Fahrenheit 2,777

 11/XNUMX created the mother-of-all-conspiracy-theories * If steel doesn't break, towers don't collapse

The well-known French left-wing activist Thierry Meissen's book, L'Effroyable Imposture, which presents a conspiracy theory about September 11, became a bestseller in 2002. But I never imagined that this horrifying fraud would find a listening ear in America. In a public lecture I attended not long ago, I had to listen to Michael Moore - a filmmaker in his own right - who, without batting an eyelid, explained that the events of September 11 were orchestrated by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA, as part of their plan for global takeover and a new world order . The achievement of this goal was supposed to be financed with the help of GOD (English acronym for gold, oil and drugs), and the race to achieve it was supposed to begin with a Pearl Harbor-style attack on the World Trade Center (the Twin Towers) and the Pentagon, an attack that would justify war. The evidence is in the details, he explained, and handed me a fake dollar bill (with the numbers "9-11" printed instead of the number "1", and Bush's picture taking the place reserved for Washington) loaded with Internet addresses.
In fact, if you type the words "World Trade Center" and "conspiracy" into Google, you will get more than 250,000 results. On these sites you will find that there are people who believe that the Pentagon was hit by a missile, that the US Air Force jets were ordered to stay on the ground and not intercept flights 11 and 175, that their planes collided with the Twin Towers, that the towers themselves collapsed as a result of explosives that were intended to detonate shortly after the planes hit, that a mysterious white jet shot down Flight 93 over Pennsylvania and that the Jews of New York were ordered to stay in their homes that day (Zionist and pro-Israeli elements were involved, of course). Books were also written such as, for example, "Inside Work" by Jim Mars, "The New Pearl Harbor" by David Ray Griffin and "11/2005: The Great Illusion" by George Humphrey. The best rebuttal of all this conspiracy nonsense is contained in the March XNUMX issue of Popular Mechanics magazine which presents a careful analysis of most of the common claims.
The mistaken opinion that a handful of unexplained anomalies can undermine an established theory is at the heart of all conspiracy ideas (as well as at the heart of creationism, Holocaust denial and all kinds of strange theories in physics). All the "evidence" regarding a conspiracy on September 11 is included in this framework. It is easy to refute such ideas simply by pointing out the fact that scientific theories are not built only on the basis of single facts but on the basis of evidence that converges on a single theory and is collected by many different research methods.
For example, the website www.911research.wtc7.net claims that steel melts at 2,777 degrees Fahrenheit (1,525°C) but jet fuel only burns at 1,517 degrees Fahrenheit (825°C). And if the steel hadn't been melted, the towers wouldn't have collapsed. "The planes did not bring down the towers, they were bombs," claims the website www.abovetopsecret.com. Mistake. Thomas Iger, professor of engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) explained why this is not the case in an article in the "Journal of the Society for Minerals, Metals and Materials", and in subsequent interviews: Steel loses 50% strengthened at a temperature of 1,200°F (650° C). 90,000 liters of jet fuel were burned in the towers, igniting other flammable materials such as carpets, curtains, furniture and paper. These materials continued to burn even after all the fuel was burned, raising the temperature to over 1,400°F (760°C) and spreading the burning inferno throughout the buildings. A temperature difference of hundreds of degrees along the horizontal support beams caused them to sag, a sag that deformed and then broke the angle joints that attached them to the vertical columns. As soon as one case fell, others fell in its wake. When one floor collapsed on top of the floor below, it too eventually buckled under the load. The resulting domino effect caused the entire structure, which weighs 500,000 tons, to collapse. Conspiracists claim that the towers were supposed to fall on their sides, but since 95 percent of their volume contained air, the only way they could have collapsed was straight down.
All conspiracy claims about 11/77 can be disproved just as easily. For example, I questioned the claimant to the title of filmmaker about the "missile that hit the Pentagon" theory and asked him what happened to Flight XNUMX that disappeared at the time. "The plane was destroyed and the passengers were murdered by Bush's emissaries," he revealed to me gravely. "You mean to say that no one among all the conspirators, did not whistle or go on television or reveal everything in a book?" I said My response was met with the same grumpy response I get from UFO experts when I ask them for hard evidence: Men in black silence eyewitnesses, and dead people tell no tales.

Credit:
Brad Haynes

Michael Shermer is the publisher of Skeptic magazine (http://www.skeptic.com>skeptic.com). The last book he published is "Science Friction".