What isn't disputed is that a professional firefighting journal objected, in writing, while it was happening.

8. Were the Planes Remotely Controlled?

There's one more theory I needed to include: that the planes weren't flown by hijackers at all, but were taken over and flown by remote control.

Here's the allegation. Soon after 2001, writers online began claiming that the airliners were seized electronically from the ground. This is sometimes called the "Home Run" or remote-takeover idea. The claim is that a hidden system locked the pilots out and flew the planes to their targets, and that the hijackers were either patsies or never at the controls. That claim has never been proven.

Part of why the idea won't die is that some of its building blocks are real. It's documented that remote and autonomous flight existed in 2001. In April of that year, the U.S. Air Force's Global Hawk, an unmanned jet, flew nonstop from Edwards Air Force Base in California to South Australia, about 8,200 miles in roughly 23 hours. It was the first unmanned aircraft to cross the Pacific. It flew a preprogrammed route while a crew on the ground monitored it.

It's also documented that our own military once put this idea on paper. In March 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff sent Defense Secretary Robert McNamara a top-secret memo, code-named Operation Northwoods, listing pretexts to justify invading Cuba. One proposal was to secretly swap a chartered civilian airliner for an exact duplicate, then convert the real plane into a remotely controlled drone. It would fly over Cuba, broadcast a fake "May Day" call, and be destroyed by radio signal, so the attack could be blamed on Cuba. President Kennedy rejected the pretext approach, and the plan was never carried out. The document was declassified in 1997 through the Kennedy assassination records review. So the idea of a drone passed off as an airliner isn't fantasy. Military planners wrote it down.

Now the other side, and it's substantial. There was no known system in 2001 for taking remote control of a commercial Boeing 757 or 767. These planes had autopilots, but an autopilot is set by the crew in the cockpit, not steered from the ground. No such takeover system has ever been shown to exist in these airliners.

The official findings of the 9/11 Commission rest on several independent kinds of evidence of hijacker control:

• Phone calls. Flight attendants and passengers on the planes called airline offices and family members, describing hijackers, stabbings, and the cockpit being taken.
• The Flight 93 cockpit voice recording. It captured the hijackers' voices in the cockpit and the passengers' struggle to break in. The recording was played for the jury at the Moussaoui trial.
• Flight training. The hijacker pilots had taken flight lessons in the United States, and the Commission documented where and when.
• Air traffic control transmissions. On Flight 11, a hijacker believed to be Mohamed Atta keyed the radio and was heard saying, "We have some planes." He apparently meant to speak to the passengers but was transmitting to air traffic controllers.

For the remote-control theory to hold, all of those would have to be faked or explained away together: the calls, the cockpit voices, the training records, and the radio transmissions. That's a high bar, and the theory hasn't met it.

My stance, marked as mine: like the advanced-technology question, I keep remote control open as a question, not a claim. Northwoods shows the idea was thought of at the highest levels. The evidence above shows why the official account says hijackers were at the controls. An honest observer holds both in view and asks a real investigation to close the gap.

9. When Evidence Isn't Prominent, Speculation Fills the Gap

Let me step back and look at the whole table.

Some things look closer to settled when you see the data. Flight 93 didn't vanish; it was dug out of a deep crater with its recorders, engines, and the remains of everyone aboard. At the Pentagon, engineers measured about 90 to 120 feet of damage at the face. The jet fuel didn't burn for an hour; it lit the fires, and the office contents kept them going.

Other things are genuinely open. Recovered parts weren't publicly matched to specific airframes. The tower flight recorders were never found. The full set of Pentagon videos hasn't been released. Most of the steel was recycled before it could be studied. Building 7 is still disputed, as I covered in The Unfinished Inquiry. And Chief Palmer's report of two isolated pockets of fire, from the place the official story says was an inferno, deserves an honest public answer, not silence.

Here's what I've learned. When people trust conspiracy theories more than their government, it isn't because they love conspiracy. It's because the evidence wasn't made prominent. Every gap in the record becomes a doorway for speculation, and some of what walks through it is wrong. That's the entropy I keep talking about. Holding up an incomplete story takes constant energy, and it wears down public trust year after year.

My personal view, marked as such: I believe a storyboard, a plan written in advance, would account for all the particulars before the operation. That's my opinion, not a finding, and I offer it as a question for a real investigation to test.

Trust doesn't come from authority. It comes from transparency. A proper investigation would have made this data prominent from the start. Here's what it would publish:

• The Palmer tapes and all first-responder recordings, entered into the official record as testimony, with a fire-science analysis of what they show about conditions on each floor.
• Serial-number matching for every recovered aircraft part, tied to the maintenance records of the specific aircraft.
• All 85 Pentagon videos, with a public explanation of what each one shows or doesn't.
• The complete steel record: what was saved, what was recycled, who decided, and why.
• The full collapse modeling data, so independent engineers can check it.
• The remaining sealed records, with a public reason for every redaction.

