Humint Events Online: Engine Trajectory Follow-up

Friday, November 17, 2006

Engine Trajectory Follow-up


Picture from here-- interestingly, the guy who took the picture didn't SEE the plane, though he was there watching the whole time.

The most noteworthy aspect of this picture is that it shows the smoke trail clearly from the south tower eject, the putative engine of flight 175 that supposedly landed at Church and Murray.

The smoke trail is basically in line with what I projected earlier, though it seems to go a bit further than what I thought and comes closer to where the engine was found. But this may be accounted for by the fact that the smoke took a little bit to develop and has drifted a bit. In the video I looked at, there was nothing close to this smoke trail as the object first ejected from the fireball.

You can also faintly see another eject trail, this fainter one lines up quite well with what I projected.

I will say that IF this picture is legitimate, it is not inconceivable that the engine could have made it out to Church and Murray.

HOWEVER, the main reasons why the engine found at Church and Murray was most likely planted and not from a plane that hit the South tower are:

1) the engine piece was found under a canopy, with no hole in the roof showing how it got there and it seems unlikely someone would have rolled this large piece of flaming hot evidence there

2) the starboard engine of the plane that hit the South tower collided with a floor slab and it seems very likely this would have kept the engine from sailing out the other side of the tower

3) the engine would have had to weave between several tall buildings to get to Church and Murray

4) the distance travelled by the eject is not clearly the right trajectory to land at Church and Murray

5) between the videos and the plane-shaped hole, it is clear that no conventional plane hit the tower

FURTHER-- there are reasons to doubt this authenticity of this picture. If you look at this video or this video, there is no sign of such a strong smoke trail from the eject.

Additionally, the trail doesn't seem quite right-- it starts off on a normal arc, but then straightens out quite a lot between the two large buildings. This is more obvious on a magnification of the picture-- the first part of the trail looks okay, but the the second half as it nears the ground looks a bit fake (between WTC7 and the Woolworth building). It's not unlike someone decided the trail needed to go out further than it really did and artificially extended the trail:



Heck, it's not like this would the FIRST picture or video from 9/11 that was manipulated! (Sometimes it seems as if the majority of them are altered!)

Another odd thing about this picture is that there are no signs of helicopters about the WTC. Several videos showed a helicopter right to the east of the towers during the second hit, but there is no sign of a chopper here.

This is one project I would like to start on when I have time-- look at all the videos of the 2nd hit and try to find which helicopters and other weird things in the sky are consistent from video to video and then make a map of where everything was.

Also, remember this guy did not see the plane (though he says he talked to people who saw it), and there is only one video of the 2nd hit taken from the ground (this one).

So, the bottom line is that I am very suspicious of the too large smoke trail in this picture and I still think it is most likely the engine was planted.

7 Comments:

Blogger Ningen said...

Great find, Spooked. There are a lot of pictures and his story sounds realistic.

Shouldn't the trail be coming from behind the North Tower right about at the dark line on the North Tower just above the trail? Unless the plane went in downward. I thought this more the first time I looked at it, but still wonder.

Also, if that is the explosion coming out where the plane supposedly hit the South Tower, is it too early for the engine to have already reached the ground?

His later pictures show the trail dissipating, that seems right, I guess, depending on when they were taken.

He says: "Many people said a small plane hit the [first] tower." That's interesting, though I wonder if size can be judged at that distance. Would the plane have flown over that place?

This seems a little strange:

"After a while, I saw a huge fireball on the second tower -- being on the far side, I didn't see the plane and assumed a bomb or something had gone off. Other people behind me on land had a wider view and said they saw the second plane approach from far away, figuring it was a rescue plane of some kind."

He had plenty of perspective to see where the plane should have come in, and "people on land," presumably just at the other end of the pier, would not have a significantly wider perspective. So why was he not snapping pictures of the plane? The smoke could have obscured the approach from his angle, or he just wasn't paying attention. But how loud would a Boeing 767 flying 500 mph be from that distance? Is the sound or appearance of a 767 consistent with the people on land thinking they were seeing a rescue plane?

Thom talks about the NYPD helicopter officers having given up on rapelling to the roofs. Having just read Chapter 9/11 of the 9/11 Commission report, I am having real trouble understanding why rescue operations were not more successful. They talk about stairwells being completely blocked at the impact floors in the North Tower, and almost completely blocked in the South Tower. They say everyone died, except one person, on the floors above the impacts. It is really appalling that rescue plans were not in place to get rescuers in from the roof quickly -- they might have been able to clear a way down. That Chapter 9 raises all sorts of questions.

Have you seen these pictures?

http://placenamehere.com/2001-09-11/8.html

They seem to be from the same place or a little to the left facing Manhattan. I can't tell if the second tower has already been hit in his pictures. His pictures go the collapse of the south tower pretty early in the sequence.
Here's one with a helicopter:

http://placenamehere.com/2001-09-11/6.html

What did these people see and hear?

http://placenamehere.com/2001-09-11/28.html

http://placenamehere.com/2001-09-11/30.html

Thom appears to be a real person. There are lots of people named Dave Thom out there. These are all the Google links that appear to be him, either because of Princeton (his site has Princeton alumni e-mail address) or New York:

Former band president from Toronto:

http://www.princeton.edu/~puband/old/pregames/1995.html

Class of 1996:

http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/1998/02/12/news/5962.shtml

http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2004/04/05/opinion/10123.shtml

Mentioned here by fellow alum in engineering grad school:

http://www.che.utexas.edu/~kenneth/site.html

The tgeneva website seems to be a Fellow Princeton grad, class of 2000.

Comments on wine store here:

http://www.gothamist.com/archives/2005/08/01/new_world_of_wine_stores.php

Comments on a ski resort here:

http://www.goski.com/resorts/vernon/resort_welcome.html?cntry_or_state=states&rorc=new%20jersey&from=state&bc=RIR

8:47 PM  
Blogger Ningen said...

This is also a bit strange:

"After a while, I saw a huge fireball on the second tower -- being on the far side, I didn't see the plane and assumed a bomb or something had gone off."

He's taking the picture just as the fireball has reached its peak, which suggests he was able to get his camera up in time. Yet he says he saw the fireball but no plane. I suppose he could have had his camera pointed ready to shoot and got the shot off.

9:14 PM  
Blogger Ningen said...

Have you seen these videos?

http://www.libertynews.org.nyud.net:8090/wtc/

There is "Euronews" footage of the 2d plane with the debris.

The CNN Recap is also interesting. Listen to what the witness says beginning at 0:58. She heard the explosion then saw a plane go by.

They are Real Player files -- I had to install DivX Codecs.

9:26 PM  
Blogger Ningen said...

On this CNN Recap video, beginning at 2:25, it looks like steel beams are left standing for a few moments then dissolve into dust.

9:30 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Gravity? Who needs it!

1:32 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I'd love to see a database of every video still and image of that day, together with source information. Futhermore, I'd love to see each image tagged with a putative timecode, and significant points on each image tagged with three-dimensional co-ordinates, with error values, calculated by triangulation. It would be a geometric crossword puzzle in four dimensions.

Whether anyone competent has the time or funding to do this is another matter.

11:39 AM  
Anonymous www.asturias-3d.com said...

It can't succeed in fact, that's what I believe.

4:35 PM  

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