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The Five-Sided Fantasy Island

An analysis of the Pentagon crash on 9-11

By Richard Stanley & Jerry Russell version 1.0 (1/10/2004) page 1 of 5

Beginning with the appearance of the "Hunt the Boeing" website by Thierry Meyssan, there has been a dedicated cadre of researchers -- including Dick Eastman, Eric Hufschmid, Gerard Holmgren, Jeff Strahl, Kee Dewdney, Carol Valentine and others -- who have argued that the Pentagon attack on 9/11 was an outrageous fraud, and that no 757 aircraft struck the Pentagon. This has generated vociferous controversy -- not so much among the general public, who find the idea of a black-ops "magic show" on 9-11 to be about as likely as any other X-Files plot involving flying saucers and shape-shifting aliens -- but among the small community of 9-11 researchers and skeptics. The lack of incontrovertible physical evidence of a 757 attack has been highly troubling, yet at the same time the amount of eyewitness testimony and physical evidence that a 757 struck the Pentagon seems substantial (at least on a casual analysis) and many of the arguments in favor of the missile theory have been subjected to relentless attacks by debunkers such as Sarah Roberts, Ron Harvey, John Judge, Michael Rivero, and JP Desmoulins.

We do not pretend that our analysis is likely to resolve this dispute -- but we do attempt to show that some of the most appealing arguments that have been used by "missile theory" advocates are based on flawed intuition. Investigators have been going down the "garden path" by over-reacting to anomalies -- such as the small hole size and the lack of sizable wing debris -- which can ultimately be explained in terms of the physics of aircraft strikes against reinforced concrete targets.

Nevertheless, there is a residual level of suspicious circumstances, video and photographic evidence, and unexplained eyewitness testimony, which raise the highly disturbing possibility that the entire Pentagon scenario was indeed a "Five Sided Fantasy Island" episode -- a pyrotechnical magic show, crafted like a Hollywood special effect. While a missile or a small attack jet may very well have been involved (as most skeptics have claimed), it's also quite possible that the damage to the Pentagon may have been entirely the result of a series of explosive demolitions, while a 757 did a low-altitude fly-over to provide a convincing illusion of an airliner impact. If this is the case, the perpetrators' motives, methods and opportunity are all easy enough to identify.

If the "757 attack" was a fraud, then it was not carried out by incompetent jerks who couldn't figure out how big the hole should have been, or what sort of engines are used in a 757. It was a deliberate, carefully planned deception which was designed and implemented to be as indistinguishable as possible from the "real McCoy". Thus, we find a very high level of detailed accuracy in the photographic record of the incident. Many aspects appear to comport very precisely with the explanation that a 757 impacted the Pentagon west wedge, just as the "official story" says.

We also acknowledge the likelihood that some of the suspicious and confusing evidence may have been intentionally planted by intelligence operatives, either to hide the scam and muddy the waters (if indeed there was no 757 that hit the Pentagon) -- or, in order to give subtle support to the Pentagon missile controversy, and draw attention away from other aspects of 9-11 which present a much more compelling case for government complicity. If this latter explanation is correct, then perhaps 9-11 investigators can be forgiven for their own imaginative reconstructions of cruise missiles and F-16 attack jets.

Regardless of the truth of the matter -- we believe that as long as there are unanswered questions about 9-11, the Pentagon crash deserves to be a matter of ongoing research and public inquiry.

Lacking an official 'conclusive' government investigation into the physical evidence of the Pentagon event of 9/11/2001, we can consider the ASCE Pentagon Building Performance report and its eyewitness testimony, and the scientific presentations referenced in that ASCE report, i.e. Sugano et al 1992 and the Purdue computer simulation, as definitive baselines for analysis. In other words, the unofficial official story.

References to reports, specifications, and witness commentary, and more photographs, are provided at the end of each page.

"The Plane! The Plane!" (Or the lack thereof...)

First frame from security camera video, purportedly showing a 757 approaching the Pentagon; with animated overlay, showing how a 757 should have looked, superimposed in the correct scale and perspective into the security camera image.

A set of five frames from a security camera video were released by Pentagon sources on March 7, 2002, and were shown widely on US media as evidence of a plane crash at the Pentagon. This was apparently in response to the increasing notoriety of Thierry Meyssan and his French best-seller, "L'effroyable imposture", or "The Big Lie".

However -- in a bizarre twist on the tale of the Emperor's Clothes -- none of these US media was willing to acknowledge the obvious, that there is no 757 aircraft visible in the surveillance camera image sequence. If anything, there appears to be the white exhaust plume of a missile, trailing behind what might be the tail of a small fighter such as an F-16 or Harrier jump jet. Advocates of the missile theory viewed this, at first, as "manna from Heaven". However, soon some investigators began to look carefully at this possible Trojan Horse, and found numerous questionable aspects: missing frames and evidence of other image manipulations.

Dick Eastman still maintains that the security camera video is valid evidence, arguing that a small "killer jet" was used to attack the Pentagon, while at the same time, Flight 77 flew quietly overhead, on its way to join the pattern at Reagan International Airport. But if Eastman's theory is correct, then shouldn't the high-flying 757 also appear somewhere in these security camera frames? Eastman's theory depends on a psychological masking effect well-known to stage magicians: a large, prominent and noisy object (the 757) can draw attention away from a smaller, less obvious object (the "killer jet") or the two could be confused and melded into one perception, but only if the two objects are close together in time and space. If there had been a 757 over-flight at any altitude up to 70 feet or so over the Pentagon (the height of the building itself) then it should have been visible within the view of the camera.

We believe that the controversy and bickering over these images is quite possibly what the government intended. Under these circumstances, the wise thing to do is neither to accept these images uncritically, nor to reject them outright. The most statesmanlike approach is simply to point out the fact that there is no 757 here -- and to demand persistently to see the original, unaltered and complete sequence of images from this camera. For that matter, why can't we see some of the other security camera film that was seized by the FBI, some reportedly within minutes after the crash?

If indeed these images are real (although perhaps touched-up to compensate for artifacts in the originals) -- then some whistle-blower from deep within the Pentagon may be (literally or figuratively) turning over in his grave, in amazement over the lack of widespread, national impact for this evidence. It is as if the Zapruder film, showing the President thrown "back and to the left", had been showed on national television in 1964 -- with the response being nothing but a collective shrug of the shoulders. (Actually, a few frames were shown out of order in 1963, to deliberately hide the facts -- and as James Fetzer et al have recently shown, to this day we still haven't seen the Zapruder film in anything resembling its original form.)