Google ‘pentagon engines 9/11’ and you can see the photos, and read all about how the engine components were planted in the debris. It’s whack-a-mole time all over again.
No reason to expect that this will penetrate the OP’s brother’s tinfoil chapeau, but here is a lengthy series of eyewitness statements that a commercial airliner did indeed strike the Pentagon, many with links to the original articles in which they appeared:
Also a link from Jeff Rense’s conspiracy site showing various bits of aircraft debris, particularly nose landing gear (Rense never saw a conspiracy he didn’t like, so if even he thinks the missile story is bogus…)
http://www.rense.com/general32/phot.htm
My statement about the mostly-intact engines was based on my remembrance of photos published on the 'net by a rescue worker, whose site I can no longer find. Since I may be misremembering, I’ll withdraw that one (note, however, that engine components are visible in some of the photos at Rense’s site). Nevertheless, I am confident from all my reading on the subject that a Boeing 757 operated as flight 77 by American Airlines did in fact strike the Pentagon on 9/11/01.
You know, one of these days a good subject for debate is just WHY people feel such a need to believe that every high-profile incident of this nature has a conspiracy behind it.
Hitting the largest office building in the world (610,000 m2) doesn’t seem to be too difficult to me.
There was a second plane on the grassy knoll.
Much better now ! The ground impact and the wings snapping makes much more sense than a disintegrating plane ! 
I wasn’t defending the flash presentation… just pointing out that people were criticizing it for the wrong reasons.
One thing that I believe is very convincing is the fact that whatever hit the building fully penetrated 3 rings of the Pentagon. I don’t believe that a missle could. If the explosion of a missle was large enough to damage the 3rd ring of the building, it would not have left the 5th floor intact. The people in the offices of the 5th floor above where the plane hit were evacuated after the plane hit the building.
I happened to have been priviledged enough to be in an FBI briefing of the event and I am convinced that it was a plane.
That should be the 5th floor of the outer ring.
Have you ever seen the Pentagon?
The usual aerial photos you see of it don’t do it justice. It is an astonishingly massive building. ANYONE who has ever flown a plane in Microsoft Flight Simulator could probably hit it.
[QUOTE[I don’t beleive it was a missile… but the pentagon damage is pretty wierd no matter what. [/QUOTE]
There’s nothing weird about it. The damage is exactly what you would expect. The width of the damaged area is the same width as a 757, with superficial damage where the thin outer parts of the wings would be and heavy penetrative damage where the engines and fuselage would be. The fire damage inside the building, where the fuel would burn, is extensive. What’s weird?
In fact I have seen the pentagon… its big for sure… flatish but big. The part about a low flying plane not causing anything to the cars in the highway and actually managing to fly so low and so fast are fishy to me… I still feel that the pilot who flew into the pentagon was either another people… or was better trained than they were portrayed to be.
I havent played much Flight simulator at all… but I do remember these big passenger planes being sluggish and a hassle to control.
Heck, with Microsoft’s old DOS Flight Simulator (I’m not familiar with later versions) you flew out of Chicago’s Meigs Field and had to work at NOT flying into the John Hancock Building.
I read something somewhere (yeah, I know…) where a commercial pilot was interviewed and said himself that anyone who had played Flight Simulator could have done this. Personally I’m inclined to think he would know what he’s talking about.
No direct knowledge, but AFAIK the real planes are not sluggish at all.
Well, for one thing it wasn’t a perfect hit. It is pretty well established that the plane hit the ground and bounced into the wall.
As for the size of the hole, why do the conspiracy nuts seem to think that there should be a cartoon style plane-shaped hole in the pentagon? The plane is mostly thin aluminum, and the Pentagon meant to survive bombing campaigns. Its only through sheer velocity that any hole was made at all.
Conspiracists demonstrate their complete cluelessness when they start saying “the military did it”. They fail to understand just how the military is. If you fuck up on a minor scale everyone in you unit/ship is probably going to know about it. So to fire a missle at a building means that sevear hundred people are going to know about it one way or another (“Hey! Didn’t this plane have two missiles when it left?”, “Hey, what was with that bearing that took you towards the Pentagon?” “Hey…”)
You know what? Unless you are a structural engineer, an aerospace engineer, or extremely knowledgeable about weapons and/or accident forensics, I don’t think most people here can say things like “I would have expected this…”, or “I think it should have that…”
I understand that a conspiracy nerd posting to the Internet in his underwear from his parents basement is very compelling, but I’ll stick with the experts.
Not to mention how many very large five-sided building are there in Washington, DC? I have little doubt if they were good enough pilots to get the plane to Washington, picking out the intended target would be trivial.
And what do you think the odds are that someone in the military would fuck up and launch a missile at the Pentagon on the exact same day terrorists flew a couple planes into the World Trade Center? Essentially zero. The only conspiracy theory that would make any possible sense is that someone in the military intentionally decided to launch a missile at the Pentagon. However, if that happened I’d think the military would publicly squish this traitor, rather than cover up what he did.
It should be noted here that the Pentagon sits between two branches of an interstate highway, and at that time of morning thousands of commuters were on the way to work in downtown Washington in bumper to bumper traffic. Press reports the morning after the event quoted eyewitnesses who actually saw the plane crash into the building. Some claimed that they even saw faces at the windows. Some at first didn’t think anything was wrong because the Pentagon is a mile or so from Washington National Airport, and low-flying planes pass through all day. Were all the witnesses wrong? Or bribed? Or government agents? Most conspiracy theories seem to be rooted in the mystery of unanswered questions. But are there really any unanswered questions about this crash?
Aaagh. I’ve I hear one more time that the plane didn’t cause plane shaped damage to the Pentagon, I’m going to cry.
It did.
The photos, even on the sites of the conspiracy nuts, show it did.
I’m tired of posting the same old links. Do some searches.
That one of the leading conspiracy nuts on the subject has a photo that shows this, clear as day, while blithely blathering on as if the photo doesn’t show what Blind Freddy can see it does, shows the complete and utter lack of connection to reality of those that propound these theories.
FBI briefing? You’re one of them, aren’t you?! Aaargh!
There’s a lot of speculation about what the intended target of flight 77 was. The plane wandered around the area some before hitting the Pentagon, leading many to speculate that the Pentagon was not the intended target (since it’s so big and visible). What’s a target that might not be so easy to find? The White House.