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Debris eyewitnesses
Fourteen eyewitnesses claim to have seen debris from the "757
impact". If there
really had been any debris from the "757 impact" we would think that
the evidence would be clear and uncontrovertible, but this is hardly the case.
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Members of Congress have been shuttled to the site to inspect
the damage. Rep. Judy Biggert (R-Ill.) made the trip on
Thursday. She saw remnants of the airplane. ''There was a
seat from a plane, there was part of the tail and then there was
a part of green metal, I could not tell what it was, a part of
the outside of the plane,'' she said. ''It smelled like it was
still burning.''
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This testimony contradicts Terry Mitchell, who went through the
Pentagon with a video camera and did not capture any evidence of
an airliner, certainly nothing as identifiable as a seat, or part
of the tail. Biggert is a Republican congresswoman.
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Donald R. Bouchoux, 53, a retired Naval officer, a Great Falls
resident, a Vietnam veteran and former commanding officer of a
Navy fighter squadron, was driving west from Tysons Corner to
the Pentagon for a 10am meeting. He wrote: At 9:40 a.m. I was
driving down Washington Boulevard (Route 27) along the side of
the Pentagon when the aircraft crossed about 200 yards [should
be more than 150 yards from the impact] in front of me
and impacted the side of the building. There was an enormous
fireball, followed about two seconds later by debris raining
down. The car moved about a foot to the right when the shock
wave hit. I had what must have been an emergency oxygen bottle
from the airplane go flying down across the front of my Explorer
and then a second piece of jagged metal come down on the right
side of the car. Washington Post, Sept. 20, 2001
http://web.lexis-nexis.com...
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Bouchoux is a former Naval commanding officer, so he met our
"insider" criterion.
Photographs of Washington Blvd. do not
show any debris whatsoever, certainly nothing as large as an
emergency oxygen bottle. While pieces of light aluminum
sheet metal should have reflected off the wall of the Pentagon, we are surprised
that anything as heavy as an oxygen bottle would do so. A
broken neck on a pressurized gas bottle could turn it into a
missile, but this is rather unlikely.
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Staff Sgt. Chris Braman : The lawn was littered with twisted
pieces of aluminum. He saw one chunk painted with the letter
``A,'' another with a ``C.'' It didn't occur to Braman what the
letters signified until a man in the crowd stooped to pick up
one of the smaller metal shards. He examined it for a moment,
then announced: ``This was a jet.''
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Odd that these two pieces of debris (the "A" and
"C") were not saved or
photographed. Although of course they might have come from a
helicopter. We are not told what it was about the small
metal shards, that convinced the "man in the crowd" that
the debris was from a jet.
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At the Pentagon, employees had heard about or seen footage of
the World Trade Centre attack when they felt their own building
shake. Ervin Brown, who works at the Pentagon, said he saw
pieces of what appeared to be small aircraft on the ground, and
the part of the building by the heliport had collapsed.
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These might have been pieces of the Pentagon facade, or pieces of
the construction trailers that were blown up, or even pieces of a
helicopter (which would be a type of small aircraft...)
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We have no way of knowing what Damoose was looking at. No
information is provided about Damoose's affiliations or
background. No photographs at any significant distance
from the crash scene, show any debris at all.
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I hate to disappoint anyone, but here is the story behind the
photograph. At the time, I was a senior writer with Navy Times
newspaper. It is an independent weekly that is owned by the
Gannett Corporation (same owners as USA Today). I was at the
Navy Annex, up the hill from the Pentagon when I heard the
explosion. I always keep a digital camera in my backpack
briefcase just as a matter of habit. When the explosion happened
I ran down the hill to the site and arrived there approximately
10 minutes after the explosion. I saw the piece, that was near
the heliport pad and had to work around to get a shot if it with
the building in the background. Because the situation was still
fluid, I was able to get in close and make that image within
fifteen minutes of the explosion because security had yet to
shut off the area. I photographed it twice, with the newly
arrived fire trucks pouring water into the building in the
background. The collapse of the building above area happened
long after I left the scene. I was not even aware that that had
happened until that evening when I watched the news. My photos
were on the wire by noon. That was the only piece of wreckage of
any SIZE that I saw, but was by no means the ONLY piece. Right
after photographing that piece of wreckage, I also photographed
a triage area where medical personnel were tending to a
seriously burned man. A priest knelt in the middle of the area
and started to pray. I took that image and left immediately. As
I stepped onto the highway next to the triage area, I knelt down
to tie my shoe and all over the highway were small pieces of
aircraft skin, none bigger than a half-dollar. Anyone
familiar with aircraft has seen the greenish primer paint that
covers many interior metal surfaces - that is what these shards
were covered with. I was out of the immediate area photographing
other things within 20 minutes of the crash.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/frameup/message/1254
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Faram's statement that he arrived at the scene ten minutes after
the explosion, contradicts the account that Faram saw Father Stephen
McGraw leap out of his car and go to help the victims moments
after the crash. Faram's photographs do not show any half-dollar
sized pieces of aircraft skin. Faram is a Gannett
employee.
