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September 11th 2001 - A Cruise Missile at The Pentagon (with videos)

Peter Wakefield Sault

A Cruise Missile at The Pentagon

1. American Airlines Flight 77

It seems that the general reaction to any suggestion that the Pentagon was not struck by American Airlines Flight 77 on September 11th 2001 is to ask what else could possibly have happened to the missing Boeing 757 and those aboard it. Stronger reactions include the levelling of indignant accusations of “disrespecting the memory of the dead” and the suchlike at the Flight 77 skeptic. Such an appeal to emotion has come to be known as a ‘shut up!’ argument; those who dare challenge the official line are depicted as ghouls intent on hindering ‘closure’ for the families and friends of the supposed victims. The strangest allegation of all — “discrediting the 9/11 truth movement” — comes from people who claim to be intent on discovering and revealing the real truth about the events of that day. What is of interest here about such condemnations is that they only ever get thrown around in the absence of hard facts upon which a solid case could rest. Their employment is actually a very good indication that their users have no real evidence to present in support of their beliefs.

An American Airlines 757

While the question of the fate of AA Flight 77 is certainly a good one it is nevertheless not this author's present intention to address it here but only to show from the available evidence that what actually struck the Pentagon was a cruise missile. The reader must draw his or her own conclusions about the ramifications of this.

A Cruise Missile at The Pentagon

2. The Pentagon Security Videos

On May 16th 2006, the U.S. Department of Defence released two short video clips to Judicial Watch, claiming that these videos show AA Flight 77 hitting the Pentagon. What the DoD actually released to JW were MPEG digitizations of the video clips, at a very much degraded resolution of 320 × 240 pixels. As far as I am aware, JW has never been able to ascertain the original format, as recorded from the cameras, of the video clips. Moreover, anyone who claims he or she can see a Boeing 757 in these clips has either a very vivid imagination or an interest in spreading false beliefs through the power of suggestion.

There have been many attempts to ‘enhance’ frames from these video clips, some of which amount to outright forgery. Such attempts are at best fatuous and the reader must accept that the original images are as good as it gets. Throughout this piece I have employed high-quality JPEG reproductions of individual frames at their original resolution of 320 × 240 pixels, and this can be verified by comparison with JW's MPEG video clips. If the reader has difficulty making out small details in these images, then welcome to the club and beware of charlatans peddling ‘enhancements’. There is enough detail in the images at their supplied resolution to make a clear case for a cruise missile strike.

The best that can be offered here are YouTube renditions into SWF (ShockWave Flash) files made from the Pentagon-supplied MPEGs. Inevitable degradation notwithstanding, here they are, courtesy of YouTube, for those who do not wish to navigate elsewhere.

A Cruise Missile at The Pentagon

3. Flight Characteristics

It is impossible that any kind of airplane, large or small, got into the position of the object shown entering the frame at right in the Pentagon security video without having gouged the ground at that point (see right-hand image above). It must be remembered that the object, whatever it may have been, had just dived or dropped at least 50 feet (15 metres) after crossing the highway to enter the field of vision already at ground level. As the whole world knows, there was not a mark on the Pentagon lawn after the event.

The reason it could not be an airplane is that airplanes swoop up and down, always pointing in the direction of flight, unlike cruise missiles which, because they are pilotless, can perform violent maneuvres known as ‘bump up/down’ wherein the attitude of the missile does not change while the missile changes its line of attack*. The design function of this maneuvre is the avoidance of incoming anti-missile rounds. Cruise missiles are designed to hug the ground (or sea) at a height of 6 feet (2 metres) during their final approaches, employing radars and high-speed electronics to achieve this. The bump up/down maneuvre is shown in the following Boeing graphic:—

*A cruise missile is steered with one or more onboard devices known as ‘Control Moment Gyroscopes’ (CMG). These control the direction that the missile points in, its attitude, and thereby its course. The wings, which swivel laterally in their entirety, can be used to cause a sudden rapid ascent or descent while the gyroscopes force the missile to maintain the same attitude. This is the maneuvre shown as “bump up/down” in the Boeing graphic.

