Extremely hot fires caused structures to fail, BYU expert says

By SUZANNE DEAN

Deseret Morning News Monday, 10 April 2006

EPHRAIM, Utah — A Brigham Young University physicist said he now

believes an incendiary substance called thermite, bolstered by sulfur,

was used to generate exceptionally hot fires at the World Trade Center

on 9/11, causing the structural steel to fail and the buildings to collapse.

"It looks like thermite with sulfur added, which really is a very clever idea,"

Steven Jones, professor of physics at BYU, told a meeting of the Utah

Academy of Science, Arts and Letters at Snow College Friday.

The government requires standard explosives to contain tag elements

enabling them to be traced back to their manufacturers. But no tags are

required in aluminum and iron oxide, the materials used to make thermite,

he said. Nor, he said, are tags required in sulfur.

Jones is co-chairman, with James H. Fetzer, a distinguished professor

of philosophy at the University of Minnesota of Scholars for 9/11 Truth,

a group of college faculty members who believe conspirators other than

pilots of the planes were directly involved in bringing down New York's

Trade Towers.

The group, which Jones said has 200 members, maintains a Web site at

www.st911.org. A 40-page paper by Jones, along with other peer-reviewed

and non-reviewed academic papers, are posted on the site.

Explosives, not plane, caused collapse

Last year, Jones presented various arguments for his theory that explosives

or incendiary devices were planted in the Trade Towers, and in WTC 7,

a smaller building in the Trade Center complex, and that those materials,

not planes crashing into the buildings, caused the buildings to collapse.

At that time, he mentioned thermite as the possible explosive or incendiary

agent. But Friday, he said he is increasingly convinced that thermite and

sulfur were the root causes of the 9/11 disaster.

He told college professors and graduate students from throughout Utah

gathered for the academy meeting that while almost no fire, even one ignited

by jet fuel, can cause structural steel to fail, the combination of thermite

and sulfur "slices through steel like a hot knife through butter."

He ticked off several pieces of evidence for his thermite fire theory:

First, he said, video showed a yellow, molten substance splashing off the side

of the south Trade Tower about 50 minutes after an airplane hit it and a few

minutes before it collapsed. Government investigators ruled out the possibility

of melting steel being the source of the material because of the unlikelihood

of steel melting. The investigators said the molten material must have been

aluminum from the plane.

But, said Jones, molten aluminum is silvery. It never turns yellow. The

substance observed in the videos "just isn't aluminum," he said. But, he said,

thermite can cause steel to melt and become yellowish.

Second, he cited video pictures showing white ash rising from the south tower

near the dripping, liquefied metal. When thermite burns, Jones said, it releases

aluminum-oxide ash. The presence of both yellow-white molten iron and

aluminum oxide ash "are signature characteristics of a thermite reaction,"

he said.

Declines to speculate on who placed explosives

Another item of evidence, Jones said, is the fact that sulfur traces were found

in structural steel recovered from the Trade Towers. Jones quoted the

New York Times as saying sulfidization in the recovered steel was "perhaps

the deepest mystery uncovered in the (official) investigation." But, he said,

sulfidization fits the theory that sulfur was combined with thermite to make

the thermite burn even hotter than it ordinarily would.

Jones said a piece of building wreckage had a gray substance on the outside

that at one point had obviously been a dripping molten metal or liquid. He said

that after thermite turns steel or iron into a molten form, and the metal hardens,

it is gray.

He added that pools of molten metal were found beneath both trade towers

and the 47-story WTC 7. That fact, he said, was never discussed in official

investigation reports.

And even though WTC 7 was not connected to the Trade Towers — in fact, there

was another building between it and the towers —and even though it was never

hit by a plane, it collapsed. That suggests, he said, that it came down because

a thermite fire caused its structural steel to fail.

Jones said his studies are confined to physical causes of the collapses, and he

doesn't like to speculate about who might have entered the buildings and placed

thermite and sulfur. But he said 10 to 20 people "in the know," plus other

people who didn't know what they were doing but did what they were told,

could have placed incendiary packages over several weeks.

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