Unraveling the Mysteries of Flight 11

I’ve been working on an extensive blog post called “9/11 for Beginners.” Although my 2013 book Truth Is a Lonely Warrior has a long chapter on 9/11, I have not written a blog post on it, because so much good material is already available from other online sources.

However, since fresh insights and information have emerged in recent years, and because we can never really say too much about this devastating crime, I felt I should contribute what I can to the discussion, in hopes of awakening additional people.

In the course of writing, I discovered a single piece of research that is so thorough, objective and edifying that I believe I should devote a post to it. The research is contained in a forum thread called “Fog, Fiction and the Flight 11 Phone Calls.” The URL is http://www.letsrollforums.com/forum/forum/the-u-s-government-conspiracy-of-9-11/the-mystery-of-flights-11-77-175-93/29035-fog-fiction-and-the-flight-11-phone-calls.

The author of this remarkable thread, which might be better termed an essay, is known to me only by his or her forum moniker: loopDloop.

Of course, I can hear someone saying, “Oh, great, James! It’s so academically reassuring to know that your work has as, its chief citation, loopDloop.” I can only suggest that people visit the thread and judge for themselves. The essay, written with extensive documentation over a two-year period (2012 to 2014), punctuated by a few forum comments, runs for seven forum pages. I am going to bullet-point some highlights here, along with my personal thoughts, plus insights from other 9/11 analysts. In the meantime, hats off to you, loopDloop.

Let’s start with the official version of American Airlines Flight 11. This is the flight said to have been hijacked by Mohamed Atta and four other Al Qaeda terrorists, and was the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center (North Tower). Almost all information about what occurred on Flight 11 is based on phone calls from two flight attendants, Betty Ong and Madeline Amy Sweeney. The pilots never sent any mayday communications, and like all pilots that day, never punched in the hijack code as they were rigorously trained to do. Also, there were no calls from any Flight 11 passengers. In the official timeline, Flight 11 departed Boston’s Logan Airport, bound for Los Angeles, at 7:59 AM; the transponder was turned off at 8:21; Ong made the first connecting call at 8:21; and the plane crashed at 8:46.

There is no audio of the calls that Sweeney made to American Airlines Flight Services at Logan Airport, although notes were kept. Of Betty Ong’s 25-minute call to American Airlines Reservations, allegedly only an early four minutes were recorded. This is rather incredible, given that it was an emergency call about a hijacking; nonetheless, those four minutes are all the public and even the 9/11 Commission have ever heard. The following clip contains those 4 minutes; Ong speaks with Vanessa Minter, an AA reservationist in Raleigh, North Carolina, to whom the call was randomly routed; as well as AA resolutions agent Winston Sadler and supervisor Nydia Gonzalez.

Let’s now review some of the Flight 11 story’s problems. Nothing in this post is intended to dishonor the dead; rather it is intended to honor them by seeking the truth about their fate.

False flags are often planned to coincide with drills. This occurred with the Boston Marathon bombing (which happened during a bomb drill) and the recent Charleston massacre (which coincided with a DHS “active shooter threat” drill). The reason for coordinating false flags with drills is that if anything goes wrong, and the false flag cannot be carried out, the authorities can attribute any strange events the public witnessed to “a drill.”

Our thesis will be: Ong and Sweeney believed they were participating in a hijacking drill. Those familiar with 9/11’s backstory know that NORAD and the Air Force were engaged in military exercises that day, including simulated hijackings. Information about this can be found abundantly on the Internet.

The “Flight 12” controversy

In the clip, Betty Ong originally says she is on is “Flight 12” and later corrects this to “Flight 11.” Here’s how this has usually been explained: Flight 11 was a regularly scheduled Boston-to-Los Angeles flight; on the return trip to Boston it was known as “Flight 12”; Ong, in her nervousness over the hijacking, simply made a mistake and called it “Flight 12.”

But the situation is more complex.

If you listen to the clip, when Ong speaks at 0:12, there are distinctly two voices saying “Flight 12.” This has been explained away as Ong and Minter speaking at the same time, but it seems hard to believe that they would speak so identically.

Furthermore, if it is really Minter speaking, this means Betty had already identified the flight as “12” to Minter in a previous, unrecorded part of the conversation. That would mean Ong mistakenly identified the Flight as “12” at least twice.

