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Vague or indeterminate eyewitness accounts These
witness accounts, many of them extremely brief, do not provide sufficient detail
to determine whether the 757 struck the Pentagon on a low approach, or whether
it might have flown over the Pentagon. In many cases, the witnesses were
not in a position to have seen exactly what happened.
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Mrs. Deb Anlauf, resident of Colfax, Wisconsin, was in her 14th
floor of the Sheraton Hotel [located 1.6 mile from the
explosion], (immediately west of the Navy Annex) when she heard
a "loud roar": Suddenly I saw this plane right outside
my window. You felt like you could touch it; it was that close.
It was just incredible. "Then it shot straight across from
where we are and flew right into the Pentagon. It was just this
huge fireball that crashed into the wall (of the Pentagon). When
it hit, the whole hotel shook. (...) Jeff didn't feel the
impact of the plane crash as directly as his wife. He was
attending an environmental meeting on the second floor of the
hotel when the plane struck the Pentagon. About five seconds
before the crash, Jeff said he heard the sound of "tin
being dropped," likely as construction workers building an
addition to the hotel saw the plane and dropped their building
materials. "Then, about 5 seconds later, the whole hotel
shook," Jeff recalled. " I could feel it moving.
We said 'Oh, my gosh, what's going on?' "
http://www.leadertelegram.com/specialreports/attack/storydetail.asp?ID=7
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From a distance of 1.6 miles, looking into the morning sun, we are not sure whether Deb Anlauf
could have distinguished between an actual impact, and the magic
show we propose. (If only we could see the Sheraton's security
video....)
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"It was striking to me how little of the building was
involved in the fire," said Dr. Corley, who has
reviewed the Pentagon report. The fire, he said, "didn't
spread and and trap other people in the building. "While
125 Pentagon workers and 59 passengers and crew members on the
plane died, few if any of the workers who died were from outside
the immediate impact zone."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/05/nyregion/05TOWE.html
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Corley is not an eyewitness, he just reviewed the report.
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It doesn't say which roadway, or exactly where Dubill was
located. We don't question that the airliner passed very low
over Columbia Pike.
Dubill is Executive Editor of USA Today. He didn't claim
to have seen the impact.
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Eberle is President and CEO of GOPUSA. He doesn't specify his location and he didn't see the
impact.
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Steve Eiden, a truck driver, had picked up his cargo that
Tuesday morning in Williamsburg, Va., and was en route to New
York City and witnessed the aftermath. He took the Highway 95
loop in the area of the Pentagon and thought it odd to see a
plane in restricted airspace, thinking to himself it was odd
that it was flying so low. "You could almost see the
people in the windows," he said as he watched the plane
disappear behind a line of trees, followed by a tall plume of
black smoke. Then he saw the Pentagon on fire, and an
announcement came over the radio that the Pentagon had been hit.
http://www.baxterbulletin.com/ads/chronology2001/page2.html
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Eiden didn't see the final approach or the impact.
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If it weren't for Dr. Goff and others like him, the death toll on
9-11 would have been much greater. In honor of their
efforts, we hope that the perpetrators can be brought to justice.
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Nicholas Holland, an engineer with AMEC Construction Management
of Bethesda, Md., had spent the last two years working to
reinforce the walls. Two summers ago, a blast wall of reinforced
steel and concrete was installed right where the plane hit. It
stood for 25 minutes after it was hit before collapsing, long
enough for people to escape, Holland said.
http://www.detnews.com/2001/nation/0109/11/nation-291261.htm
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We are not sure whether Holland is claiming that he was present on
the scene.