I don't know if this will settle the issues. I do know that putting the evidence on the table is the most useful thing we can do. Nobody can observe honestly what they're not allowed to see. Let the data come out, and let people see for themselves.

In all thy getting, get understanding.

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Sources

1. Flynn, K. & Dwyer, J. "Fire Department Tape Reveals No Awareness of Imminent Doom." New York Times, Nov 9, 2002. https://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/09/nyregion/fire-department-tape-reveals-no-awareness-of-imminent-doom.html 2. Orio Palmer Foundation. "Orio Palmer's 9/11 Story." https://www.oriopalmer.org/orio-palmers-9-11-story 3. NIST NCSTAR 1-5, Reconstruction of the Fires in the World Trade Center Towers. https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/NCSTAR/ncstar1-5.pdf 4. NIST. "FAQs – NIST WTC Towers Investigation." https://www.nist.gov/world-trade-center-investigation/study-faqs/wtc-towers-investigation 5. NIST. "Building and Fire Safety: Responding to the World Trade Center Disaster" (presentation on fuel and contents). https://www.nist.gov/system/files/documents/2017/05/09/Chicago_High-Rise_Committee_0909042.pdf 6. Reuters. "Wreckage found in Manhattan was from 9/11 plane: Boeing" (2013). https://www.reuters.com/article/world/us/wreckage-found-in-manhattan-was-from-911-plane-boeing-idUSBRE93S0QM/ 7. NBC New York. "Plane Part Near WTC Identified as Wing Flap Support" (2013). https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/911-plane-part-alley-wtc-ground-zero-mosque-nypd/2078944/ 8. 9-11 Research. "Aircraft Remains" (photo compilation of the Park Place, Church and Murray, and West and Rector debris). https://www.911research.wtc7.net/~nin11evi/911research/wtc/evidence/aircraft.html 9. The 9/11 Commission Report (2004). https://www.9-11commission.gov/report/ 10. National Park Service. "Response and Investigation," Flight 93 National Memorial. https://www.nps.gov/places/response-and-investigation.htm 11. Centre Daily Times. "Journey of Flight 93's extraction, investigation & reburial." https://www.centredaily.com/news/state/pennsylvania/article253460559.html 12. FBI. "Investigation of United Flight 93" (video). https://www.fbi.gov/video-repository/investigation-of-flight-93.mp4/view 13. U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Virginia. U.S. v. Moussaoui Trial Exhibits. https://www.vaed.uscourts.gov/101cr00455-trial-exhibits 14. Mlakar, P. et al. The Pentagon Building Performance Report. ASCE, 2003. https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=860488 15. NIST. "Description of Structural Damage Caused by the Terrorist Attack on the Pentagon." https://www.nist.gov/publications/description-structural-damage-caused-terrorist-attack-pentagon 16. Declaration of FBI Special Agent Jacqueline Maguire, Bingham v. DOJ (via Judicial Watch). https://www.judicialwatch.org/archive/2006/doubletreeaffadavit.pdf 17. Bingham v. U.S. Department of Justice, D.D.C., No. 05-cv-475. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-dcd-1_05-cv-00475/pdf/USCOURTS-dcd-1_05-cv-00475-0.pdf 18. Manning, B. "Selling Out the Investigation." Fire Engineering, Jan 2002. https://www.fireengineering.com/firefighting/selling-out-the-investigation 19. Glanz, J. & Lipton, E. "Experts Urging Broader Inquiry in Towers' Fall." New York Times, Dec 25, 2001 (excerpt). https://archive.wanttoknow.info/011225nytimes 20. National Security Archive. "Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba" (Operation Northwoods), Joint Chiefs of Staff memo, March 13, 1962. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/CMC-60/joint-chiefs-pretexts-to-invade-Cuba-1962 21. Northrop Grumman. "Global Hawk Unmanned Reconnaissance System Sets Aviation Record With Deployment To Australia" (April 23, 2001). https://investor.northropgrumman.com/news-releases/news-release-details/global-hawk-unmanned-reconnaissance-system-sets-aviation-record 22. BBC News. "Aviation first for robotic spy plane" (2001). http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1294014.stm

Listen to the audio version in the Rock U song list

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This article was written with AI assistance and reviewed by Ronnie Patterson. Figures come from the sources listed above.

By Ronnie Patterson. Narrated with AI assistance.