This still might not seem controversial until we turn to Madeline Amy Sweeney. She called American Airlines and reached passenger service agent Evelyn Nunez. According to FBI records, Nunez reported Sweeney said that “Flight 12 at Gate 32 had two flight attendants stabbed. In addition, there was a passenger in row 9 who had their throat cut by a passenger in seat 10B. Nunez also learned the hijackers said they had a bomb. The flight attendant was talking fast and then got disconnected.”¹

So Sweeney, just like Ong, mis-identified the flight as “12.” When Sweeney called back a second time, she spoke to Flight Services Manager Michael Woodward, who kept notes of the conversation. Here is the first page:

Woodward initially wrote “12,” but corrected it to say “11.” Apparently Sweeney once again mis-identified the flight as “12.” What are the chances of both flight attendants making this mistake twice?

Allow me to suggest that Ong and Sweeney were following the script of a hijacking drill, but the scriptwriter had mistakenly labeled the flight “12,” the Los Angeles-to-Boston run. In the course of communications, Ong and Sweeney spoke to whoever was directing them, and corrected this error.

Did I say “scriptwriter”?” Look at the official version Flight 11’s seating:

Although a strong case has been made that there were no Muslim terrorists at all on the 9/11 flights, look who’s beside “Mohamed Atta” in row 8. It’s Emmy Award-winning screenwriter David Angell and his wife Lynn. Angell was co-creator of the hit TV series Frasier and Wings (about a Massachusetts-based airline). Seated directly behind them in row 9 is Daniel Lewin, a former captain in the IDF (Israeli Defense Force), and who served in the Sayeret Matkal, which specializes in counter-terrorism, hostage rescue, and assassination. It was said that Lewin could bench-press 315 pounds and “was trained to kill terrorists with a pen or a credit card, or just his bare hands.”²

Let’s just say, “the plot thickens.”

The Mystery of Gate 32

One of the lesser-known controversies surrounding Flight 11 is that the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) has no record of its departing that morning, as the Bureau should. Such data is automatically recorded electronically when a flight takes off. There is debate about the significance of this, and I have no settled opinion, but those who wish to learn more can consult Peter Meyer’s article. I wouldn’t say Flight 11 “did not exist”; there is certainly a record of flight-control conversation with the departing pilot, as well as radar records. But was the plane what we’ve been told?

Deepening the controversy is that mainstream media accounts give two different gates as Flight 11’s departure point: 32 and 26. In early accounts, The Boston Globe, Washington Post, Daily Telegraph, and other publications said Gate 26. However, Gate 32 was the scheduled gate, the flight controller transcript said Gate 32, and that is what the 9/11 Commission accepted.

Adding fuel to the mystery is a detail noticed by loopDloop. Flight attendant Sweeney, in her first aborted call, had said “Flight 12 at Gate 32 had two flight attendants stabbed.” This confusing message prompted Michael Woodward and his colleague Elizabeth Williams to proceed directly to Gate 32. According to the FBI’s interview of Williams:

WILLIAMS stated on September 11, 2001, at approximately 8 a.m., she was working in her office at LOGAN AIRPORT when MICHAEL WOODWARD, Manager of Flight Services for AMERICAN AIRLINES AA, advised her that they needed to go to Gate 32 because two flight attendants had been stabbed. Upon arrival at the gate, WILLIAMS and WOODWARD found an empty airplane. WOODWARD then got on the phone and contacted EVELYN NUNEZ, an employee of AA at LOGAN AIRPORT. While WOODWARD was on the phone, WILLIAMS searched the gate-side computer for information for the flight time of the airplane at Gate 32.³

Although Woodward never mentioned it, Williams candidly said an empty plane was at Gate 32. Had another aircraft really pulled into the gate and emptied itself of persons in the half hour since Flight 11 departed? What seems more likely: the plane never left. This would resolve why the BTS data base has no record of Flight 11 ever taking off. Did a “ringer” plane, perhaps with no passengers aboard, depart Gate 26? I’d like to quote loopDloop at this point:

Here’s a possible scenario: the doors of the flight are closed at 7:40am. As soon as that happens, a man stands up on the plane and explains to the passengers and crew that they are now involved in a military drill. They are asked to disembark the plane, through the rear doors, where a bus is waiting for them on the tarmac. They are taken somewhere. . . Sweeney and Ong are selected, and convinced, to play roles within the simulation, pretending to phone in the details of the imaginary hijacking. It is impressed upon them that they must not give the game away. Betty Ong does pretty well, but in the end, there is really only four minutes near the beginning of the call which could conceivably ever be released into the public domain, so they make up the story about the four minutes of recording. . . Amy Sweeney’s first call is a complete botch up, and the controllers have to pull the plug on the connection after about a minute, because she is taking too much creative license with the script. They give her a quick pep talk, and then she reconnects for the second phone call . . . .

