Morgan Reynolds, Another "Scholar" for Truth

Here's his web page on 9-11, which is a treasure trove of 9-11 nuttery. Reynolds is off the deep end in conspiracy theory never never land; he buys into the possibility of no planes at all:

Some readers might object that critical examination of the official airplane stories is silly because everybody saw a plane hit the WTC south tower that morning. But that was only one of four events and seeing is not believing in a world of special effects. Something fantastic shown on TV is not the end of a criminal investigation but the beginning. Any important proposition delivered by the media must be established by evidence independent of their sleight-of-hand. They have been repeatedly exposed as liars, usually on behalf of the social apparatus of compulsion they must appease daily to continue their high-revenue businesses over the public airwaves. The media are not so much “embedded” with the U.S. government and military as “in bed” with them. Even if you reject this “echo chamber” view, there is no doubt that the technology exists to insert prepared images into pixels in real time and make the images prepared in advance look (mostly) real. The first-down stripe inserted in NFL telecasts is an example. Some analysts argue that the WTC crashes were little more than Tuesday-morning cartoons. Whether or not such a conclusion is warranted, any proposed theory of what happened must be consistent with physical evidence and conform to the principles of physics, the official conspiracy theory included. We should put aside preconceptions based on pixels and evaluate the physical evidence anew.

This is the sort of stuff that even Dylan Avery considers nutty.

I noticed one other thing I'll hit on now. Reynolds notes:

In a violent encounter between an aluminum plane weighing nearly 140 tons and a steel tower weighing 500,000 tons, the plane, of course, would be crushed. Aluminum has lower yield and failure strengths than steel and a Boeing 767 mass was a minuscule—to use Hoffman’s term—three hundredths of one percent of each tower’s mass. "The impact did nothing," as UC Berkeley structural engineer A. Astaneh-Asl said, "the airplane did not do much damage."

First of all, it should be obvious that the relative weights of the buildings and the planes have very little to do with what happened. The planes did not collide with the entire buildings, they collided with 3-4 stories of those buildings.

But second, here's a Scholar for 9-11 Truth citing a structural engineer! Could it be that we've finally found the Truther with the background to comment with authority that the buildings could not have come down the way the official story tells us?

Uh, no. If you go to the article that Reynolds links, it's pretty obvious that UC Berkeley structural engineer A. Astaneh-Asl believes in the official story:

A structural engineer examining the twisted bones of the World Trade Center said Friday he has tentatively concluded the towers collapsed because of intense fires fanned by jet fuel.

The interior steel remained supportive after the crash, only buckling when the fire exceeded 1,000 degrees, Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl said.

“The impact did nothing,” Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl said, pointing to a massive interior column from the south tower that he believes remained standing even after three-quarters of it was sliced away by a jet part.

He expects that research will examine whether a tougher skin for future skyscrapers might be useful in deterring similar assaults. A steel-concrete composite exterior, for example, might crumple a plane and keep more fuel outside, he suggested.

“This building could not fight. It was just innocently standing there and somebody shot it,” said Astaneh-Asl, a professor of structural engineering at University of California-Berkeley.

Pieces of one of the planes — the largest the size of a business envelope — were found imbedded in steel facade columns of one tower on the opposite side from where they entered, Astaneh-Asl said.

Reading the article, it's pretty clear that this was written in the first few weeks after the attacks. I don't know if Astaneh-Asl has changed his mind about the damage done by the planes themselves. But it's quite clear that he's not in the camp of the controlled demolitionists, let alone the nutty no-planers like Morgan Reynolds.