Another 9/11 'conspiracy'...

[Intio]

I hope this is the right forum for a post on this topic. I find that much of the mental processes involved with believing conspiracy theories mirrors those that lead to religion, pseudoscience, superstitions etc. In any case, the only other recent post on 9/11 conspiracies was in the New and Politics thread due to it being a recently released 'scientific report'.

I have so far found it easy to dismiss much of the 9/11 and WTC 7 stuff that gets regurgitated by the 'truthseekers' with basic rationallity. There is however this site which has a series of stills and animated pics showing an anomalous travelling flash near the Woolworth Building. Of course, this is not what the author of the site claims the flash is... *leans towards reader*

... it's actually a cloak-equipped stealth fighter! For those who are not familiar with techno-conspiracy theories, it has long been rumoured that current military hardware comes in secret tranches and iterations that are not made available to the public. These secret variations are supposed to have all kinds of exotic technologies on board which are considered sci-fi by modern day standards.

Indeed, the above-mentioned site contains other sections where the author claims to have caputred pictures of a cloaking stealth fighter and other examples of hidden tech.

What I'm basically asking is for anyone with expertise in physics or optical technology to explain the travelling flashes shown on the Woolworth Building section of his website. I haven't so far been able to account for them. The best I can come up with is that these are not a single object floating through the air but several pieces of debris which coincide with the fire which breaks out at the Woolworth Building. Having said that, the page contains a picture claiming to show the trajectory of this flash.

Anyone want to nip this in the bud?

Thanks.

[Darth Wong]

What is there to explain? It's a shitty low-quality video of what looks like a glitch. If it is a "traveling flash", then why can't we see a continuous video of it, instead of a couple of frames where it winks in and out?

[General Zod]

An aircraft? Is this site fucking serious? That looks more like it was taken from a poor quality web cam that had serious focus problems than any kind of aircraft.

[Duckie]

I like how the idea that auto-contrast and auto-leveling an image actually makes the quality clearer, when it's quite clear from the pictures that it just makes them grainy and distorted. It's no wonder black marks appear that look like stealth fighters when you image-edit it enough through filters to make the sky look like an oil slick made of rainbows and sharpen it a million times.

[Nephtys]

This theory is only slightly better than two other variants I heard.

Scenario 1. The Hijackers land both aircraft at a USAF Base, have soldiers execute every passenger, refit the plane with remote control and explosives, then pilot them by radio into the towers.

Scenario 2. There was no airliner. It was a holographic projection fitted to modified cruise missiles launched from a submarine off Long Island. The radar track of the aircraft was faked by computer... magic.

[Ilya Muromets]

Cloaked fighters? Holographic disguise for cruise missiles?

Where'd these guys learn science? Star Trek?

[General Zod]

Where'd these guys learn science? Star Trek?

Considering what passes for science in Star Trek this is entirely feasible.

[Darth Wong]

A long time ago, I stopped keeping track of the people who would E-mail my Star Wars site address to say something along the lines of "Star Trek is based on real science" (I actually adopted a policy of deleting most such E-mails on sight, since they're all the same anyway, and such people are too stupid to bother responding to).

It's sad how many people think "Star Trek is based on real science." Seriously, it's really depressing. So it's not at all surprising to me that somebody might think this "cloaking field" bullshit is plausible.

[Intio]

The replies here confirm my secondary suspiscion that to respond to the stuff on this site might be to frame it in a dignity it doesn't deserve.

I tend to want to debunk something by instinct, and sometimes don't discern whether or not the very act of doing so might be conter-productive.

Reminds me of corn strarch syrup - the harder you go for it, the more solid it becomes.

[Darth Wong]

Let's put it this way: even if we took that horrible artifact-ridden low-quality video at face value for some reason, there is still no reason to accept this absurd hypothesis of cloaked aircraft. The most logical explanation for a heretofore unexplained flash would be a flares: something we know to exist and which would produce a bright flash of light while floating through the air. That's how reasonable people operate: when looking for explanations, they look for things which are known to exist first, rather than leaping straight to imaginary culprits.

[Lord Revan]

ofc the main "problem" with stuff like flares or other known objects is that there's known properties for them, thus a made up culprits are "better" to justify what ever conspiracy you can imagine as they (by defination) have no known proterties to them, you can say they do just what you want them to do.

[Stuart]

I have so far found it easy to dismiss much of the 9/11 and WTC 7 stuff that gets regurgitated by the 'truthseekers' with basic rationallity. There is however this site which has a series of stills and animated pics showing an anomalous travelling flash near the Woolworth Building. Of course, this is not what the author of the site claims the flash is... *leans towards reader*

That website is pathetic. I checked out most of the links and none of them are what they purport to be. They are either dead, obsolescent or grossly misquoted. For example the testimony of Alan Reiss actually says.