A Cruise Missile at The Pentagon

4. The Transonic Shockwave

Some have claimed that while the object which struck the Pentagon was not a large commercial passenger jet, it was still an airplane. The usual candidate put forward is a smallish military jet airplane known as an ‘A3’. The evidence for this claim is a triangular shape which appears above the yellow barrier box in the Pentagon security video, as shown below in the right-hand image. To the right of the triangle can be seen what appears to be a trail of white smoke. Airplanes do not leave vapour trails at low altitude (the smoke trail is dealt with in the next section).

It is impossible that the triangular shape seen protruding above the yellow box in the Pentagon security video could be the tail fin of an airplane. For a start, no genuine airplane tail fin is pointed in that manner — all have an upper edge which is parallel to the principal axis and which is several feet long. Moreover, for an object travelling at, say, 500mph (800km/h), the fin would have moved about 12 feet in the duration of a single video frame (1/60th second exposure), hence would appear to be some 15 feet long. It must be remembered that the camera was static and was not tracking the object. At Mach 2 the fin would appear to be 40 feet long in any one frame of video. Whatever its appearance, it would not display a sharp point at the top such as we see in the Pentagon security video frame.

Assuming that the triangular apparition is not simply a trick of the light and smoke, which it could well be, there is a far more feasible explanation for it than an airplane tail fin — it is the upper half of a transonic shockwave. If this is the case then the object would have been reaching the transonic speed of about 750mph (1,200km/h) at the time that the video frame was captured.

Outline of Postulated Transonic Shockwave

Transonic Shockwave of An F8

A Cruise Missile at The Pentagon

5. The Smoke Trail

Key: A = ‘Fin’, B = Smoke trail

If it is indeed a smoke trail to the right of the ‘fin’, and it is hard to imagine it could be anything else, then it would be fair to assume that there is a similar, dense white smoke trail following the UFO.

Key: A = ‘UFO’, B = Smoke trail

Key: A = Smoke trail

Only a rocket motor produces a trail such as we see in the frames of the security videos. That automatically excludes any kind of airplane and also any kind of truck; any kind of vehicle, that is to say, that is not rocket-propelled. A cruise missile is propelled by a rocket motor for the first few minutes of flight, immediately after launch, while a solid fuel booster gets the missile up to the operating speed of its long-haul ramjet. This phase of a cruise missile's flight sequence is identified by “URAP” in the Boeing graphic of a ground-launched missile. If it was indeed a cruise missile then it must have been released from a plane at a not very great distance from the Pentagon. There are many witnesses to a large plane passing low and nearby, the same witnesses frequently reporting hearing the sound of an explosion coming from the direction of the Pentagon following their sightings of the plane*, although there is only one known eyewitness to the actual impact, Mr. Mike Walter of ‘USA Today Live’.

Evidently those responsible for the release of the Pentagon security videos to Judicial Watch had assumed that, accompanied by repeated strong doses of suggestion, the billowing smoke trail of a rocket engine would be seen by one and all as the fuselage of a Boeing 757.

*Apologists for the ‘9/11 Commission Report’ invariably misrepresent witness statements, characterizing them as “hundreds of eyewitnesses to a plane hitting the Pentagon”. This is, of course, the employment of a non-sequitur to mislead the unwary, the reality being that all such witnesses firstly saw the large plane and then quite separately heard an explosion after the plane had moved out of their fields of vision. The fact is that, with the sole exception of Mr Walter, none of them actually saw anything hit the Pentagon for the very simple reason that none of them could see the Pentagon. Two others who claim to have witnessed an AA 757 hit the Pentagon were at that time Pentagon employees, hence their testimony must be set aside because of the distinct possibility of it being spurious. In other words, they would say whatever their employer ordered them to say; an employer that is not famous for telling the truth.

