Um… does this sound as colossally implausible to anyone else as it does to me? I recently heard that many of the poor people killed were likely to have been vaporised in the explosions. It seems too fantastic that a small laminated paper booklet should survive the heart of the inferno, and also escape being buried under millions of tons of rubble.
Sorry if I sound like a conspiracy nut (honestly I’m not!) but that piece of information has been bugging me all week.
There have been a number of stories that are apparently urban legends, but this one I do not find implausible at all. You are assuming that all of the plane and passengers were contained within the WTC. That’s not the case as some of the crash debris and human remains continued out the far side of the building. For example, snopes reports that a pair of bound severed hands were found on the roof of a neighboring building. http://www.snopes.com/horrors/gruesome/hands.htm I would agree that any passports that were contained within the building would be unlikely to survive, but even then I wouldn’t say that it’s impossible.
They’ve found less strudy things than passports. Memos, notes, photographs. I can buy that the passport ended up surviving it, having been blown out the other side of the building to land, what? Three blocks away?
It does seem unlikely, but it’s possible. From what I’ve heard, the passport story is true. They found other bits of debris, including parts of the plane itself.
I’m certain that most of the passengers on the two planes were more or less vaporized. The impact of a collision, followed by explosion, then fire hot enough to soften steel, and then an 80-story drop.
As one by-stander observed, as dumptrucks full of debris and ash were driving by, “There could be people in there.”