"I responded immediately to the World Trade Center Police Desk, which was in the immediate vicinity on the plaza level and was told that the police had a report that a missile had been fired at the World Trade Center from the Woolworth building. A PA detective and I immediately left the police desk and headed out to the plaza through Five WTC to see what had really happened. We observed the north face of the north tower with a large gash across it and multiple floors fully engulfed in flames. We realized that this was not a missile, based on what our minds could conceive of the damage, and then we noticed part of a large plane’s wheel assembly on the plaza."

The red section is what the site quotes, the blue section that destroys the whole case made by the website is omitted. Straightforward dishonesty that destroys the credibility of the site. In fact, only three of the links leads to something relevent, one of those leads to a forum (Indymedia no less, that detsroys its credibility right there) and one to a Marine Corps account. There, the speaker is obviously using a missile launch as a comparison not as evidence.

... it's actually a cloak-equipped stealth fighter! For those who are not familiar with techno-conspiracy theories, it has long been rumoured that current military hardware comes in secret tranches and iterations that are not made available to the public. These secret variations are supposed to have all kinds of exotic technologies on board which are considered sci-fi by modern day standards.

Sure, if you know about something, its obsolete. BUT that doesn't mean that anything goes. The U.S. won the cold war by convincing our opponent we could defy the laws of physics, that doesn't mean we can do it. Certain effects are achieved by specific means; if one thinks logically about the physics required to achieve that result, how it can be done becomes (if not obvious) at least understandable. "Stealth fighters" (including the birds you don't know about ) don't "cloak" and "uncloak".

Indeed, the above-mentioned site contains other sections where the author claims to have caputred pictures of a cloaking stealth fighter and other examples of hidden tech.

Not one of which is remotely credible.

What I'm basically asking is for anyone with expertise in physics or optical technology to explain the travelling flashes shown on the Woolworth Building section of his website. I haven't so far been able to account for them. The best I can come up with is that these are not a single object floating through the air but several pieces of debris which coincide with the fire which breaks out at the Woolworth Building. Having said that, the page contains a picture claiming to show the trajectory of this flash.

There's nothing to explain. We have single flashes that could be anything (the use of a loop makes them seem far more significant than they are). My personal guess would be reflections from the cockpits of news camera helicopters or police helicopters or virtually any other helicopter. Or reflections from falling glass debris. Or a passing airliner. Or a light aircraft. There were two F-15s around somewhere, both flying on fumes (they only just made it to a safe landing). Then we run into things like camera and film problems with lens flare etc. The problem is that films give very little idea of depth perception. A flash of any kind can be seen a long way away so any of those "flashes" could be as close as a few yards or many miles away. Give you an example of that. Back when the Boeing 747 was being introduced, here was a massive surge of complaints about civilian aircraft flying at low altitude and being excessively noisy. Now this was really weird because ATC had no record of unusually low flights. Cutting a long story short, we eventually discovered that the reason was perceptive. A Boeing 747 looks just like a Boeing 707 except its much, much larger. So people saw one flying overhead and didn't see a much bigger aircraft flying at the same altitude, they thought they saw a familiar aircraft flying at much lower altitude and, of course, aircraft flying low make more noise don't they? We had an odd variant of that with the C-17 which is a very big, very quiet aircraft. People assumed because it was big, it was much closer than it was; but they couldn't hear it so they assumed it was a silent aircraft close up not a very quiet aircraft a fair distance away. And now you know how the "silent formations of lights" sightings came to be. We won't go into the Concorde noise problem......

There is simply insufficient information available from the film to make a conclusion. However, there are so many normal, natural sources of flases on film/video/pictures that attributing anything out of the ordinary to them is an extraordinary hypothesis that demands extraordinary proof. We are provided with nothing. It is down to the site author to present proof and here he fails completely. Having gone through the whole of that website its a mass of the same. Wild conspiracy theories (chemtrails? come on) without a shred of real evidence to back them up. Just pictures so heavily doctored that they can be used to prove anything.

Anyone want to nip this in the bud?

Nip what? There's nothing to nip? Just opinion, hypothesis and assertions without any proof.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

I will mention the other possibility which is also highly likely, that the author of the website edited the flashes in because he already KNEW THE TRUTH, but he concluded he needed to show "more dramatic evidence" to convince the average "sheeple", and because of the righteousness of his cause it was therefore ethical to doctor evidence if it would help people accept the "truth".

[Stuart]

I will mention the other possibility which is also highly likely, that the author of the website edited the flashes in because he already KNEW THE TRUTH, but he concluded he needed to show "more dramatic evidence" to convince the average "sheeple", and because of the righteousness of his cause it was therefore ethical to doctor evidence if it would help people accept the "truth".