A Cruise Missile at The Pentagon

6. Mike Walter

Mr Walter described a large plane coming in as “an American Airlines jet” and an impacting object that looked to him like “a cruise missile with wings”. He subsequently claimed that he didn't really mean that it looked like a cruise missile. One can hardly criticize Mr. Walter for any lack of certainty in his memories of the event, which must have been truly shocking to behold, although he now claims to be certain that he saw an airplane hit the Pentagon. Nevertheless, it is fair to ask how many people would describe an 18-wheeler as looking like a sports car, even if it was ramming a building at the time. It is also fair to ask how Mr Walter failed to notice the dense white smoke trail that is clearly visible in the security videos, especially in view of the fact that his keen powers of observation enabled him in a split second to positively identify the large plane as an American Airlines jet. Before, that is, its transmogrification into a “cruise missile with wings”. It would of course be unjust to characterise Mr Walter as having been a plant; he was clearly shocked and scared out of his wits hence not the most reliable of witnesses. In his own words, his feelings at the time were of “sheer terror”.

A Cruise Missile at The Pentagon

7. Donald Rumsfeld

Mike Walter was not the only person to use the word ‘missile’ in describing the object that hit the Pentagon. On October 12th 2001 then U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gave an interview to ‘Parade’ magazine.

Parade: “This is a question that's been asked by many Americans, but especially by the widows of September 11th. How were we so asleep at the switch? How did a war targeting civilians arrive on our homeland with seemingly no warning?”

Rumsfeld: “There were lots of warnings. The intelligence information that we get, it sometimes runs into the hundreds of alerts or pieces of intelligence a week. One looks at the worldwide, it's thousands. And the task is to sort through it and see what you can find. And as you find things, the law enforcement officials who have the responsibility to deal with that type of thing — the FBI at the federal level, and although it is not, it's an investigative service as opposed to a police force, it's not a federal police force, as you know. But the state and local law enforcement officials have the responsibility for dealing with those kinds of issues.

“They [find a lot] and any number of terrorist efforts have been dissuaded, deterred or stopped by good intelligence gathering and good preventive work. It is a truth that a terrorist can attack any time, any place, using any technique and it's physically impossible to defend at every time and every place against every conceivable technique. Here we're talking about plastic knives and using an American Airlines flight filled with our citizens, and the missile to damage this building [the Pentagon] and similar (inaudible) that damaged the World Trade Center. The only way to deal with this problem is by taking the battle to the terrorists, wherever they are, and dealing with them.”

The evidence of the statements of Mike Walter and Donald Rumsfeld does not seem so tenuous and the statements themselves are not so easily dismissed as metaphorical when viewed in the context of the flight characteristics of the ‘UFO’ and of the smoke trail that followed behind it. Both statements may well instead have been unintended slips of the tongue that reveal the true nature of the object.

A Cruise Missile at The Pentagon

8. The Damage to Lamp-Posts on The Highway

The slipstream of a cruise missile skimming the treetops at, say, 750mph (1,200km/h) would have dragged objects behind it and quite possibly have pulled down lamp-posts as it passed, leaving a trail of rubble strewn across the highway as it crossed low above the traffic. We also have a large airplane flying close and very low which was visible to Mr. Mike Walter through his car window immediately before the explosion at the Pentagon. This large airplane may well have struck lamp-posts in passing, as well as having had its own slipstream and powerful jet engines, all of which would have caused damage on the ground. This is very likely to have been the selfsame airplane from which the cruise missile was launched. Anyone doubting the great strength of airplane wings should look closely at the following photograph.

A Cruise Missile at The Pentagon

9. The Damage to The Pentagon

The initial damage to the Pentagon wall was inconsistent with the wall having been struck by an airplane of any size.

There is no way that any airplane could penetrate the hardened Pentagon wall, hence those who propose the ‘small-plane’ theory must — and do — introduce a small missile fired ahead of the small plane. So the small plane theorists are in actual fact missile theorists. However, a small (wing-borne) missile could not cause the damage seen and would barely penetrate the outer wall, let alone puncture three rings of the Pentagon leaving a round exit hole.

Above is a picture of the hole in the C-Ring (third ring inwards) of the Pentagon, that is to say in the sixth successive hardened (note the concrete inside the decorative brickwork) wall to be penetrated by some part of the impacting object. If that hole was caused by an engine of a Boeing 757 then where is the engine and where are the holes in any of the rings caused by the other engine? Most tellingly, there is no mention of this hole in the ‘9/11 Commission Report’.