More Problems with Ong’s Call

For convenience, I’m re-embedding it here:

— At 0:15 you will hear the people in Raleigh ask Betty what seat she is in. She avoids the question. She is asked four times before responding that she’s in her jump seat. The question’s answer had obviously not been in the drill script and had to be improvised.

And “jump seat 3R,” an attendant seat at the plane’s rear, doesn’t pass muster. A jump seat has no airphone by which to make an outside call. Betty would have been facing the last row of passenger seats, which have no airphones behind their backrests. This seemingly reduces her options to a cell phone. It is generally conceded that, in the technology existing in 2001, connecting a cell phone call in an airliner at high speeds and altitude was very difficult, though not impossible. It stretches credibility that Betty maintained a cell connection for 25 minutes without once getting “dropped.”

By tracing Flight 11’s airphone records, LoopDloop makes a strong case that Betty was wearing a headset plugged into a Claircomm box (Claircomm was the company that supplied AA with its airphone equipment). LoopDloop’s explanation is a bit long to repeat here, but may be found in the first two posts of his outstanding thread.

— Although it’s not heard in the available audio, according to the FBI transcript of Ong’s call, she said a hijacker “stood upstairs.”⁴ Former flight attendant Rebekah Roth, author of the bestselling 9/11 novel Methodical Illusion, has picked up on this important discrepancy. Flight 11 was a Boeing 767. Although Boeing 747s have stairs, Boeing 767s do not. Here are the stairs of a 747:

The “scriptwriter” for Flight 11’s drill had evidently traveled on 747s and had these in mind. Small wonder that Ong’s description of the hijacker being on the stairs was deleted from the audio made publicly available.

— The FBI reports also reveal that Winston Sadler (who can be heard in the Ong call’s audio) said “Ong also stated that she did not believe that the coach passengers were aware of the hijacking.”⁵ Likewise, just some three minutes before the North Tower’s explosion, supervisor Nydia Gonzalez, who can also be heard in the Ong clip, said in her own recorded conversation: “Okay. It seems like the passengers in coach might not be aware of what’s going on right now.”⁶

This seems unbelievable. According to the Sweeney and Ong calls, three people had been stabbed: two flight attendants (one requiring oxygen) as well as the passenger in 9B (fatally). There would have been great commotion and shouting. Ong further stated: “We can’t breathe in business class, so somebody’s got mace or something. . . . we can’t even get up to business class right now, cause no one can breathe.”⁷

Let’s think this through. If it was “impossible to breathe” in business class, the business class passengers would have retreated to the plane’s rear to breathe better (as well as escape the bloody violence they were witnessing). The coach passengers would surely have asked what was happening; the retreating business class passengers would surely have told them. Yet no passenger shrieks are heard during Ong’s call. Nor is there any record of any of the 81 passengers attempting to place phone calls (unlike other 9/11 flights).

And as airline professional Roth points out, if mace had made the business class air unbreathable, in a pressurized cabin the mace would drift into coach. But you never hear Ong coughing.

— Finally, why in the world did Ong place her call to American Airlines reservations? Not only was this contrary to hijacking protocols, reservations is the last place you’d want to call for an emergency, because of the long hold times typically experienced there.

Additional Problems of the Sweeney Call

— Let’s recall that after Madeline Amy Sweeney’s first (disconnected) call, Michael Woodward and Elizabeth Williams proceeded to Gate 32 and found an empty plane. While they were gone, Sweeney again called Flight Services, and reached Jim Sayer (name redacted in the FBI Reports, but deduced to be Sayer in loopDloop’s analysis⁸). According to the FBI’s interview with him, Sweeney said “they were in the air over New York City.”⁹ The call was quickly taken over by Woodward when he returned to the office. In the timeline established by loopDloop, this could not have been later than 8:34 AM. As he notes, “They weren’t anywhere near New York City when Amy claimed to be in the air, above it.”¹⁰

— In the FBI report, Sayer stated that Sweeney said “A doctor and a nurse, on board the plane, were caring for the injured man [Lewin, the passenger in 9B].”¹¹ Yet according to supervisor Nydia Gonzalez, Ong said no doctor was on board,¹² which the passenger manifest confirmed.

