Loose Change #1--The Missing Missiles

Looking for revisions between the two versions of Loose Change can be very revealing. Perhaps the most obvious revision between V1 and V2 might be called the Mystery of the Missing Missiles, because it leads off the former and is completely gone from the latter.

In V1, the missile section starts at about 0:49. Avery shows the familiar clip of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center.

Here's Avery's presentation:

8:46 AM, New York City, New York. American Airlines Flight 11 is allegedly flown into the North Tower by Mohammed Atta. This is the widely-known video of the attack, shot by Jules Naudet (sp?). At face value it may not look like much. However, upon closer inspection (rewinds film)... in case you missed it (rewinds film)... one more time. If you look closely, you'll notice that the shadow of the plane meets the building after the flash occurs. This means that the flash is not the fuselage colliding with the building, but rather, a separate event. Not to mention that the flash is twice as wide as the fuselage itself.

Within minutes of the attack, news teams from all over the city had their cameras trained on the World Trade Center, therefore the second impact was covered by almost every conceivable angle. This footage was shot by CNN. On the underside of the fuselage, an extra piece of equipment is visible. When questioned about this, Boeing representatives refused to discuss it due to national security.

This is what the underside of a Boeing 757 should look like.

(Note: The left one is the "normal" one. If you can see a significant difference between the two other than that one's color and the other's black and white, and that the right one is photographed traveling at about 550 miles per hour, let me know. Also, check out the bit about it couldn't be the fuselage because it's twice as big as the fuselage. But it could be a missile? Is the missile twice as big as the fuselage?)

The following footage is taken from the documentary Why The Towers Fell.

[Shows footage of second plane hitting the south tower]

Whoa, whoa, whoa! Bring it back. [Rewinds film, then shows frame by frame progression.] Did you catch that? A missile is fired seconds before impact. Skeptics claim that the flash is the fuselage colliding with the building. If that were the case, it would look like this. Also, notice that the flash is reflected in the fuselage of the plane. The flash is also present in photos taken by Catherine Fairbanks, Jennifer Spell, CNN.

Al Qaeda certainly couldn't have added this equipment at Logan International Aiport, and even if they did, the flight crew would have noticed it. So where did this plane come from?

Ends at 3:38.

Now obviously the missile theory is pretty idiotic even by the low standards of Loose Change. For starters, why load a missile onto these planes? The jets themselves were obviously large enough to do substantial damage to the World Trade Center. Remember, according to Avery, it wasn't the planes that brought down the WTC anyway; it was the explosives concealed in the building by a demolition team.

And even dumber, why fire the missiles just prior to impact? The plane crashing would be enough to set them off. The "extra piece of equipment" is discussed in the Popular Mechanics article:

FACT: One of the clearest, most widely seen pictures of the doomed jet's undercarriage was taken by photographer Rob Howard and published in New York magazine and elsewhere (opening page). PM sent a digital scan of the original photo to Ronald Greeley, director of the Space Photography Laboratory at Arizona State University. Greeley is an expert at analyzing images to determine the shape and features of geological formations based on shadow and light effects. After studying the high-resolution image and comparing it to photos of a Boeing 767-200ER's undercarriage, Greeley dismissed the notion that the Howard photo reveals a "pod." In fact, the photo reveals only the Boeing's right fairing, a pronounced bulge that contains the landing gear. He concludes that sunlight glinting off the fairing gave it an exaggerated look. "Such a glint causes a blossoming (enlargement) on film," he writes in an e-mail to PM, "which tends to be amplified in digital versions of images--the pixels are saturated and tend to 'spill over' to adjacent pixels." When asked about pods attached to civilian aircraft, Fred E. Culick, professor of aeronautics at the California Institute of Technology, gave a blunter response: "That's bull. They're really stretching."

Obviously Dylan Avery agrees, since the whole discussion of the pod and the missiles is missing from Version 2. So the very first piece of evidence cited in a Loose Change movie is now disavowed even by the creators.