To The Editor:
In 1969 Neil Armstrong became the first person to walk on the moon when his lunar lander touched down on Tranquility Base. I was 11 years old and will never forget those grainy, almost ghost-like images, beamed across thousands of miles of empty space. Those fuzzy images almost magically appeared on my parents’ Zenith black and white TV with cantankerous rabbit ears on top.
And it was not long before the conspiracy theorists came out of the woodwork with one preposterous theory after another on how the moon landing was a fake and NASA had staged the landing in some super secret, back lot studio. The conspiracy theorists came up with scores of “experts” and theories on how it was impossible to land on the moon. Even to this day you can find books and websites dedicated to the 1969 moon landing “fakery.”
What I discovered at a very young age was that once a person convinces himself that black is white, there is really not much anyone is going to do to convince them of the contrary.
I read Mr. Browning’s comments on 9/11 as being some sort of an inside job and the emotions I feel are both shock and sadness that any rational, intelligent person could conclude anything other than the obvious, brought down the buildings at One and Two, World Trade Centers. And unlike most, I was there. I heard the first jet drone over my midtown apartment and then watched from my roof as the second jet swooped in from the southwest, and hit the south tower at a large bank angle and very high speed. I spent two days with an ad hoc recovery team, trying to find survivors, but instead finding only gruesome scenes of unimaginable human devastation.
To suggest there was an “intentional” explosion set off inside the building is an insult and slap in the face to all the people who died in that building, on that day — and those on the recovery teams.
What Mr. Browning does, as do all conspiracy theorists, is take small pieces of truth and mutate them into these tortured theories that may sound good initially, but soon collapse under their own weight.
He speaks of the “Pilots for 9/11 Truth.” I have been a commercial airline pilot since 1988, for one of the largest airlines in America and I have never heard of this organization. He goes on to use names like: Jessie Ventura, Charlie “Tiger Blood” Sheen, and Ed Asner in an attempt to somehow lend credibility to his theory. Those three gentlemen should be a major red flag to anyone seriously considering this cockamamy story.
Like I teach my children, the word “why” is one of the most powerful words in the English language. The author makes no attempt to answer the simple question of why would anyone do this — other than terrorism. And yet this is the most crucial element of his argument. Instead, I am directed to watch a movie that will make it all clear as to why I should believe this story.
The evidence is available to anyone with an open mind as to what caused the collapse of the three buildings on 9/11. To be very brief, the buildings were built in the ’70s of a new core architecture that allowed the buildings to withstand substantial wind and weight loads, while reaching extraordinary heights. The buildings were designed to handle low temperature fires for extended burn durations, but engineers could not foresee these fires being caused by 300,000-pound aircraft, carrying 140,000 pounds of jet fuel, impacting the buildings at almost 600 miles per hour —all of which were confined to a small area of the buildings.
The beautiful simplicity of the buildings is what unfortunately killed the buildings when the angle clips that held the floor joists between the columns succumbed to the heat and shifting loads and eventually overstressed other key components of the buildings.
The jets did exist, the people inside of them were real, and the terrorists who boarded those jets were cold-blooded murderers — and Neil Armstrong did walk on the moon in 1969.
