United Airlines Flight 93 crashed in an open field in Pennsylvania as a result of an attempted cockpit invasion. However, there have been claims that it was actually shot down by U.S. fighter jets. This idea is promoted by author David Ray Griffin in his book The New Pearl Harbor. Two debris fields from Flight 93 were found at three (Indian Lake) and eight (New Baltimore) miles from the crash site, and there are also some eyewitness reports of debris falling from the sky like confetti. However, Flight 93 was flying south-east toward Washington, D.C. when it crashed. Both Indian Lake and New Baltimore are 3 miles and 8 miles, respectively, south-east of the crash site, in the direction the plane was heading but never flew over. Many websites say this contradicts the claim that the plane shed debris for 3–8 miles before its crash, in which case the debris would have been found north-west of the crash site along the plane's flight path. A Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article from 9/14/2001 describes the material as "mostly papers", "strands of charred insulation", and an "endorsed paycheck". The same article quotes FBI agent Bill Crowley that, "Lighter, smaller debris probably shot into the air on the heat of a fireball that witnesses said shot several hundred feet into the air after the jetliner crashed. Then, it probably rode a wind that was blowing southeast at about 9 MPH." Popular Mechanics argued that debris such as an engine exploding away and landing far from the crash scene is not a unique occurrence in commercial airline accidents.
Some conspiracy theorists believe a small white jet seen flying over the crash area may have fired a missile to shoot down Flight 93. However, government agencies such as the FBI assert this was a Dassault Falcon business jet asked to descend to an altitude of around 1500 ft to survey the impact. Ben Sliney, who was the FAA operation manager on September 11, 2001, says no military aircraft were near Flight 93.
Jim Hoffman claims there is a three-minute discrepancy in the cockpit voice recording immediately prior to the flight's crash. Seismological observations recorded an impact at 10:06:05 a.m., +/- a couple of seconds, but the 9/11 Commission Report decided that the seismological information was not definitive and concluded that the crash occurred at 10:03 a.m.
According to some theories the plane had to be shot down by the government because passengers had found out about the "plot".
Some internet videos, such as Loose Change, speculate that Flight 93 safely landed in Ohio, and a substituted plane was involved in the crash in Pennsylvania. Often cited is a preliminary news report that Flight 93 landed at a Cleveland airport;[ it was later learned that Delta Flight 1989 was the plane confused with Flight 93, and the report was retracted as inaccurate. Several websites within the 9/11 Truth Movement dispute this claim, citing the wreckage at the scene, eyewitness testimony, and the difficulty of secretly substituting one plane for another, and claim that such "hoax theories... appear calculated to alienate victims' survivors and the larger public from the 9/11 truth movement". The editor of the article has since written a rebuttal to the claims.
The woman who took the only photograph of the mushroom cloud from the impact of Flight 93 hitting the ground says she has been harassed by conspiracy theorists, who claim she faked the photo. The F.B.I., the Smithsonian, and the National Park Service’s Flight 93 National Memorial have found it to be authentic.
Conspiracy theorists have claimed that passengers of Flight 93 or Flight 77, or of both flights, were murdered or that they were relocated, with the intent that they never be found.
Here are some questions;
Did the Shanksville crash occur at 10:06 (according to a seismic report) or 10:03 (according to the 9/11 Commission)? Does the Commission wish to hide what happened in the last three minutes of the flight, and if so, why? Was Flight 93 shot down, as indicated by the scattering of debris over a trail of several miles?
United Airlines 93 was the fourth plane hijacked on 9/11, and the only one not to reach its target.
The official account of the day, as told in the 9/11 Commission Report holds that Flight 93 crashed into open ground near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, apparently as passengers tried to seize back the controls from the hijackers. But 9/11 conspiracy theorists are suspicious of this account.
Some argue that substantial wreckage from the aircraft was found at Indian Lake, a reported 6 miles from the crash site in Shanksville. If this would true, it would lend weight to the theory that the aircraft disintegrated in mid-air after being hit by a missile.
Leading conspiracy theorist and broadcaster Alex Jones of infowars.com argues that planes generally leave a small debris field when they crash, and that this is not compatible with reports of wreckage found further afield from Shanksville.
The reports of wreckage at Indian Lake were accurate in so far as small, light fragments of insulation material and paper from United 93 were found by residents at the lake, having blown there from the crash site on the prevailing wind.