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office when the explosion at the Pentagon occurred. "About
a third of the sky was blacked with smoke", He said. Hunt
was in contact with this office via e-mail on September 11 until
he left work and decided to walk, rather than catch a crowded
subway. "I talked to a number of average people in route
who said they saw the plane hovering over the Washington Mall
Area at an altitude lower that the height of the Washington
Monument" Hunt stated. He said they reported to him they
could clearly see the markings of an American Airlines airliner
and some even said they could make out faces of passengers in
the aircraft windows. Again, this is what Bob Hunt heard from
witnesses on the street in Washington D.C. on September 11,
2001.
http://www.sierratimes.com/02/03/15/arjj031502.htm
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Strangely, we have seen reports that this plane over the
Washington Mall area was photographed -- and it was a four-engine
plane. See http://letsroll911.org/ipw-web/bulletin/bb/viewtopic.php?t=3571
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Could hardly be more vague. Where is the high-rise?
How far away was the jet? How small?
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Rep. Mark Steven Kirk (R-Ill.), a Naval Reserve intelligence
officer. ''Apparently, the fire killed everybody in there,''
said Kirk, shortly after he learned that two friends perished in
the center. Kirk also went to the site. ''The first thing you
smell is the burning. And then you can smell the aviation fuel.
And then you can smell this sickly, rotten-meat smell,'' he
said.
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Thanks for that information, Rep. Kirk.
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No problem.
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``I saw a big jet flying close to the building coming at full
speed. There was a big noise when it hit the building,''
said Oscar Martinez, who witnessed the attack. Extrait article :
Away from the Pentagon, unexplained explosions were reported in
the vicinity of the State Department and the Capitol.
http://www.firehouse.com/terrorist/11_APdc.html
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Martinez could be an important witness for the Official
Story. As far as we can tell, he doesn't work for the
mainstream media and he doesn't work for the perpetrators.
We wish this interview was more extensive and detailed. How
high was the plane when it "hit the building"? Did
Martinez see any light poles going down?
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Traffic is normally slow right around the Pentagon as the road
winds and we line up to cross the 14th Street bridge heading
into the District of Columbia. I don't know what made me look
up, but I did and I saw a very low-flying American Airlines
plane that seemed to be accelerating. My first thought was just
'No, no, no, no,' because it was obvious the plane was not
heading to nearby Reagan National Airport. It was going to
crash.
http://depts.washington.edu/uweek/archives/2001.10.OCT_04/_article9.html
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Apparently, McCusker was on Highway 395, with a badly obscured view.
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I was right underneath the plane, said Kirk Milburn, a
construction supervisor for Atlantis Co., who was on the
Arlington National Cemetery exit of Interstate 395 when he said
he saw the plane heading for the Pentagon. "I heard a
plane. I saw it. I saw debris flying. I guess it was hitting
light poles," said Milburn. "It was like a WHOOOSH
whoosh, then there was fire and smoke, then I heard a second
explosion." - (Washington Post, September 11, 2001) -
http://
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/metro/daily/sep01/attack.html
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Again, a badly obscured view. He is conjecturing about the
light poles, and about the source of the flying debris he saw,
which might have been some other explosions taking place at or
near the Pentagon.
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This could be another key witness. A little more detail
would be nice. How high was the plane as it appeared to hit
the Pentagon? The essay is gone from the web.
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Well, in that case maybe Myers should have scrambled some
fighters, instead of just sending a C-130.
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At the Dulles tower, O'Brien saw the TV pictures from New York
and headed back to her post to help other planes quickly land.
"We started moving the planes as quickly as we could,"
she says. "Then I noticed the aircraft. It was an
unidentified plane to the southwest of Dulles, moving at a very
high rate of speed ... I had literally a blip and nothing
more." O'Brien asked the controller sitting next to her,
Tom Howell, if he saw it too. "I said, 'Oh my God, it looks
like he's headed to the White House,'" recalls Howell.