What was the purpose of the flight attendants calls? The same as all the 9/11 calls: to provide the government with the narrative required to begin the never-ending “War on Terror.” Since none of the four planes had any survivors to describe what happened, reconstruction of events, proving a hijacking by men who looked “Middle Eastern,” was based entirely on the calls. In Flight 11’s case, Ong and Sweeney reported the hijackers’ seat numbers. Although the numbers they gave were sometimes contradictory, it was enough for the government to match those passengers to people on its terrorist watch, as well as a list of names found in Mohammed Atta’s luggage, which conveniently didn’t make it onto Flight 11. Of course, 9/11 Truthers have always asked why Atta would bother bringing luggage for a trip on which he planned to commit suicide.

LoopDloop has a good insight into why the script had Israeli Special Op Daniel Lewin getting killed. Naturally people would have asked why this veteran anti-terrorism expert, who could “kill a terrorist with a pen or credit card,” didn’t lead a recapture of the cockpit. So the narrative transformed him from handler to heroic victim – one more feather in the Zionist cap, Lewin being just one of many Zionists linked to 9/11.

Sara Low’s Calls

A little-known Flight 11 fact is that a third attendant, Sara Low, also made four attempted airphone calls. All these calls failed to connect; they were made to the number of a childhood home she hadn’t lived in for ten years. This has been attributed to Low not being able to remember her current home phone number due to stress from the hijacking. However, loopDloop, with his usual excellent detective work, has established that Low’s current home number would have been on the ATT Phone Card she was using to bill the calls.¹³ His deduction: Low was being instructed to call home to describe the “hijacking.” But Low, sensing something very wrong with the “drill,” refused to disturb her family, and kept dialing the number of her childhood home, which she knew was defunct.

If this was a real hijacking, it seems unreal that three flight attendants would keep making calls. The cabin crew was by now seriously undermanned. Two of their fellow attendants had allegedly been stabbed and would have needed help; a passenger had had his throat cut; the pilots were never mentioned, but by default would probably have been dead or wounded. Panicking passengers would have needed reassurance. Yet somehow Betty Ong was able to stay on the phone 25 minutes, and Sweeney likewise spent extensive time on the phone.

Never did the ladies request help. The calls’ sole purpose seems to have been to document what occurred. Ong’s calm demeanor has been attributed to professionalism; her voice reveals little anxiety despite fellow crew members being stabbed and the cockpit being controlled by murderous hijackers. It is no slur on Ong’s professionalism to ask: Was she this calm because she thought “it’s only a drill”?

American Airlines’ Restrained Response

When the hijacking became known about, a remarkable number of American Airlines employees were told to “keep quiet,” “don’t spread it around,” “don’t mention it,” etc. Although one could put a sinister spin on this, it may indicate that some suspected they were only dealing with a drill/exercise. For a full review of AA’s muzzling of the hijacking news, I recommend the article “’Don’t Mention This to Anyone’: Why Did American Airlines Suppress News of the First Hijacking on 9/11?” at 9/11 Blogger.

The FBI Arrives a Little Early

When Betty Ong made her call, it was answered by reservationist Vanessa Minter, who states that the FBI arrived about five minutes later and took her off the phone. Watch starting at the 2-minute mark of this interview (I can’t embed this clip, so click on the link):

http://www.wral.com/news/local/video/10111135/

Since Ong’s call was the first alarm that Flight 11 was hijacked, one wonders how the FBI was able to respond so quickly, even allowing for some exaggeration by Minter. As loopDloop notes, it “makes no sense. Unless they were monitoring the whole thing from the beginning, and realised that Minter was making a hash of the whole thing and had to be whisked out of the frontline as quick as possible.”¹⁴

The FBI Arrives a Little Late

And who was American Airlines’ Managing Director of Corporate Security on 9/11? Larry “Mandrake” Wansley, a veteran deep undercover FBI agent, co-author of the book FBI Undercover: The True Story of Special Agent Mandrake.

