Reply #37: It started

[Bolo Boffin]

as far as I know, with the video of a dripping hot substance from the South Tower. This was compared with videos of thermite reactions.

Then Stephen Jones got a hold of a hunk of metal from the towers. He began testing for trace elements of thermite, or was it -mate at that point? Anyway, he was finding them. However, the things he was looking are used in other ways in office buildings as well.

By then, people had copped to the fact that it wasn't thermite dripping out of the South Tower. It became steel in the minds of our CT friends, because it was now being hooked up to these reports of orange-hot metals underneath the pile. Some reports even are of molten pools of metal, and some reports lasted up until eight weeks after the collapse. In the mind of a conspiracy theorist, the only way this could happen was the thermite reaction.

The thermite hypothesis not only eliminates the idea of chemical evidence (because they think they have chemical evidence as well), but it eliminates the need to explain the relative paucity of explosive events that bring down the towers. Sure, we still got people who will post a long list of "sounded like bombs going off" witnesses, but the rhetorical genius of the thermite hypothesis is that they can use our arguments against bombs in conjunction with thermite - thermite doesn't make big booming noises going off.

As yet, no one has decribed a viable way of transporting that much thermite into the buildings, how it was attached to the columns and forced to do the work of cutting the columns, etc. It is a hypothesis that unites some video and some shoddily interpreted chemical evidence into a position that appears to eliminate some difficulties (in exchange for others) and also gives CTers a chance to look smarter than the pigeons they come in contact with, because who's ever heard of thermite?