Sunday, May 25, 2008

Shadow Study Proves Compositing

I recommend a great new study by Portuguese researcher Rasga Saias, "Enlightening the Shadows". He discovers a novel method of determining the azimuth angle of the sun's shadow at 9:03 am on 9/11, the time of the second "plane crash". He confirms the azimuth with NOAA's handy calculator. Then Rasga proceeds to demonstrate that the shadows on the planes are not where they belong.



When I encountered this work, I wanted to check it against my model of the WTC in Google Sketchup. The buildings in Sketchup are geo-referenced to Google Earth, and shadows can be set to any time on any date. I typed in "9:03 a.m. on September 11", but the shadows agreed with the 9/11 videos, and not with Rasga.

After dialoging with Rasga by email, we quickly discovered my error - daylight savings time. Google Sketchup does not account for the clock change. 9:03 a.m. in September would be the same as 8:03 a.m. standard time. Using the correct time, my model agrees very well with Rasga's study.

Of course the 9/11 composi-traitors would never just forget about adding shadows. But I think it is quite possible that they made the same mistake I made - they forgot daylight savings time, and their shadows were off by one hour. This would make the azimuth angle almost exactly parallel to the tower, which is consistent with the (lack of ) shadows on the "UA175" as it glides into the tower.

Here are gifs made from my Sketchup model.

View matching CNN Hezarkhani Ghostplane



View matching Evan Fairbanks




View matching Spiegel TV




View matching Luc Courchesne



Top View

Friday, May 16, 2008

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.

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Morgan Reynolds on Crash Physics

This is Morgan Reynolds' email from today. It's right on the money.

Lawson vs. Newton:
Newton's 3d law, sometimes called the law of reciprocal actions,
states that all forces occur in pairs and these two forces are equal in
magnitude and opposite in direction. That is, the forces of action and
reaction between bodies in contact have the same magnitude, same line of
action, and opposite sense. Didn't Lawson have a tug of war when he was a
child? If there is a force on the building in a crash, there is an
equal and opposite force on the airplane. Yet the plane does not slow down
or break apart!
If an aluminum plane ran into a Twin Tower, it must crumple, shatter
and could not possibly leave a jetliner-shaped, cartoon-like "silhouette
of passage" because in a collision with a tremendously strong
building, arguably the strongest in the world, an airplane with its far lower
mass, density and strength because it is built to be lightweight, would
be far less able to withstand the equal force exerted on both bodies.
The airlines weigh your luggage and worry about its distribution en
route while building security personnel and custodians do not worry about
the weight building entrants bring in or where they distribute it
because buildings do not have to be lightweight and are built with redundant
strength.

Strength and massiveness matter greatly in which body will fare better
in withstanding the equal force of an impact. Everybody knows this in
shopping for a car: should I buy a heavy SUV for safety or accept the
risk of driving a lightweight econobox or sportscar? If the damage
inflicted on the other body in a collision between a jetliner and a Tower
were likened to a sports contest, it would be something like Tower 100,
Airplane 2. Imagine, for example, that a Tower fell on the airplane
instead of the aluminum airplane hitting the Tower: complete and utter
devastation of the airplane. However, this mismatch is not what the videos
show. Instead, the aluminum plane cuts right through steel and
disappears inside the Tower. This is impossible. Structural steel is far
stronger than aluminum and present in abundant quantities, and would suffer
only light damage compared to complete and utter destruction/rejection
of an aluminum airplane, with most of its debris scattered outside the
building, especially wings, tail section and a majority of the shattered
fuselage. The five floors in each Tower allegedly impacted by planes
weighed more than 100X that of the alleged 140 ton airplanes.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Dynamic Duo - 5.14.08

Videos to download

Chopper 5 - Salter - Gamma Down

Chopper 5 Luminance Study

Chopper 5 Salter-Lawson Comparison

Distant Plane Test


What does compositing expert Steve Wright say?

No plane in the wide shot - Too small.

Nose out - Debris.

Fade to black - Automatic Gain Control.

Magically Healing Columns - Fireball enlarged the hole.

Link to Magically Healing Columns article.

Baker v Wright on Hardfire



Part 1 - Did a Plane Hit the South Tower?



Part 2 - Can an Explosion of Jet Fuel Enlarge a Hole in a Steel Building?

(No!)

Sunday, April 13, 2008

WNYW's Nunez Denies Request for Chopper 5



From: Isaura.Nunez@FOXTV.COM
Subject: footage request
Date: March 10, 2008 11:29:43 AM PDT
To: ace@acebaker.com

Hi Alex,
I have received your voice messages, but not your email. I’m not sure if you have my email address correct. I didn’t understand the spelling of your email address on the previous message you left me. hope this reaches you.