In a 2002 article in the Dallas Observer, Wansley’s FBI Undercover co-author Carlton Stowers wrote:

It began as a bright, promising September morning on the sixth floor of the Dallas-based American Airlines headquarters. Staff members were sipping coffee and mingling as they anticipated the morning’s operational meeting. . . . Larry Wansley, managing director of corporate security, had arrived early, pleased that on that day he would not be jetting off to San Francisco or London or Rome to address some new crisis. . . . At 7:45 a.m [Central], however, the leisurely atmosphere changed dramatically. From the airline’s nearby command center came an urgent call. American Flight 11, carrying 92 passengers from Boston’s Logan Airport, Wansley was told, had been hijacked. Betty Ong, a 45-year-old flight attendant on board, had managed to phone her company supervisor, reporting at least three hijackers with weapons and several passengers injured. From the vice chairman’s office, Wansley phoned Danny Defenbaugh, special agent-in-charge of the Dallas FBI office. It was the first step in the well-researched, secret hijack-response plan all commercial airlines have in place.¹⁵

Defenbaugh, we’ll note, had been in charge of the FBI’s investigation of the Oklahoma City Murrah Building bombing, recognized in alternative media as a false flag. Here’s how Wansley explained things to the 9/11 Commission in 2004:

On 9-11 Wansley was walking into Baker’s office for the morning phone call (7:45am) and the secretary told Wansley that “we have a hijacking.” He called the SOC but they didn’t have much information. Wansley then called Danny Defenbaugh who was the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Dallas Field Office. Wansley informed Defenbaugh about the hijacking with the little information that he had which was that Flight 11 had been hijacked. Defenbaugh did not know anything about it. Defenbaugh told Wansley to hold and got a couple of other people together which Wansley said “started the ball rolling.” ¹⁶

So according to Wansley, his FBI colleagues had no clue about the hijacking at 8:45 AM Eastern. What a contrast to the statement of Vanessa Minter, who received Betty Oong’s call at 8:20, and said FBI agents took her off the call just five minutes later.

Flight 11 and the North Tower: Exclusive Coverage

President George W. Bush has long been ridiculed for saying he saw the first plane hit the World Trade Center on live TV. But some wonder if this slip means he had a private showing:

This seems reinforced by a similar slip in Stowers’ article on Wansley:

As he began relaying the information, Wansley heard a sudden chorus of muted screams from an adjacent conference room. Several female employees, eyes fixed on a television, had just watched a plane fly into the North Tower of New York’s World Trade Center.

Phone still in hand, the security director emerged in time to see a cloud of black smoke billowing from the building. In downtown Dallas, Defenbaugh’s secretary had entered his office and turned on his TV. “Did you see that?” the FBI agent asked Wansley.

Neither, however, connected the gruesome images they were watching with their own immediate concern. The initial television reports were suggesting that it had been a small, private plane that had flown into the Trade Center. What they had to focus on was how to deal with American’s hijacked Boeing 767. Someone else, they agreed, would have to deal with New York’s problems.

Then, in a mind-numbing moment as the two longtime friends continued discussing plans, a second plane appeared on their respective TV screens, banking sharply as it headed directly for the South Tower. “Oh, my God,” Wansley said.¹⁷

Were both Bush and this writer making silly mistakes? Perhaps. But if 9/11 was an inside job, it makes sense that the orchestrators had a private live-camera view to ensure everything was going as planned.

Spinning through Splicing

Credit goes to loopDloop, not only for spotting the above Stower article on Wansley, but for discovering that two different versions exist of Betty Ong’s taped call – one generated on 9/11 and one on 9/12. The changes occurred immediately following Wansley’s interview of supervisor Nydia Gonzalez, which can be seen in the opening pages of the FBI’s documents on Flight 11. Gonzalez plays the tape for Wansley. Not only does it differ in minor respects from the tape we hear today, but in the original Ong repeated some of the exact same phrases over as though she was on a loop, strongly suggesting that rehearsed lines were being repeated. The clip we hear on YouTube is highly edited.

What Did Happen to the People on Flight 11?

Regrettably, loopDloop’s posts on his two-year thread stopped in 2014, just when he had indicated he was going to address this question. I would rather defer to his consistently good insights, but in his absence, I’ll take my best shot, acknowledging that most of what I say is speculation and most certainly may be wrong.

Let’s pick it up from loopDloop’s original proposal:

The doors of the flight are closed at 7:40am. As soon as that happens, a man stands up on the plane and explains to the passengers and crew that they are now involved in a military drill. They are asked to disembark the plane, through the rear doors, where a bus is waiting for them on the tarmac.