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"Traffic was at a standstill, so I parked on the shoulder,
not far from the scene and ran to the site. Next to me was a
cab from D.C., its windshield smashed out by pieces of lampposts.
There were pieces of the plane all over the highway,
pieces of wing, I think. (...) "There were a lot of people
with severe burns, severe contusions, severe lacerations, in
shock and emotional distress"
http://www.msnbc.com/news/635293.asp
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High resolution photographs of the taxi don't show any chunks of
aluminum on the highway at all, certainly not anything big enough
to be identified as a piece of the wing.
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From time spent on military aircraft as part of his job at the
Pentagon, Will Jarvis (who graduated with a bachelor of applied
science in 1987 while attending New College) knows what
aviation fuel smells like. That smell was his only clue that
a plane had crashed into the Pentagon, where he works as an
operations research analyst for the Office of the Secretary of
Defense. Jarvis, who was around the corner from the disaster,
tried but failed to see the plane when he left the building.
" There was just nothing left. It was incinerated. We
couldn't see a tail or a wing or anything," he says.
"Just a big black hole in the building with smoke pouring
out of it." For someone sitting only 300 metres away from
the carnage of American Airlines Flight 77, Jarvis and his
officemates were surprisingly well insulated from it. "We
thought the plane was a dump truck backing into the building,
because there was a lot of construction going on," he says.
The group noticed that the sky was darker than normal, but still
didn't think much of it. " Then I saw little bits of
silver falling from the sky," says Jarvis.
http://www.magazine.utoronto.ca/02winter/f02.htm#jarvis
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With all the explosions going on, who knows where those little
silvery bits came from. It's not clear where Jarvis was when
he saw this. Jarvis doesn't mention even seeing anything as
large as a half dollar.
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One of the aircraft's engines somehow ricocheted out of the
building and arched into the Pentagon's mall parking area
between the main building and the new loading dock facility,
said Charles H. Krohn, the Army's deputy chief of public
affairs. Those fleeing the building heard a loud secondary
explosion about 10 min. after the initial impact.
http://www.aviationnow.com/content/publication/awst/20010917/aw48.htm
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We thought that the engines were supposed to have been destroyed when they hit the
electrical trailer or the concrete exhaust vent. Probst said
that he watched one of the engines "vaporize". At
any rate, we simply can't imagine how an engine could bounce
intact off the building and into the parking lot, especially when
there were holes punched in the Pentagon facade where both engines
should have gone in. Unless of course one engine bounced off
of a broken, bent-out column?
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Somebody sent this as an email to a website. The author might be Lt. Col.
McClain, and then again it might be a high school student from
Chicago.
Why didn't anybody take any photographs of the
engines as they were sitting in the parking lot? What about the engine that
Probst said was vaporized, was it there in the parking lot too?
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Naval officer Clyde Ragland, who works near the Pentagon, was
stuck in his office because the streets outside were clogged
with traffic. He and his co-workers were watching television
reports of the disaster in New York when "we gazed out our
own windows and, to our horror and disbelief, saw huge billows
of black smoke rising from the northeast, in the direction of
D.C. and the river . . . and the Pentagon." Ragland
described billowing black smoke and " what looked like
white confetti raining down everywhere." He said it
soon became apparent "that the 'confetti' was little
bits of airplane, falling down after being flung high into the
bright, blue sky."
http://bernie.house.gov/documents/articles/20010912170838.asp
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la%2D091201main.story
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There was no confetti visible on the highway or the lawn.
The article does not provide much information about the location
of Ragland's office.