However, the distance between the two locations was misreported in some accounts. In fact, in a straight line, Indian Lake is just over a mile from the crash site. The road between the two locations takes a roundabout route of 6.9 miles - accounting for the erroneous reports.
Also, the fragments of debris which were found at Indian Lake were downwind of the crash site and east of the plane's flight path. Had United 93 started to disintegrate in mid-air, wreckage would have fallen below the flight path - to the west of Shanksville.
Wally Miller, the local coroner at Somerset, Pennsylvania is at the centre of another debate about the crash of United 93. In his film Loose Change, Dylan Avery quotes Miller as saying: "I stopped being coroner after about 20 minutes because there were no bodies there."
However, interviewed for The Conspiracy Files, Wally Miller says he was misquoted.
"I said that I stopped being a coroner after about 20 minutes because it was perfectly clear what the manner of death was going to be.
"It was a plane crash, but yet it was a homicide because terrorists had hijacked the plane and killed the passengers."
He says it is technically correct that there were no complete bodies at the crash site, but the recovery operation found many bodies.
Did United 93 crash?
1. The wide displacement of the plane's debris, one explanation for which might be an explosion of some sort aboard prior to the crash. Letters — Flight 93 was carrying 7,500 pounds of mail to California — and other papers from the plane were found eight miles (13km) away from the scene of the crash. A sector of one engine weighing one ton was found 2,000 yards away. This was the single heaviest piece recovered from the crash, and the biggest, apart from a piece of fuselage the size of a dining-room table. The rest of the plane, consistent with an impact calculated to have occurred at 500mph, disintegrated into pieces no bigger than two inches long. Other remains of the plane were found two miles away near a town called Indian Lake. All of these facts, widely disseminated, were confirmed by the coroner Wally Miller.
2. The location of US Air Force jets, which might or might not have been close enough to fire a missile at the hijacked plane. Live news media reports on the morning of 11 September conflict with a number of official statements issued later. What the government acknowledges is that the first fighters with the mission to intercept took off at 8.52am; that another set of fighters took off from Andrews Air Force base near Washington at 9.35am — precisely the time that Flight 93 turned almost 180 degrees off course towards Washington and the hijacker pilot was heard by air-traffic controllers to say that there was "a bomb aboard". Flight 93, whose menacing trajectory was made known by the broadcast media almost immediately, did not go down for another 31 minutes. Apart from the logical conclusion that at least one Air Force F-16 — 125 miles away in Washington at 9.40am, meaning 10 minutes away from Flight 93 (or less if it flew at supersonic speed) — should have reached the fourth of the "flying bombs" well before 10.06am, there is this evidence from a federal flight controller published a few days later in a newspaper in New Hampshire: that an F-16 had been "in hot pursuit" of the hijacked United jet and "must have seen the whole thing". Also, there was one brief report on CBS television before the crash that two F-16 fighters were tailing Flight 93. Vice-President Dick Cheney acknowledged five days later that President Bush had authorised the Air Force pilots to shoot down hijacked commercial aircraft.
3. One telephone call from the doomed plane whose contents do not entirely tally with the hero legend and which is accordingly omitted in the Independence Day-type dramas favoured by the US media. The Associated Press news service reported on 11 September that eight minutes before the crash, a frantic male passenger called the 911 emergency number. He told the operator, named Glen Cramer, that he had locked himself inside one of the plane's toilets. Cramer told the AP, in a report that was widely broadcast on 11 September, that the passenger had spoken for one minute. "We're being hijacked, we're being hijacked!" the man screamed down his mobile phone. "We confirmed that with him several times," Cramer said, "and we asked him to repeat what he said. He was very distraught. He said he believed the plane was going down. He did hear some sort of an explosion and saw white smoke coming from the plane, but he didn't know where. And then we lost contact with him."
According to the information that has been made known, this was the last of the various phone calls made from the aeroplane. No more calls were received from the plane in the eight minutes that remained after the man in the toilet said that he had heard an explosion.