I suggest that something like the above did happen. Flight 11’s crew may have moved to a specially prepared plane with handlers on board, at Gate 26. The passengers were told they weren’t needed for the exercise, and that they and their luggage would be moved to United Flight 175, which would be shortly departing for the same destination as Flight 11: Los Angeles. In this way, they were told, they would lose no time. Flight 175, another Boeing 767, had only 56 passengers, and could easily have accommodated Flight 11’s passengers. (Of course, Flight 175 was the plane alleged to have struck the second tower.)

Alternatively, if the BTS reports, Gate 26 reports, and Gate 32 “empty plane” report are all wrong, perhaps only the passengers disembarked, and the original plane did depart Gate 32 with crew and handlers aboard.

In either case, a plane took off as “Flight 11,” turned off its transponder at 8:21, while “Mohamed Atta” spoke threateningly in the cockpit for the benefit of flight controllers back in Boston. Ong and Sweeney played their parts, guided by cue cards. Sara Low smelled something wrong and wouldn’t play ball. In the meantime, at 8:14 Flight 175 had departed Logan.

This post is about Flight 11. However, because I believe its passengers likely boarded United 175, I will discuss both planes in the ensuing remarks. There are many theories about what happened; since speculation is shaky ground for investigation, I’d like to restrict myself to some established facts.

Fact Number 1. In 1962, the U.S Joint Chiefs of staff developed a never-implemented plan called Operation Northwoods to stage “false flags” in order to justify invading Cuba. In addition to hijackings, the plan included swapping a drone mid-air for a passenger plane; the drone would be destroyed by radio signal, but the public would hear that Cuba had shot down the actual passenger plane. We’ll quote the original declassified document; a PDF can be read here.

It is possible to create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner enroute from the United States to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama or Venezuela. The destination would be chosen only to cause the flight plan route to cross Cuba. The passengers could be a group of college students off on a holiday or any grouping of persons with a common interest to support chartering a non-scheduled flight.

An aircraft at Eglin AFB would be painted and numbered as an exact duplicate for a civil registered aircraft belonging to a CIA proprietary organization in the Miami area. At a designated time the duplicate would be substituted for the actual civil aircraft and would be loaded with the selected passengers, all boarded under carefully prepared aliases. The actual registered aircraft would be converted to a drone.

Take off times of the drone aircraft and the actual aircraft will be scheduled to allow a rendezvous south of Florida. From the rendezvous point the passenger-carrying aircraft will descend to minimum altitude and go directly into an auxiliary field at Eglin AFB where arrangements will have been made to evacuate the passengers and return the aircraft to its original status. The drone aircraft meanwhile will continue to fly the filed flight plan. When over Cuba the drone will being transmitting on the international distress frequency a “MAY DAY” message stating he is under attack by Cuban MIG aircraft. The transmission will be interrupted by destruction of the aircraft which will be triggered by radio signal. This will allow ICAO radio stations in the Western Hemisphere to tell the US what has happened to the aircraft instead of the US trying to “sell” the incident.

Fact Number 2. One of 9/11’s remarkable details, acknowledged even in the official account, is that Flights 11 and 175 came close to colliding. See, for example, this article from USA Today. It occurred when they crossed paths very close to Stewart International Airport, which Wikipedia describes as a “public/military airport.” Further, Wikipedia notes, “In 2000 the airport became the first U.S. commercial airport privatized when United Kingdom-based National Express Group was awarded a 99-year lease on the airport.”

Flight 11 took a circuitous route, almost as if waiting for 175 to catch up. Here is an excerpt from a Pilots for 9/11 Truth documentary proposing that the 9/11 planes may have been swapped for drones in an updated version of Operation Northwoods:

With transponders off, detection of the planes was primarily from radar, which could have been more easily tricked by a swap. (Some have suggested that missiles instead of drones may have been launched.)

Fact Number 3. Flights 175 and 93 – which, of the four 9/11 flights, were the only two that officially took off according to Bureau of Transportation Statistics records – were not de-registered as planes until four years later. As Greg Syzmanski notes:

Two of the 9/11 airliners were never “deregistered” and remained on the “active” flight list until Sept. 28. 2005, the classification officially changing only a month after two inquisitive flight researchers made repeated calls to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), inquiring about the strange irregularity.

The two planes in question were Flight 93 and Flight 175, both owned and operated by United Airlines and, according to the official story, both destroyed on 9/11, one in Shanksville, Penn., and the other crashing into the South Tower of the WTC.