Isaura Nuñez
Fox5/My9
Public Affairs & Media Relations
205 East 67th Street
New York, NY 10453
212.452.3856 (O)
212.879.0636 (F)
isaura.nunez@foxtv.com



From: ace@acebaker.com
Subject: Re: footage request
Date: March 10, 2008 3:43:55 PM PDT
To: Isaura.Nunez@FOXTV.COM

Dear Ms. Nunez:

I write to request a license and broadcast-quality footage for use in a documentary film. The specific footage is:

September 11, 2001
9:02-9:03 a.m. EDT
WNYW Fox 5 source, carried across FOX network
"Chopper 5"

Footage begins with a wide shot over New Jersey, looking east toward the lower Manhattan skyline. Anchor Jim Ryan says ". . .as you look at the view from our chopper now arriving at the scene . . .". Camera zooms in, zooms more, then zooms a third time, framing the twin towers. The airplane enters the screen from the right side, crosses the screen right to left, and hits the tower. The tower begins to explode. There is a brief blackout, picture returns, the explosion grows.

"Handles" on each end would be great, say from 9:01 am to 9:04 am. If by chance the scene was recorded "raw", without the logo graphics, that would be ideal. Otherwise a copy with the FOX 5 logo graphics is acceptable.

I'm looking for a broadcast-quality beta copy, or similar quality digital file. An acceptable digital file would be at least 720 x 480 in size, interlaced, and uncompressed.

The documentary is an independent production, with no distribution deal. It is to be sold as a DVD, directly from a website.

Thank you for considering my request. If you have any other questions, please feel free to ask.

Sincerely,

Alex Baker



From: Isaura.Nunez@FOXTV.COM
Subject: RE: footage request
Date: March 11, 2008 2:15:13 PM PDT
To: ace@acebaker.com

Hi Alex,
We need to know exactly what you are using the footage for and what the documentary is about before we can grant permission. There is also a cost involved.

Isaura Nuñez
Fox5/My9
Public Affairs & Media Relations
205 East 67th Street
New York, NY 10453
212.452.3856 (O)
212.879.0636 (F)
isaura.nunez@foxtv.com


From: ace@acebaker.com
Subject: Re: footage request
Date: March 11, 2008 5:08:25 PM PDT
To: Isaura.Nunez@FOXTV.COM


Hi Isaura,

The documentary is about 9/11 conspiracy theories. As you may or may not know, there are some who claim that no plane struck the south tower. Others find that assertion patently ludicrous. Viewing the highest quality video (instead of lousy internet YouTube versions) would seem the most honest, best way to fairly study it.

Yes, I understand there is a charge. Let me know what it is.

Sincerely,

Alex Baker



From: Isaura.Nunez@FOXTV.COM
Subject: RE: footage request
Date: March 12, 2008 9:01:54 AM PDT
To: ace@acebaker.com

Hi Alex,
Unfortunately, we will be unable to participate in this project.

Isaura Nuñez
Fox5/My9
Public Affairs & Media Relations
205 East 67th Street
New York, NY 10453
212.452.3856 (O)
212.879.0636 (F)
isaura.nunez@foxtv.com



From: ace@acebaker.com
Subject: Re: footage request
Date: March 12, 2008 12:34:50 PM PDT
To: Isaura.Nunez@FOXTV.COM

Hi Isaura,

Why would that be? It wouldn't be because there's NO PLANE in the wide shot, would it? It wouldn't be because the nose of the airplane pops out of the back side of the building, would it? It wouldn't be because there's a fade to black, would it?

If nothing to hide, it would seem WNYW would wish to clear up its good name.

I seek answers to some reasonable questions . . .

http://acebaker.blogspot.com/2008/02/questions-for-911-plane-theorists.html

Please feel free to forward this to your legal department, perhaps they have some answers.

Sincerely,

-Alex Baker

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

September Clues 9 - Blatant Disinfo

Please see September Clues 9 for blatant disinformation.




Simon Shack has jumped fully on the bandwagon with Fred BS Registration and others in claiming that the 9/11 videos were animated with foreground and background layers.

His evidence consists of comparing the apparent sizes and positions of various structures in various shots. He also notes differences in color balance.

Long story short, there is NO evidence for compositing buildings, skylines, backgrounds, etc. ALL of the apparent size and position anomalies are explained by foreshortening and parallax. Professional cameras have telescopic lenses. Under that sort of zoom, distant objects like bridges can indeed appear much, much closer and larger than they would with less zoom. In fact, that's the whole point of a zoom lens. Once again, I urge anyone with a camcorder to experiment for themselves.

The color balance problems are suspicious, but they are evidence of nothing more than the color balance being tweaked.

As usual, Simon Shack has tossed a perfect softball to agent Orange Anthony Lawson, who is today circulating an email debunking SC9. Do you see how disinformation works? Shack and Grable screw up the evidence for no planes, Lawson and Salter debunk it, and people think no planers are crazy.

It's quite a brilliant strategy, I must admit.