Given the contents of his website your Grace, that is an entirely probable hypothesis. Indeed, I'd say its the most likely explanation.

[PeZook]

It wouldn't surprise me. Conspiracy theorists have been using camera artifacts, distortions and lens flares as proof of photographs being doctored, fake or showing aliens for a long time now.

You can see it especially easily with Moon hoaxers, since 99% of their arguments are about photographs. Of course, 99% of moon hoaxers also happen to have no idea how to interpret photographs, and what should and shouldn't be on one.

[Darth Onasi]

I love it when they latch onto quotes about missiles or military aircraft from witnesses immediately after the event.
Because it's so fucking hard to imagine they just might, you know, be in shock, panic and might not have gotten a good look at the aircraft right?

And a cloaked stealth fighter? Why not a UFO firing a death ray? Or hell just Satan himself coming to wreak havoc on the edifices of man. It'd make about as much sense.

[Duckie]

Fun fact- the man who invented the "There were no planes, they were holograms disguising missiles" claim is David Shayler, a former MI5 agent.

He also claims he is the Messiah.

Seriously.

The 9/11 Truth Movement has disavowed him as an 'agent of government misinformation'. Which tells you how Special Crazy he is.

[Intio]

they were holograms disguising missiles.

I've even seen one of the many videos on youtube about this kind of hologrtaphic stuff, where a camcorder on the ground filming other people at ground level shows classic digital pixel distortion.

This, naturally, is extrapolated as evidence that a holographic virtual reality program is running in the area; because the latency of the camcorder maps a few pixels over something in the foreground.

[Tolya]

You can see it especially easily with Moon hoaxers, since 99% of their arguments are about photographs. Of course, 99% of moon hoaxers also happen to have no idea how to interpret photographs, and what should and shouldn't be on one.

Oh, but you are forgetting about how competent are conspiracy theorists on finding hundreds of "experts" who will back their claims. Preferably with as many "PhD's" before their name as possible. So what if a biology doctorate passes judgments on photography, who cares. Scientific title is a scientific title, right?

[Chris OFarrell]

You know, is there a breakdown anywhere of 9-11 'conspiracy' believers by country?

I very much doubt that there is, the hardcore ones probably think if they answered any survey that the Government would find out and send them off the some FEMA re-education camp or something, but I'd be interested to see if this is just an ultra paranoid US Citizens group, or if there is significant international belief in this. I found one guy in Sydney, the guy was CONVINCED it was all a bit lie, I tried to debate it a bit with him, but gave up as I recognized the 'fundie-logic' mode, where he would just keep repeating arguments he had clearly had programmed into his brain to ANYTHING I said...

[Intio]

Preferably with as many "PhD's" before their name as possible

If they didn't plaster your vision with degrees, then you might start looking behind them for evidence of peer review.

[Tolya]

If they didn't plaster your vision with degrees, then you might start looking behind them for evidence of peer review.

Are you suggesting that your average chump knows how the scientific community actually works? Oh you joker...

[Adrian Laguna]

I'd be interested to see if this is just an ultra paranoid US Citizens group, or if there is significant international belief in this.

The Muslim world is rather prone to believing all sorts of wild conspiracy theories, especially if they involve Jews. The belief that 9/11 was an inside job has been catching on in the Middle East, much to Al-Qaeda's dismay, since it robs them of their greatest victory against the Great Satan. They've been claiming it's Shiite misinformation spread to discredit Sunni successes. Likely it's just that it fits very well with the general beliefs framework of Middle Eastern Muslims.

[Sea Skimmer]

"Stealth fighters" (including the birds you don't know about ) don't "cloak" and "uncloak".

Sure they do. Maybe not in an optical sense, but at least the F-117 had switches to retract the radio antennas for a lower RCS. In interviews pilots even refer to it as getting ‘stealthed up’, usually right after they hit the last tanker. Its easy to see how stuff like that just feeds into the spiral of bullshit that are conspiracy theories.

[
The Muslim world is rather prone to believing all sorts of wild conspiracy theories, especially if they involve Jews. The belief that 9/11 was an inside job has been catching on in the Middle East, much to Al-Qaeda's dismay, since it robs them of their greatest victory against the Great Satan. They've been claiming it's Shiite misinformation spread to discredit Sunni successes. Likely it's just that it fits very well with the general beliefs framework of Middle Eastern Muslims.

I wasn’t aware that was still a growing belief, but you know it makes some slight sense given that Al-Qaeda had spectacularly failed to mount anything like a comparable follow up attack. The Jewish war machine meanwhile at least has an established history of striking over long distances in unexpected places.