Reply #12: Hi Zaphod

[paulthompson]

I hope you don't mind my criticism of the essay you cowrote. I think there's a lot of great research in there, I just object to the needless second plane postulation.

>I don`t think that the plain was just flying upside down.

I agree. I hope you and others look into such issues. I have a personal hunch about what happened, though it's just a hunch. Let us assume MIHOP for a minute and pretend you're one of the evil plotters and you want to destroy Flight 93. If you use a fighter to shoot it down with a missile, that's dangerous because you might have witnesses who see the fighter, the explosion, and so on. Wouldn't it be better to take it down without a missile? It turns out there is a way. Here's an entry from my book:

August 13, 2002: Electronic Warfare Methods May Have Brought Flight 93 Down
The Independent carries a story entitled, “Unanswered Questions: The Mystery of Flight 93,” a rare critique of the official version of events around that plane’s crash. Most of the information is a summation of what was reported before. However, there is one interesting new theory. Theorizing why witnesses did not see smoke from the faltering plane, the article points to the 1996 research of Harvard academic Elaine Scarry, “showing that the Air Force and the Pentagon have conducted extensive research on ‘electronic warfare applications’ with the possible capacity to intentionally disrupt the mechanisms of an aeroplane in such a way as to provoke, for example, an uncontrollable dive. Scarry also reports that U.S. Customs aircraft are already equipped with such weaponry; as are some C-130 Air Force transport planes. The FBI has stated that, apart from the enigmatic Falcon business jet, there was a C-130 military cargo plane within 25 miles of the passenger jet when it crashed. According to the Scarry findings, in 1995 the Air Force installed ‘electronic suites’ in at least 28 of its C-130s—capable, among other things, of emitting lethal jamming signals.” (INDEPENDENT, 8/13/02)

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Not only was there a C-130 within range to take it out electronically, but curiously it was the same C-130 only a couple of hundred yards from Flight 77 when it crashed. I don't know what that means, but it's damned curious.

Everything I've heard about Flight 93 before it crashed sounds to me like a pilot trying to keep it in the air but slowly losing control. It appears to have been very low to the ground, then actually went up to about 2,000 feet, when it came to a complete stop and plummeted straight into the ground. Before that, it was sputtering, revving, turning over, wobbling, etc... Big passenger planes are no lithe fighters and travelling that fast that low to the ground would have been EXTREMELY stressful on the plane in the first place (some say it's not even possible for that kind of plane to fly that low that fast for very long and not break up in mid-air). Then add the extra difficulty of the electronic attack. So I imagine stress from all of this caused the plane to leak contents even before it crashed. This would also explain why there was no smoke, or not much.

Anyways, just a hunch. I think looking into these things would be much more fruitful than second plane theories. Perhaps you could follow up on your work with a more detailed map of witnesses, everything we know them to have said, and thus get a better idea of what was happening to the plane in its last few minutes.