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USAToday.com Multimedia Editor, saw it all: an American Airlines
jetliner fly left to right across his field of vision as he
commuted to work Tuesday morning. It was highly unusual. The
large plane was 20 feet off the ground and a mere 50 to 75 yards
from his windshield. Two seconds later and before he could see
if the landing gear was down or any of the horror- struck faces
inside, the plane slammed into the west wall of the Pentagon 100
yards away. My first thought was he's not going to make it
across the river to National Airport. But whoever was flying the
plane made no attempt to change direction. It was coming in at a
high rate of speed, but not at a steep angle-- almost like a
heat-seeking missile was locked onto its target and staying
dead on course... "I didn't feel anything coming out of the
Pentagon [in terms of debris]," he said. "A couple of
minutes later, police cars and fire trucks headed to the
scene." Ironically, the passage of emergency vehicles got
traffic moving again, which was now crunching over twisted
metal Sucherman guessed was the skin of the plane.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,9306,00.asp
I heard a sonic boom and then the impact, the explosion.
... There were light poles down. There was what appeared to be
the outside covering of the jet strewn about. ... Within about
two minutes there were firetucks on the scene. Within a minute
another plane started veering up and to the side. At that point
it wasn't clear if that plane was trying to manouver out of the
air space or if that plane was coming round for another hit.
(Audio)
http://play.rbn.com/?url=usat/usat/g2demand/010911sucherman.ra&
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Gerard Holmgren carefully parsed the eweek article, and noted that
Sucherman was not actually quoted as having seen the impact -- he
may have only seen the 757 pass in front of his windshield.
Like Holmgren, we have been unable to access the video files.
We would make our usual remarks that the
high-resolution photographs did not show chunks of twisted metal
on the highway, other eyewitnesses specifically mentioned that
there was no debris on the highway, and Sucherman is yet another
member of the USA Today editorial staff.
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FBI evidence teams combing the area of impact along the
building's perimeter found parts of the fuselage from the Boeing
757, said Michael Tamillow, a battalion chief and search and
rescue expert for the Fairfax County, Virginia, Fire Department.
No large pieces apparently survived.
http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/09/12/pentagon.terrorism/
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The piece of wreckage that Mark Faram allegedly photographed,
should have been large enough to mention as a result of the FBI
team searching the area.
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Around 9:40 a.m. I reached the heliport area (beside the
Pentagon). So I got about 100 yards or so past the heliport and
then all of the sudden I heard this loud screeching sound that
just came out of nowhere and it intensified. This huge WHOOSH!
And something made me look in my rearview mirror and by the time
I looked up I saw the side of the Pentagon explode. I was
stunned. It was just so surreal, like something out of a movie,
like Die Hard. The side of a building just exploded! As the
fireball got higher and higher, you saw this debris go up in the
air. I am watching this in my rearview mirror, and then I
thought, Oh my God, there is debris coming toward me! So
my reaction was, I ducked into my passenger seat and I heard
the pitter-patter of pebbles and concrete bouncing off my
car. And the next thing you know, I heard this big crash come
from somewhere. It sounded like glass being shattered and I
thought maybe, at first, it was one of my windows so I popped up
to look but everything was fine. But when I looked to the car
next to me I realized that something went through (the
drivers) rear windshield and shattered it. There was a hole
where you could see that something went through it. I put the
car in park - it is amazing how instinct takes over because I
will never know how it is I kept my foot on the brake when I
ducked at the same time. I should have rammed right into the guy
in front of me. I got out of the car and the guy in front of me,
he and I just looked at each other. It seemed like everybody who
was on the road got out of their cars and just looked in
disbelief as the fireball just kept getting bigger and bigger.
My jaw was dropped, his jaw was dropped, and then, at that
point, something about trying to make sure people were OK
overtook me and I started going around to the people in the
other cars to see if they were all right.I and the guy in front
of me went to the car next to me and asked the driver if he was
all right and if he was OK to drive. He was in shock, you could
tell. He just kept looking straight ahead. He didn't even look
back, he was so fixated on looking north. He didn't want to look
south at the Pentagon. And it took a couple of times for me and
the other guy to say, Can you drive? Hello? Are you OK? Are you
OK? And he said, Yeah, I think I can drive. We asked him again,
Can you drive? and that time he was more sure and said, Yes,
yes, I can drive. Then both I and the guy in front of me looked
at his rear windshield and saw what was about a four-inch hole
in it and the rest of the window was shattered as if someone
took a baseball bat to it. At that point I realized - you see at
that point I didn't know it was a plane, I thought it was a
missile strike - how dangerous things were. And I just
started yelling, We gotta get out of here, to the guy in front
of me - and he agreed - and we started yelling at people, Get
back in your cars! We gotta get the f--- out of here! And I just
kept repeating, Get in your cars! Let's go, let's go! Get the
f--- out of here. Go! Go! Go! And people must have listened
because down the road you heard more people telling everyone to
get in their cars and go. Cars were going over the median on
Route 27 because there wasn't any traffic coming southbound
toward the Pentagon. People were hopping over it any way they
could, on the grass, anything. It was a little scary at that
point. Pulling away from the Pentagon there was tons of stuff
on the ground, big pieces of metal, concrete, everything. We
got up to a certain point and there was this huge piece of
something - I mean it was big, it looked like a piece of an
engine or something - in the road. And there was somebody,
definitely a security guard or maybe a military person, with his
car in front of it making sure no one touched it. (...) I
looked back and I saw the fire, it was just huge and just
incredible. I still cannot believe it. At that point in
time, I remembered I had a camera in my trunk. I got off an
off-ramp beside the Pentagon and parked my car in the grass and
started taking pictures. The whole time I was taking pictures it
was so detailed. I could this huge piece of a wheel on fire
through the black smoke, but I could not see into the Pentagon
itself.
