TheEmperorsNewBoeing


(Thanks to Sammy Klein for finding this link)

Hunt the Boeing is the lure, bait, and hook for a conspiracy theory: it lines up a series of news photos to imply that the pattern of damage at the Pentagon (only the lower floors of the outermost ring in a fairly narrow segment of wall) is flat-out inconsistent with the claim that a 757 was the implement of destruction.

This sort of speculation is open to some fairly simple sanity checks. For example, a CNN story entitled Images show September 11 Pentagon crash would seem like a fairly direct refutation of HtB's suggestions.

The photos (from a Pentagon security video) are pretty dramatic stuff, but it's kind of hard to tell whether a particular smudge is a 757 or atmospheric haze. Well, presumably these stills are just excerpts from the actual video, so let's click on that "play video" link.

Lo, it's Jamie McIntypre, narrating over an animation of these same fuzzy photos. So where's the plane, Jamie? "The sequence shows the plane coming in so low it can't be seen in the sky."

Read that last one back to yourself.


Now, I'm not ready to sign up as a believer in the full "Dreadful Imposture" theory behind HtB. I'm not a structural engineer, that plane had to have been diverted somewhere, and given the low frame rate, it seems perfectly reasonable that the critical moment fell between one frame and the next.

All the same, I trust CNN even less than I used to. The Pentagon asked them, "Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?" and CNN's answer was "you."