A Cruise Missile at The Pentagon

10. The Balance of Probabilities

One of the differences between the small plane plus small missile scenario and that of a cruise missile is that the former is excessively complicated, hence it carries a significantly greater risk of failure. Another difference is the far greater likelihood of a plane being spotted, whereas a cruise missile would be coming in at the level of the treetops and is relatively small (about 20 feet, or 6 metres, in length) with a very short wingspan by comparison.

The small plane theorists always omit any mention of a pilot. For a small plane to have been both pilotless and to have fired a small missile with precision timing would have required extensive modifications to have been made to the plane. A cruise missile, on the other hand, and especially a bunker-busting cruise missile, would have been doing precisely what it had been designed, built and proven to do. Where was the testing of the small plane and small missile carried out? How many tests would have had to be performed before the assembly could be got right? How many airplanes would have been destroyed in the testing? On what building would such tests have been performed? All this extensive development for a one-off operation seems highly unlikely. One has only to put oneself in the place of the plotters to see that the choice of cruise missile was a no-brainer.

A Cruise Missile at The Pentagon

Appendix A. The 9/11 Commission Report

With the recent announcement of Mr Larry Silverstein's filing of a $12.3 billion lawsuit against American Airlines and others for “allowing” the events of that day to take place, in addition to the $4.68 billion World Trade Center insurance payout already received by Mr Silverstein, it is clear that a considerable sum of money rides on the survival of the U.S. Government's official ‘9/11 Commission Report’.

A Cruise Missile at The Pentagon

Appendix B. Attempts to Discredit The Case for A Cruise Missile

A variety of websites contain attacks on the case for a cruise missile. Here, a representative sample will be analyzed.

Pentagon Missile Hoax

This article is billed as Pentagon missile hoax: the "no Boeing" claims are not "9/11 truth" they discredit and distract from proven evidence of complicity. The anonymous author makes the following five claims in her introduction:—

[1] the fake debate between no plane and no complicity gets the Bush regime off the hook

[2] there is zero evidence for any of the "no plane" claims — hundreds of people saw Flight 77, none saw a cruise missile, Global Hawk robot plane, smaller plane or flying saucer piloted by giant lizards

[3] the physical evidence shows that a large twin engine jet hit the nearly empty part of the Pentagon, the "Black Boxes" were found, cleanup crews found remains of the passengers, the "hole was too small" claim was a hoax

[4] making 9/11 complicity dependent on the no-plane claim was a brilliant tactic to discredit the real evidence for people inside the Beltway, both for the majority who vote against Bush and the political / military elites (especially the military officers who saw the plane crash or the plane debris)

[5] the material on this page and all of the websites that are linked here should finally extinguish the "no plane" hoax — except for those who have staked their credibility on these claims and cannot admit a mistake, and those who intentionally promote the hoax. Every claim for the "no plane" hoaxes is refuted here or at a page linked from this page.

Here are the appropriate responses:—

1. This claim is entirely irrelevant to the matter in hand. However, to deal with its claims, firstly, there is no such debate let alone a “fake debate” that I am aware of so it is actually a spurious device that the author appears to have invented and, at that, one which hardly makes any sense. The purpose of this can only be to try to confuse the reader. Secondly, there is no connection whatsoever between the nature of the object that struck the Pentagon and whether or not G.W.Bush is in any way culpable for the strike. The author wisely does not even try to explain how a plane would constitute evidence of “complicity” while a cruise missile would not.

