Answers to Gary Popkin's No-Plane Questions

After he edited the Hardfire no-planes programs, producer Gary Popkin had some follow up questions for me. There was a whole lot of material we didn't get a chance to go over. Mr. Popkin is fairly new to 9/11 research, his questions are reasonable.

There was a lot of video of a so-called plane hitting the south tower, from many angles and distances--Chopper 5, ABC News, CBS, the ghost-plane video, and that video from the bottom of the tower where a fellow says a plane come out of nowhere and then says the video was faked. He says he saw a plane, but the video was faked! What does that mean? This was supposed to be evidence of something, presented by Ace, but I can't tell what it is supposed to be evidence of.

Although 30+ videos of the second plane hit eventuated, only 2 of them occurred live. Neither of the live shots show a plane hitting the tower. They both show a plane entering from the right side, crossing quickly, and disappearing behind the edge of a tower.

The rest came hours, days, and months after the event. The "video from the bottom of the tower where a fellow says a plane come out of nowhere" is the Evan Fairbanks video. Yes, Evan Fairbanks says he saw the plane - in his viewfinder. On ABC with Peter Jennings, on the night of 9/11, Fairbanks said the plane "disappeared like a bad special effect". That quote was in the witness montage I was playing, but host Ron Wieck cut it off before the infamous Fairbanks quote. I agree with Fairbanks, the videos which actually show the plane entering the tower do look like a bad special effect.

All this video from different angles! Was each one a separate composite?

Yes.

Did each require pre-recording a plane at just the right angle and distance?

Yes, assuming the planes are real videos of real planes, which they certainly could be. Alternatively, they could be CGI planes. We could have some of each. I hypothesize that the locations of the shots were scouted in advance, with test video of the towers shot, at around 9:00 a.m. on a clear day. Then a single flight of a 767 flying north, banking left, at around 9:00 am was video taped from corresponding locations. This could be done at an air base without too much trouble.

Or, as I mentioned, they could be CGI. CGI has the advantage of being able to determine a single flight path, then render the video from any virtual camera location. The disadvantage is trying to make sure the lighting and color match. CGI can tend to look "too perfect". But there are ways to screw up CGI so that it looks like video.

There could be some of each. This would go a long way to explaining the color problems. For example, the Park Foreman video has a nearly black plane. It was shot from Brooklyn, looking west, with the sun behind. The buildings are lit up very brightly. The gray and blue plane was in full sunlight, but came out almost black? This reeks of hiding color problems.

And to get the co-operation of every last one of the networks and news-reporting services, each one to play its own composite at exactly the same time!

In case you hadn't noticed, the mainstream media is government propaganda. The media are in on it, that's my whole point. Governments all over the world have a long history of intimidating and using the news media for propaganda purposes. Remember when Lincoln threw all those newspaper editors in prison? Research "Operation Mockingbird" for modern U.S. tactics. News guys either get with the program, or else. They're with the program.

As I said, only two were shown live, Chopper 5 and Chopper 7. Playing two or more videos at "exactly the same time" is quite routine. It involves using SMPTE time code, which has been a routine method of synchronizing audio/video for decades now.

To what purpose, such an elaborate hoax? Regardless of who did it, whether bin Laden, or Bush, or the Jews, or the reptiles, wouldn't it have been easier to fly a plane into the building?

The perpetrators of 9/11 would never have used real planes. This is the key to understanding the whole mess. They want to convince everyone on a story of suicidal hijackers who crash, causing massive structural damage to the core of each tower, and starting a raging inferno.

How to do that? Real planes? What real planes? The actual passenger jets? That's out. You'd have to hijack them electronically, at which time the pilots would no doubt call someone on the airphone (or even their cell phone when low enough): "Help, help, we're being electronically hijacked".

Land the planes and switch them with other 767s? We can rule out real suicide pilots, they'd have to be piloted remotely. Can 767s be targeted with accuracy down to a foot? I doubt it. Remember, they need those plane-shaped holes to be in VERY specific places, otherwise the "collapses" later on will not look right.