4. Eyewitness accounts of a "mystery plane" that flew low over the Flight 93 crash site shortly after impact. Lee Purbaugh is one of at least half a dozen named individuals who have reported seeing a second plane flying low and in erratic patterns, not much above treetop level, over the crash site within minutes of the United flight crashing. They describe the plane as a small, white jet with rear engines and no discernible markings. Purbaugh, who served three years in the US Navy, said he did not believe it was a military plane. If it indeed was not, one suggestion made in the internet discussion groups is that US Customs uses planes with these characteristics to interdict aerial drug shipments. Either way, the presence of the mystery jet remains a puzzle.
How has the US government and its various agencies responded to doubts raised by the above questions? In the following ways:
1. The paper debris eight miles away, the FBI says, was wafted away by a 10mph wind; the jet-engine part flew 2,000 yards on account of the savage force of the plane's impact with the ground. The FBI conclusion: "Nothing was found that was inconsistent with the plane going into the ground intact." Aviation experts I have contacted are very doubtful about this. One expert expresses astonishment at the notion that the letters and other papers would have remained airborne for almost one hour before falling to earth.
2. The Air Force jets were on their way but failed to make it on time, according to General Richard Myers, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. Fighters did finally approach Flight 93, he acknowledges, "moments" before it crashed, but did not shoot it down. Which begs the question why they were unable to arrive sooner to intercept an aircraft that clearly had terrorists aboard and that was flying straight for Washington more than one hour after another United Airlines plane had crashed into the second World Trade Centre tower. The report in the New Hampshire newspaper, and the one on CBS, have not been explained, and the air-traffic controllers in Cleveland who tracked the last minutes of Flight 93 on radar have been forbidden by the authorities to speak publicly about what they saw on their screens.
3. Neither the FBI nor anyone else in authority has explained the reported 911 phone call from the plane toilet, even though it appears to be the last of the phone calls made from the plane and even though it conveys the far from insignificant claim that there was an explosion on board. The FBI has confiscated the tape of the conversation and the operator Glen Cramer has received orders not to speak to the media any more.
4. The explanation furnished by the FBI for the mystery plane, whose existence it initially denied, serves less to reassure than to reinforce suspicions that a cover-up of sorts is under way, that the government is manipulating the truth in a manner it considers to be palatable to the broader US public. The FBI has said, on the record, that the plane was a civilian business jet, a Falcon, that had been flying within 20 miles of Flight 93 and was asked by the authorities to descend from 37,000ft to 5,000ft to survey and transmit the co-ordinates of the crash site "for responding emergency crews". The reason, as numerous people have observed, why this seems so implausible is that, first, by 10.06am on 11 September, all non-military aircraft in US airspace had received loud and clear orders more than half an hour earlier to land at the nearest airport; second, such was the density of 911 phone calls from people on the ground, in the Shanksville area, as to the location of the crash site that aerial co-ordinates would have been completely unnecessary; and, third, with F-16s supposedly in the vicinity, it seems extraordinarily unlikely that, at a time of tremendous national uncertainty when no one knew for sure whether there might be any more hijacked aircraft still in the sky, the military would ask a civilian aircraft that just happened to be in the area for help.
Most suspicious of all, perhaps, has been the failure of the FBI or anybody else to identify the pilot or the passengers of the purported Falcon, and their own failure to come forward and identify themselves.
There was one other plane, a single-engine Piper, in the air as Flight 93 headed to its doom. The pilot, Bill Wright, said that he was three miles away and so close he could see the United markings on the plane. Suddenly he received orders to get away from the hijacked plane and to land immediately. "That's one of the first things that went through my mind when they told us to get as far away from it as fast as we could," Wright later told a Pittsburgh TV station, "that either they were expecting it to blow up or they were going to shoot it down — but that's pure speculation."
Everything is speculation — that is the problem with the story of Flight 93. And unless the US government reveals more of what it knows, provides a detailed account of the last 10 minutes in the life of Flight 93 and the 44 people who were aboard, there will not only be scope but sound reasons for the conspiracy theorists to continue to speculate as to what really happened in those last few minutes before the plane plunged into the earth; to cast doubts on the soft-focus legend that the traumatised American public has seized upon so gratefully.
Some conspiracy theorists will say that the plane was shot down by a missile, perhaps a heat-seeking missile that honed in on one of the plane's engines — a theory possibly substantiated by the 2,000yd flight of the 1,000lb engine part, but arguably refuted by consistent eye-witness accounts, including Lee Purbaugh's, that when last sighted the plane was not emitting smoke.
