They weren’t claiming that the hijackers mounted a missile. They were suggesting that the U.S. Government was responsible for the attack, perhaps using their own military aircraft to do it.
I know it’s a little blob of orange pixels on the computer screen, but the flash is actually around the same diameter as the fuselage of the plane, if you compare the two. That seems pretty sizable to me. I also don’t think it’s one of the lights on the plane, because why would the light suddenly turn on at that moment? Even from the stills, you can see that there clearly is no flash in the first picture. It may not be clear from the stills, but in the program I saw, it’s a sizable flash that seems to happen pretty near the moment that the nose of the plane hits the building. It definitely doesn’t look like a light that has been on the entire time.
I understand, but it still doesn’t disprove the theory. You have to admit that if one were trying to engineer the most horrific disaster they could, they would want to go for a scenario in which the entire building was destroyed, rather than just putting a little hole in it.
I’d still like to hear a really good explanation of what would cause the flashes, if anyone knows the answer.
Sure you don’t really believe this, as you said?
You have to admit…when someone says “You have to admit it sure sounds/looks/is pretty convincing…” that it’s going a bit past playing devil’s advocate, eh?
Anyhow, you want a really good explanation? Just an explanation won’t cut it? What about a good explanation? No, huh…has to be really good. I see.
Basically, if you believe that a missile ignited the jet fuel or whatever, you’re never going to find someone who can disprove it. Can’t prove a negative, and all that jazz. What intelligent folks generally do is look at the objective evidence and use past events and common sense to determine what should have happened.
Hey, maybe the flash can be explained by an employee bringing a 55-gallon drum of gasoline to work that morning and setting it right by that particular wall. I mean, you can’t disprove my theory…so it MUST be right!
There’s really no reason for you to be a jerk here. Apparently you think I actually do believe the conspiracy theory, and are accusing me of lying about it. I don’t know exactly what your problem is, but if you don’t have the answer to my question, I’d prefer if you’d just go away, rather than posting solely for the purpose of being obnoxious.
I’m merely saying that there have been myriad explanations already given in this thread. Apparently none of them are really good explanations though. As I’ve pointed out, no one can definitively state “There WAS NO MISSILE,” due to the nature of logic, and yet that seems to be what you’re looking for.
The most we can do, from a position of logic, is say that virtually every shred of reliable evidence combined with realistic expectations based on knowledge of the factors involved and observation of past events suggests that what happened is that a commercial passenger airliner loaded with enough fuel for a cross-country trip was deliberately flown into a building and exploded on impact. No missiles, no fighter jets, no rigged explosives. I can’t prove there weren’t any. So far, however, no one, as far as I’m aware, has proven that there were.
OK, here’s an attempt at a debunking. Assuming the missile has an acceleration of 10G, it takes just under one second from being launched from the wing for it to be about 15 metres beyond the nose of the plane. This means that the launch has to take place some 200 metres before impact. Yet nothing is visible, no flashed, no smoke, no glowing engine.
For the missile launch to not be noticeable, it should take place perhaps 30m before impact. In this case, the missile has to gain 40m on the plane in 0.143s to hit the building 10m ahead of the plane. That requires 300G acceleration, which I suspect is simply not the case with the initial lauch of any missile (other than the top secret ones in Area 51 
). Plus it would mean the missile reached nearly Mach 2 before impace - surely somebody would have noticed the sonic boom?
(Someone please check my maths …)
With all due respect, bolero, that’s just not true, any more than the best debunking of a mental patient’s belief that he is Napoleon is to show that Napoleon is dead. Rationality does not apply to some people. So many of these conspiracy theories are so stupid that it’s just not worth the time. Partially that’s because once you do debunk it they move the goalposts. “What? You can’t mount a missile on an airplane without anyone noticing? Well, it must have been government aircraft!” That’s just fucking stupid, as is anyone who would put forth the theory. You are wasting your time with these people, as their stupidity is incurable.
They had “testimony of eyewitnesses” that the planes didn’t look like commercial airliners? So what? There are literally thousands of thousands of people who did see that they were commercial airliners. Oh, and the videotapes, which are linked in this thread, in which anyone with eyesight can identify the airliners as civilian. Oh, and by the way, the two missing airliners.