-Ace Baker




From: lawson911@gmail.com
Subject: Correctiion: September Clues Part 9
Date: April 8, 2008 6:53:36 AM PDT
To: ODEION@yahoogroups.com, aussiesoundengineer@gmail.com, denzen@umich.edu, nateflach@hotmail.com, urban-badger@hotmail.co.uk, rgage@ae911truth.org, jimveda37@yahoo.com, jshelton@ae911truth.org, TBach65@aol.com, and 10 more…
Cc: simonshack@libero.it, ace@acebaker.com, jfetzer@d.umn.edu, econrn@suddenlink.net

Hello,

I know that the subject of no planes has been kind-of banned, among many of us, by mutual consent, but if you feel like a good laugh, you really should take a look at Simon Shack's latest, and hopefully, final, resistible pièce de résistance at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eie1lDKDNxA

His presentation is so audacious, as well as confident that several people have said that they were almost taken in by it, like almost believing that the magician has really cut the lady in half and re-joined her, before your very eyes. It is hard to know if Mr Shack is simply naïve or a clever manipulator, but he has taken many clips, from the video coverage of the tragic events of 9/11 and, by calling them into question, makes you do a double-take and almost mentally concede that he might have a point. Almost, but not quite.

Every day—whether walking or driving in a car—we pass or approach objects which are at different distances from us, and our brain automatically processes this information, giving us a sense of the relative distances between these objects, which is largely based on prior visual experiences as to their size as well as other, subconscious visual triggers. However, when such familiar objects are photographed, filmed or videoed, the photographer may use a lens which will distort these relationships, and the resulting images can often appear, at first glance, to be unreal or wrong, when we mentally compare them with what we remember as being normal.

Even though such visual manipulations have been commonplace since the first telephoto lens was fixed to a camera, Mr Shack, apparently, is unaware of these factors, or he has deliberately chosen to ignore them, because he now maintains that the 9/11 television coverage was a gigantic video hoax, from beginning to end, and that he has "proven" it by pointing out these common visual distortions—they are not discrepancies—in the video coverage.

Much of the coverage was, of necessity, videoed using zoom lenses mounted on cameras which were attached to sophisticated heli-mounts, which allowed their operators to zoom in and out on the Twin Towers, keeping them in focus, as well as reasonably vertical, and in the same relative positions in frame, while the helicopters flew around them. As a result, many sections of these shots were taken with the zoom lenses set at long focal-lengths.

One ridiculous claim, in particular, stands out: it is commonly known as the "Moving Bridge" shot, because several "experts" have maintained that the Verrazano Narrows bridge moves, during a zoom out from the smoking Towers. Of course the bridge does not move, it is the camera which was moving, from right-to-left, and also zooming out during the shot. This combination reduced the apparent motion-parallax effect, as the South Tower is increasingly unmasked by the North Tower, which was only about 164 feet from it. However, the Verrazano Bridge was 7.1 miles away—37,488 feet, or 288 times more distant—so it naturally appears to move quite a lot, in the frame. But not, as Simon Shack would have us believe: because the shot was a trick, or a composite or an overlay or anything else, other than a figment of his fertile imagination.

I have tried to post some comments about this video, in the appropriate place, but it seems that I have been blocked, so here they are, meant for the perpetrator of this nonsense:



This video is absurd. A 12 year old with a basic knowledge of viewing perspectives and motion parallax would be able to refute your nonsense, using Lego bricks and a viewer: e.g. a digital camera.

Motion parallax is the apparent shift of an object's position against a given background, and is caused by a change in the observer's position. In the cases you've highlighted, the camera positions vary, either because they are different cameras or a single camera moving/zooming during a shot.

The alleged discrepancies between building sizes, in different shots, are also phoney. They can be explained by the viewing angles of the cameras in question, and the distances to each of the objects. An imaginary (impossible) viewing angle of zero degrees would make all objects, no matter the distance, appear the same relative size in an image. As the (real) angle is increased, so the image sizes of the objects vary, relative to their distance from the camera. Optics 101. Go read a book!


If you do happen to view the video, please make a comment to try and set Mr Shack's delusional followers straight.

Anthony




From: ace@acebaker.com
Subject: Re: September Clues Part 9
Date: April 8, 2008 8:00:19 AM PDT
To: lawson911@gmail.com
Cc: ODEION@yahoogroups.com, aussiesoundengineer@gmail.com, denzen@umich.edu, nateflach@hotmail.com, urban-badger@hotmail.co.uk, rgage@ae911truth.org, jimveda37@yahoo.com, jshelton@ae911truth.org, TBach65@aol.com, sggoodale@yahoo.com, truthaction@hotmail.com, and 12 more…

Dear Anthony Lawson,

Simon Shack is disinfo, poisoning the proof of no planes. I've debunked the parallax hoax ad nauseam, e.g. here:

http://acebaker.blogspot.com/2008/02/correcting-mistakes-in-no-planes.html

I will appear on the Hardfire television program, taping April 24, and present the correct evidence for no planes. If any of you would like to attempt to defend the plane theory, here are some preliminary questions here that you should answer:

http://acebaker.blogspot.com/2008/02/questions-for-911-plane-theorists.html

Here's an under-construction version of my chapter in the upcoming Scholars book:

http://acebaker.blogspot.com/2008/03/fox-five-fakery-contents.html

Sincerely,


Ace Baker