2. Nobody, let alone “hundreds of people”, could possibly have known whether or not the airplane she saw was Flight 77. As far as I am aware the only person to have identified American Airlines livery was Mr Mike Walter — but the paint job does not identify the flight number and does not even prove that it was an AA airplane. The rest of these “hundreds of people” appear to be as anonymous and untraceable as the author of this hit piece. If a cruise missile passed above you in the street, travelling at 750mph (1,200km/h), would you see it? How long did it take the UFO to get from above the cloverleaf to the Pentagon wall? Let us do a little calculation to find out: the distance is roughly 1,000 feet (300m) and 750mph is just about 1,100fps (340m/s), hence it would have taken the object about 0.9s to travel that far. How much can anyone see of a high-speed object in that time, especially a completely unexpected object with a completely unexpected destination? If you only heard it, then by the time you turned your head it would be gone. I recall glimpsing for just a second, or two at the most, in 1980, a fireball in the sky, from a London, England street. What I thought I saw was a giant burning rag tumbling end over end while falling quite slowly just a mile or two away from me, from an altitude of about 15°. It was later reported that a “meteorite” had fallen in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean (presumably it had been tracked by air defense systems). It was broad daylight in London and there were crowds of people around me but to this day I appear to have been the only person who saw it — newspapers and TV reported no witnesses. The simple fact is that because no one reported seeing the Pentagon strike object and identifying it as a cruise missile does not mean that it was not there. The evidence of the smoke trail proves conclusively that it was a rocket no matter what anyone thought he saw. Witness evidence is notoriously unreliable.

3. The author asserts there is “physical evidence” which he does not identify, making it hard to discuss, let alone to refute. Nonetheless, since the evidence is not identified we can safely dismiss the claim that it exists as a ‘because-I-say-so’ argument, which is worthless. How could the author possibly know that any part of the Pentagon was “nearly empty”? Is he taking the word of a Pentagon spokesman — in other words an accessory after the fact to the murders that took place there? Apparently some 85 Pentagon employees were killed. As for the claim about the black boxes, the problem with this is that they were “found” by accomplices of the murderers. Moreover, it would seem that the data in the boxes, however it got there and wherever they really came from, is incomplete and stops short several seconds before the impact. It is very easy to falsify the data in a black box and it was only the data that was released. No one outside the Pentagon has, to the best of my knowledge, ever actually seen these black boxes. Finally, we get another bald assertion, this one patently absurd, yet again presented without any evidence beyond ‘because-I-say-so’, that the real entry hole is much bigger than the hole which is visible in photographs taken before the ‘collapse’ (probable demolition) of the wall.

4. If anyone can make any sense of the garbled statement that is bullet-point #4, I would be grateful for an explanation. Until then it is pure amphigory, perhaps designed to make the reader feel inadequate because he cannot understand the point the author appears to be trying to make, whatever it might be.

5. More groundless assertions compounded by ad-hominem attacks against anyone who dares to disagree with the author.

A Cruise Missile at The Pentagon

Appendix C. An Email from The Pentagon

I have been convinced since the day itself that the Pentagon was struck by a cruise missile. Hence I have always argued that position in Internet forums and have had no reason to change my mind. As a consequence in 2003 I received an email from someone claiming to be a Pentagon employee who wanted to make known what she had overheard but who was too frightened to step forward publicly herself. The machine on which I received that email was scrapped soon afterwards and so, due to the impossibility that exists for reasons known only to Microsoft of transferring bulk email files from one Windows computer to another, I no longer have either the email or the sender's address. While it was never my intention to lose it, its loss does make it easier to report the contents, as I can do so in the knowledge that no seizure of my present equipment could ever compromise the sender, whose name I can't even remember. I do, however, clearly recall the message. She was at work in the Pentagon that morning and, shortly after the impact, had overheard men she described as “FBI” making a decision to dynamite the Pentagon wall because they felt that the damage and the entry hole didn't look enough like an airplane crash to be presentable to the gathering television cameras. It would seem that the wall collapsed quite soon after that. If true, they really shouldn't have bothered since it still didn't look like an airplane crash even after the wall had collapsed if only because all the main features of an airplane crash were still entirely absent from the scene. A couple of pieces of the wreckage of something, each conveniently sized so as to be liftable by one man, lying in the middle of the pristine lawn qualify only as symbolic stage props, the minimum suggestion needed to ensure the psychological compliance of an audience which had been conditioned all its lives to believe that the ‘good guys’ never lie.

A Cruise Missile at The Pentagon

“Missile” #3