"I was yelling ... 'We've got a target headed right for the
White House!'" At a speed of about 500 miles an hour,
the plane was headed straight for what is known as P-56,
protected air space 56, which covers the White House and the
Capitol. " The speed, the maneuverability, the way that
he turned, we all thought in the radar room, all of us
experienced air traffic controllers, that that was a military
plane," says O'Brien. "You don't fly a 757 in that
manner. It's unsafe." The plane was between 12 and 14 miles
away, says O'Brien, "and it was just a countdown. Ten miles
west. Nine miles west ... Our supervisor picked up our line to
the White House and started relaying to them the information,
[that] we have an unidentified very fast-moving aircraft inbound
toward your vicinity, 8 miles west." Vice President Cheney
was rushed to a special basement bunker. White House staff
members were told to run away from the building. "And it
went six, five, four. And I had it in my mouth to say, three,
and all of a sudden the plane turned away. In the room, it was
almost a sense of relief. This must be a fighter. This must be
one of our guys sent in, scrambled to patrol our capital, and to
protect our president, and we sat back in our chairs and
breathed for just a second," says O'Brien. But the plane
continued to turn right until it had made a 360-degree maneuver.
"We lost radar contact with that aircraft. And we waited.
And we waited. And your heart is just beating out of your chest
waiting to hear what's happened," says O'Brien. "And
then the Washington National [Airport] controllers came over our
speakers in our room and said, 'Dulles, hold all of our inbound
traffic. The Pentagon's been hit.'"
http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/2020/2020/2020_011024_atc_feature.html
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O'Brien says that the plane was first noticed to the southwest, 14
miles away. It looked like it was headed to the white house,
but it wasn't flying over the mall area. So what was going
on with the four-engine plane seen over
the Washington Monument, was it doing sightseeing at low altitude
in the most controlled airspace in the world?
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When she thinks of that day, Ramos also recalls another burn
patient whom she treated just after getting Maj. Leibner into
the ambulance. "I turned around and a burn patient was
coming out," she said. "I was afraid I'd be caught
with her in the line of fire." The woman's clothes were
literally exploded off her body, Ramos said. "Her legs were
so bad that her skin was coming off," she said. "She
was really in shock. She had like a vacant stare. She was all
sweaty, her legs were burned, and her clothes were blasted off
her back because her back was bare. We got her onto a stretcher
face down and DiDi started an IV, and they were ready to take
her into the ambulance. We evacuated at that point." They
later heard that the burn patient died a couple of days
afterward. The victims exited the building in waves, but after a
short while they stopped coming out. "After the first hour,
it was very frustrating," Ramos said. "You felt
hopeless," added Lopez. "You can't go in and no one is
coming out." Ramos said she still gets galvanic skin
responses when she recalls the events of that morning.
"Everything was so busy, you couldn't remember
everything," she said. (...) It took some time before
Ramos, Maj. Leibner and others were able to talk openly of their
experiences that day. "We went to several debriefings,"
Ramos said.
http://www.usmedicine.com/article.cfm?articleID=384&issueID=38
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We applaud Ramos for her work, and we don't see anything in this
report that contradicts our viewpoint.
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This would be more useful if there were more information about
Regnery's location.
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Ryan's video interview is interesting, but he wasn't in position
to see the final approach.
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OK, it was a passenger plane.
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Jim Sutherland, a mortgage broker, was driving near the Pentagon
at 9:40 a.m. when he saw a 737 airplane 50 feet over
Interstate 395 heading in a straight line into the side of the
Pentagon. The fireball explosion that followed rocked his car.
Drivers began pulling over to the side - some taking pictures -
not quite believing what they were seeing.
http://www.abqtrib.com/archives/news01/091201_news_dcscene.shtml
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Sutherland is potentially an excellent witness, but we would like
more detail as to the apparent height of the plane at impact.
"50 feet over I-395" is a contradiction to the many
witnesses who saw the 757 over the Annex, or over Arlington
Cemetery.
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"I glanced up just at the point where the plane was going
into the building," said Carla Thompson, who works in an
Arlington, Va., office building about 1,000 yards from the
crash. "I saw an indentation in the building and then it
was just blown-up up--red, everything red," she said.
"Everybody was just starting to go crazy. I was
petrified."
http://bernie.house.gov/documents/articles/20010912170838.asp
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Since this was admittedly a last-second perception, it's hard to
be certain about its accuracy in detail. Does Thompson
remember anything about the plane, or did she just see an
"indentation" or an explosion? We don't mean
to seem flippant about this, but there's not much to go on
here. We aren't told who Thompson is, or who she works for.
