I have a structural engineer friend who is also a big gamer online. During a chat some time ago he hammed up the CGI graphics on a blasted game he'd just acquired and bored the tits off me for a while on just how realistic gaming has become. I began playing "Tetris" in 1989 and never graduated much from that but what this guy was talking about was virtual reality. "It's almost like you're really there," he enthused. "It's just so believable." 

Fast forward to a few weeks back and another chat with the same guy, this time about 9/11. I ventured the new theory doing the rounds that NO airplanes were involved and that instead, the main networks were all playing footage from some video source outside their stations and the theory goes that these were all computer generated graphics superimposed on footage of actual explosions in the buildings that did really take place. Like me though, he was a bit doubtful because to synchronize such a fraud, a whole lot of people would have to be in on it and nobody has blown the whistle in fifteen years since. Mind you, if anyone did it would upset some very rich powerful people and revenge could be eternal for the whistleblower and family, but I digress. 

He introduced another interesting angle however. How did the hollow aluminum tube of an aircraft fuselage and hollow wings actually penetrate the outer maze of steel surrounding each building? So he went off to do the calculations. He discovered from the Boeing site what a fully loaded and fueled 757 would weigh. The second jet to hit was doing 600MPH at point of impact, according to the 9/11 Commission Report. So he had weight by velocity and then he set about the original plans for the towers to find out what resistance these outer shell meshed walls would offer the aforementioned combination, given their metal thickness, intricate interwoven design and tensile strength. 

I won't bore you here with the scribbled page of calculations but basically, only the two six-ton engines from either aircraft had a hope in hell of actually penetrating the outer steel fencing they hit that morning. The wings, fuselage, people and baggage, would splat against it on impact and immediately disintegrate and begin a free fall far down to the ground in millions of pieces of various sizes. The kerosene fuel would explode in a fire ball outside of course but quickly burn out. The six ton engines though are tightly packed with many heavy metals and carbon fibre and these would probably penetrate and burst onto the floor they hit.

But the design of the twin towers was way ahead of its time and quite revolutionary in construction terms in 1970. The central core from seven floors below ground right up to the 110th floor was the most powerful and strongest part of the building It shared the load bearing with the outer mesh and on every floor there were complex cross-membered trusses connecting both together and holding up each one acre floor. Between them, they bore the weight of two hundred thousand tons of concrete in both buildings in duplicate. They were built to survive multiple hits from the biggest aircraft of their time, the Boeing 707. That's multiple hits from a fully loaded jet liners and still not collapse. Fires alone have never before brought down a steel skyscraper incidentally.

So neither aircraft should have been able to make an airplane-sized hole in either building. Two neat engine-shaped holes yes, but the Manhattan footpaths should have been strewn with debris and body parts and that did not happen. Then there is the four  engines. What should have happened to them. Well, according to the structural engineer, they would have lost some of their momentum on impart with the outer mesh before breaking through, but he reckons that would have skated across the floor at high speed before coming to an abrupt halt at the much stronger inner core because even the engines would never have broken through that. It was thicker and stronger than even the outer mesh.

I was intrigued but it occurred to me to ask him, why when he could calculate that so easily, hadn't thousands of structural engineers around the States done exactly the same thing? If it was so obvious to him when he had the numbers, what was the problem? What we were told we saw could not physically have happened that way so why hadn't it been flagged up by structural experts?. His answer was nothing to do with engineering and everything to do with psychology. He pointed out that he was an interested third party without skin in the game, as it were. Like the rest of the world, he was shocked by the scale of things that day but his view was that Americans were not only shocked but stunned as well. In that stunned bewilderment they would have been amenable to someone trying to make sense of it FOR THEM. Whatever theory matched what they saw would have good enough for Americans that morning and to hell with the details.

For my own part, after much research and hours poring over video footage and reading transcripts, I have arrived at my own conclusions. The twin towers were brought down in a series of controlled explosions, and that I no longer doubt for an instant. That alone has incredible implications. I also now believe there was prior knowledge of what would unfold in the days and weeks prior to 9/11. Perhaps the many people who did know did not have the full picture, but they knew something big was going to happen and several of them made millions of dollars out of it on the stock market in 'put options'. Building Seven, the 49 floor skyscraper that came down later that evening in the same complex was also intentionally imploded. It didn't even warrant a mention in the official version because nobody was killed in that one. I am also convinced that the Pentagon was hit by a missile and not an aircraft and the hole in the ground in Hicksville, Pennsylvania, was another explosion and not an aircraft either. 

Who did it and why is open to speculation but until someone comes clean, (and that's highly unlikely), we may never know. But it was brilliantly staged, a massive operation that killed several birds with one stone and stunned a huge Nation into silence and grief before anger hit. The dead and injured that morning were "collateral damage" as the saying goes but I believe they were victims of "friendly fire." I do not have all of the pieces and probably never will have but enough of the holes in the official version have made me arrive at the above conclusions. The great American people are innocent victims themselves and much has been done in their name since by the powerful elements in the upper echelons of their society as a result of the events on 9/11.

Like I said many times before, it is deeply upsetting.

By the way, as an added footnote, have a look at this.