What caused the mysterious flash of light during 9/11 plane strikes?

[Chi Meson]

This thread was almost dead. Again, the purpose of the OP was to find a reasonable explanation for the nose flash. (I started in the "... Debunking" forum, but it was moved. Debunking is still the intent; Let's have no one believe that there was any deliberate incendiary device ).

I will be deleting the OP soon since this is not the right forum, and it keeps going in the wrong direction. The title is wrong, also.

Evo, feel free to move or lock it.

 

[fourier jr]

no mention of the flash made by the nose cone here, but here's a clip of a presentation by an MIT engineer (not a materials scientist or retired theology professor) who raises some good questions about the WTC collapses:
http://www.freedomisforeverybody.org/MITEngineer.php"
he also brought up some stuff about the dust cloud (a pyroclastic flow) which i had never heard of before. worth a watch i think...

 

[Jonny_trigonometry]

if anything is fishy at the wtc disaster it's with building 7. There are much more solid arugments against the official report for that building. It wasn't even seriously damaged... planes didn't crash into it, and other buildings didn't fall onto it, and there wasn't much damage beyond some broken windows from the flying debris. Bldg 7 was further away from the scene than the millenium Hilton, and as intuition tells you, didn't receive as much damage as the Hilton, but the Hilton is still there). There were fires which broke out in bldg 7's lower floors, but that was about it, and for some odd reason, it collapsed in the same way builtings are demolished by controlled implosion. There is no way a fire which occupied less than 1/3 (a very liberal estimate, prolly much less than 1/7) of the building could've weakened it so much that it fell. In fact, if fire alone (and not explosives) truly caused this building to fall, it is the first modern steel building in recorded history to collapse due to a fire. Check out Fire Engineering magazine, that's one source that will confirm that claim. The fires in bldg 7 would be labeled as "moderate" by any firefighting manual. There has been over 100 uncontrolled fires in skyscrapers in the last 50 years, and none of them has collapsed, or even come close to collapsing from fire, only earthquakes and demolitions. The fires in bldg 7 were going for about 6 hours, whereas of the known uncontrolled fires I mentioned, some went on for over a week, and in the process burned out every floor (check out hte Windsor bldg in Madrid spain, it burned for 2 days, and at much hotter temperatures than bldg 7 http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/spain_fire_2005.html) . Why didn't the building's sprinkler system put out the fires anyway? Perhaps it was because the water to the building was damaged due to the first plane crash? bldg 7 was built to withstand much more damage than regular buildings since it sat on top of an electrical sub station for the city (it was over engineered to withstand thousands of degrees for days if need be), among other things, it housed offices for the department of defense, CIA, FEMA, US secret service, SEC, and also the Mayor's "emergency command center" on the 23rd floor which had bullet, and bomb resistant windows and it's own air and water supply, and was designed to withstand winds of up to 160 mph. So we know that the 23rd floor had working sprinklers, and then we can surmize that any fire that started below the 23rd floor wouldn't have traveled up the building past the 23rd floor, and if there were fires above the 23rd floor, they must've been started above the 23rd floor, but from the few pictures we have of building 7, no fires can be seen in the upper floors. An interesting note, Gulianni told ABC news that he was told to get out of bldg 7 and he left (to a FEMA command base that was setup the night before next to the harbor) before the fires broke out.