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Terry C. Wallace - Southern Arizona Seismic Observatory - I
looked pretty hard -- and to be honest I can't find any
CONCLUSIVELY above the noise. I calculated an expected magnitude
assuming that the impact was on the wall, not vertical (like UA
flight), and got a magnitude of .8 The noise at all the stations
(closest is 60 km aways) is above this.
http://www.unknownnews.net/cdd060702.html
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Wallace is not an eyewitness, he's studying seismic data in
Arizona. The results are inconclusive.
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Washington, Mike Walter, USA Today, on the road when a jet
slammed into the Pentagon: "I was sitting in the northbound
on 27 and the traffic was, you know, typical rush-hour -- it had
ground to a standstill. I looked out my window and I saw this
plane, this jet, an American Airlines jet, coming. And I
thought, 'This doesn't add up, it's really low.' "And I saw
it. I mean it was like a cruise missile with wings. It
went right there and slammed right into the Pentagon. " Huge
explosion, great ball of fire, smoke started billowing out.
And then it was chaos on the highway as people tried to either
move around the traffic and go down, either forward or backward.
"We had a lady in front of me, who was backing up and
screaming, 'Everybody go back, go back, they've hit the
Pentagon.' "It was just sheer terror."
http://www.cnn.com/2001/CAREER/trends/09/11/witnesses/
http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/09/11/pentagon.terrorism/
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Gerard Holmgren at http://www.911dossier.co.uk/pen07.html
goes through several more Mike Walter interviews and
statements. Those interviews were marked by wild
inconsistencies, and seem to indicate that Walter did not
actually see the "impact".
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Winslow's view of the tail is a possible problem for some versions
of the "Plane
Bomb" theory. We'd like to know if Winslow noticed
anything about the light poles, or whether the airplane's engines
were running. Or the altitude of the impact.
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Ian Wyatt glanced into the sky just as a commercial airplane
roared by about 100 yards off the ground. "I was so scared
I thought it was coming after me and just ducked for
cover," said Wyatt, a 1999 graduate of Mary Washington
College who was walking to his federal job when terrorists
struck at the heart of the nation's defense yesterday morning.
"It was going so fast and it was so low," he said,
standing on Army-Navy Drive. "The only intelligent thought
that came into my head was, 'Oh my God, they hit the Pentagon.'
I could then hear cars squealing all around and people were just
stunned." After the plane struck the west side of
the famed five-sided building, thick black smoke billowed
from a huge crater as fire raged within.
http://www.fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2001/092001/09122001/390193/printer_friendly
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100 yards is higher than reported by most witnesses near the
scene. Army-Navy Drive is on the other side of I-395 from
the Pentagon, so Wyatt's view was probably quite obscured.
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Don Wright from the 12th floor, 1600 Wilson Boulevard, in
Rosslyn: " .. I watched this .. .it looked like a
commuter plane, two engined ... come down from the south
real low ... " (Real Audio)
http://www.sun-sentinel.com...
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Wright was watching from two miles away, across the cemetery.
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Madelyn Zakhem, executive secretary at the STC (VDOT Smart
Traffic Center), had just stepped outside for a break and was
seated on a bench when she heard what she thought was a jet
fighter directly overhead. It wasn't. It was an airliner coming
straight up Columbia Pike at tree-top level. "It was huge!
It was silver. It was low -- unbelievable! I could see the
cockpit. I fell to theground.... I was crying and scared".
"If I had been on top of our building, I would have been
close enough to reach up and catch it,"
http://www.roadstothefuture.com/VA_Sept21.txt
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The Smart Traffic Center is on Columbia Pike, across from the
Annex. She thought it
was a jet fighter -- what if she was correct about that? This
witness seems to be supporting the Eastman "killer jet"
theory, if anything. She didn't see the impact.
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