http://www.counseling.org/ctonline/news/amazing1001.htm
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Terronez mentions that he is in a "surreal" situation,
"like Die-Hard". However, in general, he
seems to be a credible witness. Terronez does not
claim to have seen the impact. We aren't clear on which
direction Terronez went after the crash -- since he was in a hurry
to get out, and traffic ahead was blocked, did he also turn around
and go south? The Riskus photos of the southgoing highway
don't show any guards parked in front of huge chunks of debris,
and neither do any other sources mention this.
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Alan Wallace usually worked out of the Fort Myer fire station,
but on Sept. 11 he was one of three firefighters assigned to
the Pentagon's heliport. Along with crew members Mark
Skipper and Dennis Young, Wallace arrived around 7:30 in the
morning. After a quick breakfast, the 55-year-old firefighter
moved the station's firetruck out of the firehouse. President
Bush had used the heliport the day before: he'd motorcaded to
the Pentagon, then flown to Andrews Air Force Base for a trip to
Florida. Bush was scheduled to return to the Pentagon helipad
later on Tuesday, Wallace says. So Wallace wanted the firetruck
out of the station before Secret Service vehicles arrived and
blocked its way. He parked it perpendicular to the west wall of
the Pentagon. Wallace and Skipper were walking along the right
side of the truck (Young was in the station) when the two looked
up and saw an airplane. It was about 25 feet off the ground and
just 200 yards away-the length of two football fields. They had
heard about the WTC disaster and had little doubt what was
coming next. "Let's go," Wallace yelled. Both men ran.
Wallace ran back toward the west side of the station, toward a
nine-passenger Ford van. "My plans were to run until I
caught on fire," he says. He didn't know how long he'd have
or whether he could outrun the oncoming plane. Skipper ran north
into an open field. Wallace hadn't gotten far when the plane
hit. "I hadn't even reached the back of the van when I felt
the fireball. I felt the blast," he says. He hit the
blacktop near the left rear tire of the van and quickly shimmied
underneath. "I remember feeling pressure, a lot of heat,"
he says. He crawled toward the front of the van, then emerged to
see Skipper out in the field, still standing. " Everything
is on fire. The grass is on fire. The building is on fire. The
firehouse is on fire," Wallace recalls. "There was
fire everywhere. Areas of the blacktop were on fire."
Wallace ran over to Skipper, who said he was OK, too. They
compared injuries-burned arms, minor cuts, scraped skin. He ran
back into the station to try to suit up. But he found debris
everywhere. The ceiling had crumbled, there were broken lights
and drywall everywhere. His boots were on fire. His fire
pants filled with debris. The fire alarm was blaring.Then
Wallace heard someone call from outside. "We need help over
here," someone yelled. He ran back outside over to the
Pentagon building and helped lower people out of a first-floor
window, still some six feet off the ground. He helped 10 to 15
people to safety. Most could walk, though he helped carry one
badly burned man. "He wasn't too responsive," Wallace
recalls. He helped two other men drag him to the other side of
the heliport then he turned around. "I've got to go
back," he said. Working with a civilian, Wallace headed
back to the building. He could hear more cries for help from
inside. There was trash and debris everywhere. The trees were
on fire. Wallace headed into the building through an open
door, but couldn't find anyone else to save. "After a while
I didn't hear anybody calling anymore," he says. "They
probably found another way out."
http://www.msnbc.com/news/635293.asp
About 9:40, Alan Wallace had finished fixing the foam metering
valve on the back of his fire truck parked in the Pentagon fire
station and walked to the front of the station. He looked up and
saw a jetliner coming straight at him. It was about 25 feet off
the ground, no landing wheels visible, a few hundred yards away
and closing fast. "Runnnnn!" he yelled to a pal. There
was no time to look back, barely time to scramble. He made it
about 30 feet, heard a terrible roar, felt the heat, and dove
underneath a van, skinning his stomach as he slid along the
blacktop, sailing under it as though he were riding a luge. The
van protected him against burning metal that was flying around.