Plane-shaped holes? Nonsense. A real plane would crash up against the side of the much stronger steel and concrete tower. This includes not only the dense grid of steel box column, but also hitting steel and concrete floors, edge on. Both tower and plane would receive equal force, says Newton's 3rd law. Because the plane is hollow aluminum, and not built to withstand any impact, a real crash would send airplane parts bouncing and falling to the pavement below. This ruins the story about massive damage to the core.

Plus, real planes leave real evidence, for example serial number parts. If even one part is found by the wrong person, it would not match the records of the passenger aircraft. What on earth could the perpetrators say if the real plane clipped a wing and tumbled down into Manhattan? The damage to (non-targeted) buildings could be enormous, but it gets worse. Where are the passengers? Where is the pilot? Why isn't this really United Airlines flight 175?

The solution to the problem is to use explosives and fake the planes. Explosives can be positioned very precisely. They will blast the hole right in the right place. Enough shill witnesses will be coached and planted. The real witnesses who saw and heard only an explosion, will be dismissed as simply having missed it.

Yes, the plane videos will look fake, but that's a manageable problem. People like Evan Fairbanks will say "it looked like a bad special effect". Peter Jennings will say, "It's like a graphic artist, isn't it?" Dissent will be strictly prohibited in the mainstream media, relegated to the internet and public access.

And then there's the CBS footage, that Ace uses to show that a tiny plane can be seen at a great distance. He says it's a plane. And into the building it goes. And then Ace uses that video, of something he says is a plane, flying into a building, to argue that no plane flew into the building. Am I missing something?

You're right, the footage debunks Steve Wright's claim that smaller than 8 pixels, real planes disappear on video. Composited images can be inserted at any size, but if this is a real plane, why didn't it disappear at this size? It has less contrast than Chopper 5.

Originally that CBS shot was inserted in my Chopper 5 piece to respond to another critic. This person claimed that the plane was not visible in the CHopper 5 wide shot because it was hiding in the smoke trail from tower 1. From the CBS shot, we can easily see that the alleged path of the alleged plane is nowhere near the smoke, ever.

On Hardfire, I pulled that shot up quickly to respond to Steve Wright. Wright said that the Chopper 5 footage was never replayed because it is a lousy shot. The CBS "replay" is but one example of a shot in which the plane is tinier, but was replayed anyway. There are other examples. The History Channel documentary "9/11 Conspiracies: Fact or Fiction" used a shot quite similar to Chopper 5, but worse. It too is from the west, looking east, silhouette, but the plane is very small.

So the contention that Chopper 5 was cleansed because it is bad footage is simply false. It is VERY dramatic footage of history's defining moment.

Not only was Chopper 5 not replayed, but worse, it was cleansed from the archives. On the archive.org archives, the Chopper 5 footage had been replaced with completely different footage, while keeping the voice over exactly the same.

But what about the passengers?

They are dead. I think all 4 flights took off as advertised. There were hijackers on board, but not Arab flight school flunkies. I think the hijackers were special op military types, with at least one qualified pilot per plane. They were probably Israeli, because they needed to look "Middle Eastern". They were allowed through security with guns, keys to the cockpit, and whatever they needed.

They really took over the flights, and they really killed the pilots. Some of the airphone calls from terrified passengers and flight attendants were genuine.

The 2 Boston flights landed at Stewart Air Force Base, at 8:36 am. The published flight paths show the two flights going completely different directions, yet both pass over Stewart, and both at 8:36 a.m., a huge coincidence. The 9/11 Commission report said they almost collided. Since the transponders were off, radar could not tell altitude.




On landing, the real radar blips were replaced with false radar blips. We know for sure that war games were in progress on 9/11, some of which simulated hijackings with false radar blips. Again, this is too coincidental for me to swallow on its face. The false radar blips continued on the published flight paths, down to Manhattan.

Flight 93 landed at Cleveland, as was originally reported in the news, and as originally mentioned in Loose Change. Flight 77 landed somewhere, I don't know where.

Meanwhile, the poor passengers were executed. The "hijackers", that is the special ops guys, walked away.