Dave McGowan Takes on Flight 93

Several essays starting here.

He makes the important conclusion that no 757 crashed in Shanksville, though he's rather late coming to this critical finding. He does miss several things, most notably the discrepancies in the passenger phone calls.

He makes a big deal out of saying the passengers were indeed real-- and while this is certainly the simplest and least complicated explanation, that doesn't make it the right answer.

Unfortunately, he hasn't yet posted his scenario for what he thinks DID happen to flight 93, and I'll be rather curious what he's come up with. I don't have any great explanation that explains everything; the best I have come up with is that flight 93 had real people that were involved with a hijacking drill/terror drill, that the plane crashed elsewhere than Shanksville and that the Shanksville crash was faked in order to hide important evidence and also possibly to promote a bogus shoot-down story. Though even this is not thoroughly satisfying. Possibly there were even two flight 93's-- one real and one "doppleganger" with passengers on a terror drill, that might explain some of the conflicting phone calls and crash times.

Really, it is impossible to say what happened without more evidence, which the government surely is hiding (if it hasn't been destroyed). More pictures of the plane they supposedly dug up from the ground in Shanksville would be a good start.

I liked this part of the piece:

The patch of soil that purportedly swallowed United Airlines Flight 93 seems to have had some peculiar physical properties. The photo to the left purports to show one of the aircraft's engines being excavated from the alleged impact crater (other parts were allegedly dug out of the ridiculously small hole as well, including the flight recorder, which reportedly burrowed to a depth of about twenty-five feet). Curiously though, several published reports noted that a "section of engine weighing a ton was located 2,000 yards - over a mile - from the crash site." (Richard Wallace "What Did Happen to Flight 93?" Daily Mirror, September 12, 2002; some reports place the engine section at about a third that distance from the 'crash' site, or vaguely specify that it was found a "considerable distance" from the alleged impact crater.)

So what appears to have happened in Shanksville, as best I can determine, is that Flight 93 impacted what MSNBC referred to as "the loose, porous soil of a deserted strip mine" in such a way that the engine on one side of the aircraft burrowed deeply into the ground, while the engine on the other side of the plane, encountering the very same loose soil at the exact same moment in time, snapped off and bounced thousands of feet away! If this had happened on any other day, it would obviously beg for a rational explanation. But since it happened on September 11, 2001, and since we have already established that the physical properties of the world were in a strange state of flux that day, no further explanation is necessary.

Well put, and I will assume that McGowan thought of this discrepancy on his own. I had pointed out this funny aspect of the "flight 93" engines back in July of this year.

I guess my major beef with McGowan is that he doesn't really cite all the skeptics who have done good flight 93 research, and only cites other investigators in order to cast doubt on their ideas. The fact that McGowan has clearly looked some up other investigators' work on flight 93 would indicate that McGowan is familiar with many other 9/11 skeptics' flight 93 research and doesn't acknowledge it. This really is a bit lame at this stage in the game (in my book).