Usually a normal procedure after an airliner is destroyed, why it took United more than four years to “deregister” the airplanes and fill out the official FAA paperwork remains a mystery and never has been fully explained by the FAA, United or the government.¹⁸

Fact Number 4. Affirming the above, Pilots for 9/11 Truth made a significant discovery through the Freedom of Information Act. Airborne planes receive regular messages, similar to text messages, via the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS). It is possible to track a plane by checking which ACARS stations it received messages from. Twenty minutes after it allegedly crashed into the South Tower, Flight 175 was still receiving messages from ACARS, proving that it was heading west over western Pennsylvania. (ACARS also demonstrates that Flight 93, the “Let’s Roll” flight, was heading west over Illinois well after it supposedly burrowed into the hole in Shanksville leaving only tiny bits of debris.) A detailed discussion of what ACARS proves is in this two-part article by Pilots for 9/11 Truth.

Some who are less familiar with the 9/11 Truth Movement may ask: Am I really saying 175 didn’t hit the South Tower as claimed? Yes. Some of the best evidence you’ll find is in this affidavit by John Lear, son of Learjet inventor Bill Lear, and one of America’s most expert pilots. Besides the impossibility of a Boeing 767 sustaining a speed of 540 mph at an altitude of 1,000 feet, Lear presents many other facts that demolish the 9/11 story.

Let Pilots for 9/11 Truth show you why poorly trained hijackers couldn’t have hit the World Trade Center at the claimed speeds, a feat which, as you will see, seasoned Boeing pilots couldn’t achieve on a flight simulator:

Finally, first watch this CNN clip of Flight 175 striking the South Tower:

Then watch this breakdown of the video by Ramon Dockins:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCypcBYUt10&rel=0

A plane’s aluminum wings and tail could not sail through steel, no matter how fast they were going. This type of phenomenon happens only in Looney Tunes cartoons. As Russian analyst Dimitri Khalezov has pointed out, during World War II the front armor of a Soviet T-34 tank was impervious to explosive enemy shells traveling far faster than the speed of sound, even though the steel armor was much thinner than the World Trade Center’s steel girders. If aluminum could pierce steel, we’d be using it to manufacture artillery shells.

I have an opinion about what people really saw hit the Towers, but we’ll stay on course. There’s so much more we could say about the Towers (e.g., how they collapsed) and 9/11, but right now let’s ask: What really happened to Flights 175 and 11?

Conclusion

If 175 never hit the North Tower, was still airborne 20 minutes later, and not de-registered for four years, it almost certainly must have been landed somewhere.

One possibility is Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, which was evacuated on the morning of 9/11 because a plane was ordered to land there which was suspected (falsely) of having terrorists and a bomb on board. This was Delta Flight 1989, another Boeing 767 en route from Boston to LA. It landed in Cleveland; its passengers remained on board for well over two hours before being uneventfully interviewed by the FBI at FAA headquarters.

In the meantime, however, a second large plane touched down on a runway far from Delta 1989. While the Delta passengers still waited, some 200 passengers were reportedly brought from this second plane to the airport’s NASA Glenn Research Facility, which had been evacuated earlier. This second aircraft has been called Cleveland’s “mystery plane,” and there is speculation that it could have been United 175. Adding some credibility to this is ACARS putting 175 over western Pennsylvania headed for Ohio. Subsequently a NASA Glenn spokesman told a Cleveland Free Times writer that the aircraft had been a NASA plane carrying visiting scientists, who were bussed to local hotels. It remains a point of controversy. (Those who wish more information may consult the article “The Cleveland Airport Mystery” with an update here.)

In its own playbook, Operation Northwoods had called for the swapped plane to land at an Air Force base and there evacuate passengers. I think this is a reasonable scenario for all of the 9/11 planes, because of the tighter security and secrecy that military installations maintain. With all the war games going on that day, confusion initially reigned at NORAD, and one can see how the planes could have landed undetected. Covert landings might also have been facilitated by the absence of the numerous warplane crews engaging in the exercises.

While the locations remain a guarded secret, I feel confident in saying landings did occur.

Which leaves a final question: What happened to the passengers after landing? There are two schools of thought: (1) they were exterminated; (2) they had been hired to take part in the plot, were paid handsomely, and were then “disappeared” under new identities.