Bush and Cheney asked Tom Dashle to limit the investigation of bldg 7, in March 2002, the committee on science for the house of representatives tried to investigate the investigation, congressman Boehlert said the investigation seemed "shrouded in excessive secrecy", the investigation was done with part-time engineers and scientists on a shoestring budget, and there were accusations that landlords and insurance companies interfered with efforts to investigate, by May 2002, all the rubble was destroyed, so nobody could conduct further investigations on to how the buildings (not just bldg 7) collapsed. This of course was illegal to do, since there are laws which state that rubble from disasters claimed to be caused by fires should be saved and studied so that in the future we may be able to design buildings safer. Ken starr spent 40 million investigating the sex life of Clinton, but yet there wasn't enough money spent to investiage an attack on our nation (ie shoestring budget, with part time egineers), what is more important here? Larry Silverstein bought bldg 7 years ago, but 2 months before 9-11, he bought the whole complex and insured them all with a record breaking insurance policy worth 3.5 billion to insure against you guessed it, terrorist attacks. The millenium Hilton was closer to the two towers, but it didn't collapse, probably because it wasn't owed by Larry Silverstein... GW's brother Marvin Bush was running security on the wtc complex and his contract ended on the morning of 9-11 (this was written by Barbra Bush in her memoir "reflections"). Preceding the collapse of bldg 7, seismographs (at the university of NY and the US geological survey) detected explosions going off which resemble the classical pattern of a controlled demolotion.

Try to debunk that... Then again this was moved to GD, oh well. The starting idea with this thread is laughable, but these things about building 7 are not. Let's not focus on nose cone flashes when there is much more credible and relavent things to consider.

 

[TheStatutoryApe]

if anything is fishy at the wtc disaster it's with building 7. There are much more solid arugments against the official report for that building. It wasn't even seriously damaged... planes didn't crash into it, and other buildings didn't fall onto it, and there wasn't much damage beyond some broken windows from the flying debris...
_____

...So we know that the 23rd floor had working sprinklers, and then we can surmize that any fire that started below the 23rd floor wouldn't have traveled up the building past the 23rd floor, and if there were fires above the 23rd floor, they must've been started above the 23rd floor, but from the few pictures we have of building 7, no fires can be seen in the upper floors...

I looked at 7 World Trade Center. There was smoke showing, but not a lot and I’m saying that isn’t going to fall. So I went up Church Street two more blocks and went across to West and went right down behind 7 and got a good look at three sides. Again, there were a lot of fires on the ground, some crushed mail trucks, some burned-up engines. It was a scene out of a war zone. I continued around to West and Vesey and reported into the command post. They were very concerned about fire extending into the telephone company building. They gave me a couple of companies and said get into the telephone company building and check on extension there. We had extension on the first and second floors, so we took some standpipe lines, put them in operation and knocked that down. From there, we looked out at 7 World Trade Center again. You could see smoke, but no visible fire, and some damage to the south face. You couldn’t really see from where we were on the west face of the building, but at the edge of the south face you could see that it was very heavily damaged.

http://www.firehouse.com/terrorist/911/magazine/gz/norman.html

So we go there and on the north and east side of 7 it didn’t look like there was any damage at all, but then you looked on the south side of 7 there had to be a hole 20 stories tall in the building, with fire on several floors. Debris was falling down on the building and it didn’t look good.

http://www.firehouse.com/terrorist/911/magazine/gz/boyle.html

for some odd reason, it collapsed in the same way builtings are demolished by controlled implosion.

NOVA: The Twin Towers collapsed essentially straight down. Was there any chance they could have tipped over?

Eagar: It's really not possible in this case. In our normal experience, we deal with small things, say, a glass of water, that might tip over, and we don't realize how far something has to tip proportional to its base. The base of the World Trade Center was 208 feet on a side, and that means it would have had to have tipped at least 100 feet to one side in order to move its center of gravity from the center of the building out beyond its base. That would have been a tremendous amount of bending. In a building that is mostly air, as the World Trade Center was, there would have been buckling columns, and it would have come straight down before it ever tipped over.

Have you ever seen the demolition of buildings? They blow them up, and they implode. Well, I once asked demolition experts, "How do you get it to implode and not fall outward?" They said, "Oh, it's really how you time and place the explosives." I always accepted that answer, until the World Trade Center, when I thought about it myself. And that's not the correct answer. The correct answer is, there's no other way for them to go but down. They're too big. With anything that massive -- each of the World Trade Center towers weighed half a million tons -- there's nothing that can exert a big enough force to push it sideways.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/wtc/collapse.html
And that's a very good interview that explains why the towers fell.

