David Griscom's Latest Hypothesis

You can tell David L. Griscom's a serious scientist, because he's careful to call it a hypothesis and not a theory.

Is he a CIT-head?

I have previously prepared a PowerPoint (available on request) based on eyewitness reports and the officially released Pentagon-security-camera frames that supports a hypothesis proposed by others that the Pentagon was struck on 9/11 by a smallish twin engine aircraft superficially resembling the a Boeing 737, 757, or 767. Most probably the specific aircraft type was Cold-War-era Navy A-3 converted to an unmanned air vehicle (UAV). UAVs are commonly referred to as “drones.” According to eyewitness reports, this second aircraft arrived at the Pentagon simultaneously with American Airlines Flight 77 (AA-77) but from a different quarter, at higher speed, and at lower altitude. Thus, most witnesses caught a glimpse of one or the other of the two planes, but not both. The expanding fireball of the A-3 impact then distracted everyone from noting (or correctly interpreting) the escape of the Boeing 757. In this analysis of the Pentagon attack, the passengers and crew of American Airlines Flight 77 (AA-77) would have escaped unscathed.

Is he a pod person?

So I reasoned that that both UA-175 (#N612UA) and AA-11 (#N334AA) took off on the morning of 11 September 2001 as unmodified Boeing 767s that had been continuously in the possession of their original owners. However, the plane that actually struck WTC2 was captured on film and digital video cameras by many dozens of individuals – and widely-published frames from these films (some even appearing on magazine covers) show the impacting aircraft to have unmistakable external modifications.

Or is he a bumbler?

Returning to the proposed ruse, I asked myself: Would it have been possible to fool the radars into missing two aircraft swapping places? Actually, the answer might have been “No” ...were it not for one thing: AA-11 turned off its transponder at a convenient time to cover up its possible substitution for a drone not possessing a transponder. This switchoff was done at point and time D on Slides 2 and 3, respectively – i.e., just before the two aircraft would have met near point E in my scenario. An aircraft’s transponder sends high-strength signals (so-called “mode C returns”) back the radar installations with encoded data specifically identifying the aircraft in terms of a four-digit number assigned by the air traffic controllers and giving its precise altitude based on an on-board airpressure altimeter. The “primary returns” (small triangles in Slide 3) represent reflections of the radar pulses off the skin of the aircraft, which bounce back to the radar receiver as signals very much weaker than those from the aircraft’s transponder ...and carrying no information about the aircraft’s identity. These weak primary returns are susceptible to large statistical errors when an attempt is made to extract altitude data from them (note scatter in triangles in Slide 3).

Nevertheless, as suggested by the bold arrows that I have added in Slide 3, the NTSB primary-return data appear consistent with actual detection of an unknown aircraft climbing to 30,400 ft and there meeting AA-11, which in turn promptly begins to descend.

Well, actually he's all of the above, and more. Believe it or not, Steven Jones' favorite peer reviewer believes in a CIT-like hypothesis for Flight 175:

Specifically, what I see in this film is a super-fast aircraft much nearer the camera than to the WTC, which pulls out of a steep dive practically simultaneously with the 767 attacker seen striking WTC2, banks sharply to its right, and disappears going away from the camera (in the general direction of the WTC). The object I am describing here has been widely noted but is generally spoken of as being a bird. However, no bird known to man is capable of flying laterally into our field of view and then turning away and disappearing in the distance in a total elapsed time of less than a second! Yet this is exactly what we see in Slide 6! It seems quite possible that this may be the very same “bird” as the one captured flying west to east just north of the World Trade Center just 14 seconds later (see the following video and Slide 7):

Good news for the family members: Griscom no longer believes that all the passengers survived.

In earlier versions of this hypothesis, I supposed that all passengers were co-conspirators, who would have been sent on their separate ways to tropical islands or mountaintop retreats of their choices. Subsequently, it was suggested to me that the head conspirators might not have had complete trust in everyone privy to the conspiracy. Thus, while promising a cushy “witness protection program” to every co-conspirator ordered to board one of these flights on the morning of 9/11/01, it seems very possible that the leaders shunted aside and murdered those they considered less trustworthy. Moreover, on study of the occupations and travel priorities of some of the people on the passenger and cabincrew lists of the 9/11 “hijacked” jetliners, I now believe that a number of innocent people were allowed to board these flights as well ...and that all of these innocents were murdered.

(Italics in original)

Well, as you can see, David Griscom is a very serious and diligent researcher. I can readily believe that his 12 pages of comments and suggestions on the nanothermite paper improved it immeasurably. Note to commenters: Don't talk about the microspheres! I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it.