The latter view has gained support in more recent years due to heightened awareness of the use of crisis actors in false flags, as well as the low number of passengers that turned up on the Social Security Death Index and the 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund. It also more closely corresponds to the plan laid out in Operation Northwoods.

However, I am skeptical that the Illuminists could have found that many people, including complete crews of pilots and flight attendants, who would agree to assist in 9/11’s mass murder for the right price; or that they would risk having someone with second thoughts come forward, “resurrected,” and expose the plot. Those who planned 9/11’s slaughter wouldn’t have hesitated to extend the carnage to unwitting helpers who thought they were only participating in a drill.

The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle. In a plot of this caliber, wouldn’t a few accomplices be in the passenger mix? Daniel Lewin and Barbara Olson come to mind. Perhaps when the passengers disembarked, they were separated into two groups, in a black reversal of the “sheep and goats” which Jesus Christ described in Matthew 25. I believe Betty Ong and Madeline Amy Sweeney were among the innocent.

NOTES

1. “T7 B17 FBI 302s of Interest Flight 11 Fdr-Entire Contents,” p. 57, http://www.scribd.com/doc/14094215/T7-B17-FBI-302s-of-Interest-Flight-11-Fdr-Entire-Contents.
2. Paul Sperry, “Lewin: Flight 11’s Unsung Hero?” WorldNetDaily, http://www.wnd.com/2002/03/13281/.
3. T7 B17 FBI 302s of Interest Flight 11 Fdr-Entire Contents,” p. 40, http://www.scribd.com/doc/14094215/T7-B17-FBI-302s-of-Interest-Flight-11-Fdr-Entire-Contents.
4. Ibid., p. 3.
5. Ibid., p. 42.
6. “9/11 Passenger Phone Calls,” https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/9/11_Passenger_phone_calls.
7. “T7 B17 FBI 302s of Interest Flight 11 Fdr-Entire Contents,” p. 12, http://www.scribd.com/doc/14094215/T7-B17-FBI-302s-of-Interest-Flight-11-Fdr-Entire-Contents.
8. “Fog, Fiction and the Flight 11 Phone Calls,” loopDloop post of March 2, 2012, http://www.letsrollforums.com/forum/forum/the-u-s-government-conspiracy-of-9-11/the-mystery-of-flights-11-77-175-93/29035-fog-fiction-and-the-flight-11-phone-calls
9. “T7 B17 FBI 302s of Interest Flight 11 Fdr-Entire Contents,” p. 28, http://www.scribd.com/doc/14094215/T7-B17-FBI-302s-of-Interest-Flight-11-Fdr-Entire-Contents.
10. “Fog, Fiction and the Flight 11 Phone Calls,” loopDloop post of March 2, 2012, http://www.letsrollforums.com/forum/forum/the-u-s-government-conspiracy-of-9-11/the-mystery-of-flights-11-77-175-93/29035-fog-fiction-and-the-flight-11-phone-calls.
11. Ibid., post of August 2, 2012.
12. “9/11 Passenger Phone Calls,” https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/9/11_Passenger_phone_calls.
13. “Fog, Fiction and the Flight 11 Phone Calls,” posts of July 29, July 30, and August 30, 2014, http://www.letsrollforums.com/forum/forum/the-u-s-government-conspiracy-of-9-11/the-mystery-of-flights-11-77-175-93/29035-fog-fiction-and-the-flight-11-phone-calls.
14. Ibid., post of August 2, 2012.
15. Carlton Stowers, “Rough Skies,” Dallas Observer, November 21, 2002, http://www.dallasobserver.com/news/rough-skies-6392004.
16. “Memorandum for the Record, Interview, Mr. Larry Wansley, Director of Security, American Airlines,” January 8, 2004, p. 4, http://media.nara.gov/9-11/MFR/t-0148-911MFR-00012.pdf.
17. Stowers.
18. Greg Syzmanski, “Are Both Jetliners Still Flying in United’s ‘Friendly Skies’?” http://www.rense.com/general68/911h.htm.

James Perloff is the author of Truth is a Lonely Warrior: Unmasking the Forces Behind Global Destruction (2013) and the classic The Shadows of Power: The Council on Foreign Relations and the American Decline (1988). He has conducted research and published articles on America’s hidden history for over thirty years. Perloff has also written the script for the new Free Mind Films feature length production, Shadow Ring. More information is available at jamesperloff.com