So now these guys are positing that the government crashed two airliners somewhere else without detection, mocked up a couple of fighters to look like transcontinental airliners and persuaded two military pilots to crash into the World Trade Center, firing a missile just before impact? Then they convinced al Qaeda operatives to take credit for it. That is stupid. The people who put forth the theory are stupid. Too stupid to be cured. Leave them to their stupid fantasies.
Why on Earth would you fire a missile just before impact, which would require split second timing, when you could simply pack the plane with explosives?
Why risk detection of your plot by mounting a missile on the plane when it’s completely unnecessary?
The conspiracy theory assumes complete stupidity on the part of the conspiritors.
When dealing with conspriacy nuts, there is no such thing as a complete debunking. Even if you prove every single point they bring up as wrong, they merely move to other ‘anomalies’. Then when they think you aren’t paying attention they go back to the original items.
Conspriacy theories make some folks feel special. They’ll never give that feeling up.
There is nothing at all that Garfield226 said in that post that was even remotely being a jerk IMHO. I think it fit with the OP just fine. There is nothing wrong with taking a stupid conspiracy theory and countering it with a stupid alternative explanation of your own that gives the proponents of the first stupid theory pause because now they can’t counter that one.
Damned if that flash of light don’t look like some kind of scalar weapon of the sort made many decades ago.
I think this is a pretty pertinent question. I think it would make a pretty large fireball, but that’s just my guess. And if we had definitive example, that should be one more nail in the coffin of this lame conspiracy theory.
It just seems to me that if you look at the number of joules of energy absorbed by the metal on the very front of the plane, and the metal girders of the building, this amount of energy would be enough to make the aluminum molten and emit light. Isn’t that what’s going on here? Any metallurgists? Isn’t it like when a bullet hits steel and sparks fly?
Absolutely. Here is where I see this thread:
Issue 1) Plausibility of any missile involvement.
Status - Disproven beyond a reasonable doubt. Let’s please not talk about missiles anymore.
Issue 2) Explanation of flash of light at nose of the plane, well ahead of the fuel tanks.
Status - Not adequately explained, in my opinion. I would like to see an airtight explanation of this.
I don’t buy the “metal on metal” theory because, to my knowledge, it takes a massive piece of dense metal striking another massive piece of dense metal. Having seen fewer sparks produced when a depleted uranium sabot round strikes a tank, I don’t think aluminum sheet metal on a steel girder would explain the effect seen in the images.
Please do not talk about the stupidity of missiles in response to the question about the nose flash. We all agree that the missile theory is stupid even as far as conspiracy theories go. We’re all done talking about missiles, or at least we should be.
I doubt anyone will consider this airtight, but I’ll advance a probable explanation anyway. At first I thought the glow could be easily explained if there were a nose-mounted landing light on the aircraft, but I’ve seen no such light on any of the photos of 767s that I checked. OTOH, it was a bright, sunny morning. American Airlines jets have polished aluminun fuselages and the video stills linked to by the OP appear to show the aircraft fuselage illuminated by sunlight as it approaches the building. IMO the circle of light, therefore, is sunlight reflected onto the shadowed side of the building from the tapered area of the fuselage just behind the nose of the aircraft.
But the whole tapered front of the aircraft is in the shadow at that time.
Could the flashes have been a blast wave? These planes didn’t clip the corner of these buildings - they crashed head on into the side wall. I’m not a physicist, but as the plane was closely approaching the building wasn’t it was compressing the air in front of it against the building wall. Could that “air” have superheated and exploded right before impact. The flash seems small enough.
Geez - calm down, dude.:rolleyes:
That’s an excellent point, IMO, and really kills the lame conspiracy theory. It would still be nice to know exactly why there were those flashed of light, though.
Well it sounds logical to me.
It is unlikely to be a nose light on the aircraft because, a) nose lights, where fitted, are white, b) nose lights face forwards like car headlights, and c) B767s don’t have em.
As others have said, it’s clear that the flash occurs at the moment of impact, not before. That’s the important point.
So what is it? My theory - probably a combination of electrical arcing as the wiring in the cockpit and the WTC walls is broken, and heat generated by the impact. Nothing sinister (other than the whole damn incident being horribly sinister, of course, but not in a conspiracy-theory way).