A few seconds later he was sliding back out to check on his
friend and then race back to the firetruck. He jumped in, threw
it into gear, but the accelerator was dead. The entire back of
the truck was destroyed, the cab on fire. He grabbed the radio
headset and called the main station at Fort Myer to report the
unimaginable. The sun was still low in the sky, obscured by the
Pentagon and the enormous billowing clouds of acrid smoke,
making it hauntingly dark. The ground was on fire. Trees were
on fire. Hot slices of aluminum were everywhere. Wallace
could hear voices crying for help and moved toward them. People
were coming out a window head first, landing on him. He had
faced incoming fire before -- he was with the hospital corps in
Vietnam when mortars and rocket shells dropped on the operating
room near Da Nang -- but he had never witnessed anything of
this devastating intensity.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38407-2001Sep15
The morning of Sept. 11 was crystal clear in Washington, still
summer warm. It would be easy to relax on a morning like that,
but outside the Pentagon, firefighter Alan Wallace and the
safety crew at the Pentagon's heliport pad already were too
busy. President Bush was scheduled to fly from Florida that
afternoon, and his helicopter, Marine One, would carry him to
the Pentagon. Secret Service was everywhere and their
cars blocked the driveway. So the meticulous Wallace moved the
fire truck out of the way, parking it about 15 feet from the
Pentagon. That's when Wallace got a call from his chief at
nearby Fort Myer telling him of the attacks in New York and to
be on alert. Minutes later, Wallace and his buddy Mark Skipper
looked up and saw the gleam of a silver jetliner. But it was
flying too low. Maybe less than 25 feet off the ground. And it
was heading right at them. "I yelled to Mark, 'Let's go!'
" He bolted to the right, and a second later felt the
searing heat of the blast behind him. He hit the ground and
rolled under a parked van as a fire engulfed his fire truck,
then blew through the firehouse. Wallace got back to his feet,
saw Skipper had escaped, then rushed to the scorched fire truck
to see if it would run, but the truck only belched fire. It
wouldn't move. So Wallace switched on the truck's radio.
"Foam 61 to Fort Myer," he said. "We have had a
commercial carrier crash into the west side of the Pentagon at
the heliport, Washington Boulevard side. The crew is OK. The
airplane was a 757 Boeing or a 320 Airbus." Although he
was still frantic and shaken, Wallace's report turned out to be
painfully accurate. (...) With bits of cloth and fiberglass
still raining down outside the blackened section of the
Pentagon, Alan Wallace's instincts focused on trying to help
somehow. The truck was useless. So he dashed for his gear inside
the torched firehouse. His boots were filled with debris. His
suspenders were on fire. Wallace and two other firefighters
rushed to a window, where Pentagon employees were crammed
together, frantic to escape the darkness. Fire burst through
the windows above them. The ground burned near Wallace with heat
so hot he thought several times that his pants were on fire.
They began grabbing arms and pulling people out - 15 in all.
" They were all burned," Wallace said. But there
wasn't time for Wallace and the other firefighters to get
emotional. "We just seemed to stay in one mode there until
we ran out of people coming out," Wallace said. And no one
was sure how many more remained inside.
www.gosanangelo.com...
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Wallace supposedly was able yell at his companion and then to
outrun the oncoming plane, at least for the distance from his
firetruck to a passenger van, although the jet would have taken
about one second to traverse the last 200 yards. Perhaps Wallace saw the oncoming plane a little earlier than he
says, and perhaps it was a little higher in altitude than that
25-foot estimate. At any rate, once Wallace had dived for
cover, he was hardly in a position to see exactly what transpired.
The firehouse was supposedly on fire, but
photographs show it in nearly pristine condition. The
photographs also show that the fire truck was not melted or
useless or destroyed, but rather its firehoses proved quite useful
in extinguishing the Pentagon fire.
The only debris mentioned here is "bits of cloth and
fiberglass" and "Hot slices of aluminum" (which
might describe the chunks of aluminum siding that came off the
Pentagon walls, or perhaps pieces of the construction trailers
that were blown up.)
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