Larry Silverstein bought bldg 7 years ago, but 2 months before 9-11, he bought the whole complex and insured them all with a record breaking insurance policy worth 3.5 billion to insure against you guessed it, terrorist attacks.

"Even after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, insurers in the United States did not view either international or domestic terrorism as a risk that should be explicitly considered when pricing their commercial insurance policy, principally because losses from terrorism had historically been small and, to a large degree, uncorrelated. Thus, prior to September 11, 2001, terrorism coverage in the United States was an unnamed peril covered in most standard all-risk commercial and homeowners’ policies covering damage to property and contents"

http://grace.wharton.upenn.edu/risk/downloads/05-03-HK.pdf

In its court papers, Swiss Re shows how Silverstein first tried to buy just $1.5 billion in property damage and business-interruption coverage. When his lenders objected, he discussed buying a $5 billion policy. Ultimately, he settled on the $3.5 billion figure, which was less than the likely cost of rebuilding.

http://www.forbes.com/2003/09/11/cx_da_0911silverstein.html

Perhaps that will be enough for you to be just as skeptical of the conspiracy theories as you are of the official stories.

 

[Jonny_trigonometry]

here's some photos of building 7, I can't seem to find any photos of the south face... So I guess that is open for discussion until someone can produce them. As far as the south face goes, I guess there must've been a 20 story high hole in it... But that is one guy, and he may have been exagerrating, and he also didn't say how deep it went into the building, and also, he may have mistaken blackened walls as missing walls since there was a lot of dust in the air obstructing the view and stuff. Even if there was a gash 20 stories high, it must've not penetrated that far into the building because the buildings right next to it, and the other buildings that were very close to the two towers weren't damaged enough to collapse. If you show me a picture of the south face which shows damage that looks reasonably greater than the damage received from other buildings at ground zero, then I'll start to entertain this idea even more.
http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/evidence/photos/wtc7.html
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/wtc/collapse.html
this link doesn't talk about why a skyscraper would fall due to a fire. It talks about how they are designed to take an impact from a plane. At the beginning, a materials scientist says

"It wasn't until Dr. Thomas Eagar saw Building 7 of the World Trade Center implode late on the afternoon of September 11th that he understood what had transpired structurally earlier that day as the Twin Towers disintegrated."

But never explains how a fire destroyed building 7. Was there 10,000 gallons of jet feul in building 7 or something, is that what he's comparing the fire with?Ok, keep in mind I'm really only trying to focus on building 7, and the fact that the official report claims that it fell due mainly to fires and some flying debris. I'm not talking about towers 1 and 2, because I think that those could've fallen due to the combined forces of the aircraft impacts and fires due to 10,000 gallons of jet fuel, and the idea that the insulation of the supporting beams could've blown off during the impact of the aircraft. The sotry for towers 1 and 2 is definitely plausible, but not the story of building 7.Your link about terrorism insurance is informative, and helps to persuade that terrorism insurance wasn't explicitly offered by insurance companies until after 9-11. Thats nice to know, but do you have a copy of Larry Silverstien's insurance policy? It may not have been labeled explicitly as "terrorism insurance" but did it not cover the terrorist attacks, and was it not a 3.5 billion dollar policy? More importantly, did Larry not buy the whole wtc site 2 months before 9-11 and insure it with said policy? Was the wtc not covered by an insurance policy which protected against things such as what happened?
Thanks for the links. Don't get me wrong, I'm skeptical of conspiracy theories, even the ones fed to the public and labeled as "official", perhaps some of the points I've made, and some of the links I've listed will help you too.

 

[Moonbear]

Evo, feel free to move or lock it.

I think, given Chi Meson's discomfort with this thread being discussed outside of S&D, where it was originally posted, and the continued "popping up" of additional conspiracy theories rather than it dying a peaceful death, I'm going to honor his request and lock it to further discussion.