Unburned passports at ground zero

Eddie Dane

Philosopher
Eddie Dane
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Aug 18, 2007
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I understand passports and other documents were recovered from the rubble.

Truthers often trod out the claim that anything on the plane should have burned on impact.

I was wondering about this, but couldn't immediately find the resource for debunking it.

Can anyone point me to it?
 
I guess truthers must believe that the shuttle columbia crash was an inside job too, because there were plenty of pieces of paper which survived that, including a journal belonging to one of the astronauts.
 
Classic truther logic. It's impossible to recover evidence from a crash site but it is possible to wire up 3 high rise buildings with explosives with nobody being the wiser. :)
 
BigAl said:
If somebody claims the passport was snuck in there, they have to explain how big pieces of aircraft were, too.
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You would also need to explain why-on-earth the wily conspirators would bother to plant fake passports among piles of debris, when the hijackers' identities were amply demonstrated already.
 
The passport belonged to a (hijacker) passenger of AA11 which approached from the north and crashed into the north face of WTC1. The passport was found before the collapses on Vesey street, which ran north of WTC1 (see here). That is the same side of the building where AA11 made its initial impact, as seen in the Naudet video. This means that the passport did not travel through the building and was not ejected with the fireball. It was among the debris that became airborne when the aircraft struck the exterior columns of building (if the passport was on the body of the hijacker, it may have even been in the cockpit, the first part of the plane to make contact with WTC1). The street was littered with debris from the impact.
 
Eddie Dane said:
I understand passports and other documents were recovered from the rubble.
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Actually it was one passport (Satam al-Suqtami's, although most Troofers get this wrong and say it was Mohamed Atta's) and it was recovered a few blocks from the WTC before the towers collapsed.
 
When discussing the "miracle" passport, what most people fail to take into account is the air in the aircraft's cabin. A Boeing 767 contains 19,500 cubic feet of air. Air has weight: at sea level it weighs approx. .075 pounds per cubic foot. This means that the air in the cabin weighed a little under 1, 500 pounds or three quarters of a ton. The air was traveling at 800 feet per second. It didn't simply stop, bounce off or evaporate when the plane struck the building. It rammed its way through the core, the elevator shafts and out the windows on the other side. Like a wind ten times the force of a hurricane, the cylinder of air carried with it light debris from the cabin such as magazines, life vests, headrest covers, and at least one passport that we know of.

I have a video post on YouTube that goes into more detail. My username is waypastvne if you want to look at it. The video is titled "Miracle Passport". Sorry I don't have enough time on the forum yet to post a link.
 
waypastvne said:
When discussing the "miracle" passport, what most people fail to take into account is the air in the aircraft's cabin. A Boeing 767 contains 19,500 cubic feet of air. Air has weight: at sea level it weighs approx. .075 pounds per cubic foot. This means that the air in the cabin weighed a little under 1, 500 pounds or three quarters of a ton. The air was traveling at 800 feet per second. It didn't simply stop, bounce off or evaporate when the plane struck the building. It rammed its way through the core, the elevator shafts and out the windows on the other side. Like a wind ten times the force of a hurricane, the cylinder of air carried with it light debris from the cabin such as magazines, life vests, headrest covers, and at least one passport that we know of.

I have a video post on YouTube that goes into more detail. My username is waypastvne if you want to look at it. The video is titled "Miracle Passport". Sorry I don't have enough time on the forum yet to post a link.
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The surviving passport is consistent with reality. In aircraft accidents some object survive the impact and fires. I have worked aircraft accidents and some objects are ejected in a crash in good condition. I never had to think about why, or prove it can happen, since I have observed firsthand objects surviving impacts. And paper objects, low mass objects, would have the best chance in a high speed accident.
 
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Many years ago I assisted in the recovery of wreckage from a Stearman Biplane that crashed in a fairly remote area. The pilot died on impact, and the resulting fire from nearly full fuel tanks really did a number on almost everything. So I was quite surprised when I came across a nearly new, unburned 20 dollar bill, and a bunch of paperwork that had been in a pouch in the cockpit. Some items were really heavily burned, others only slightly, and some not at all. The 20 came from the pilots wallet which, for comfort, he kept in the breast pocket of his jacket. Paperwork/passports and such can easily survive even a violent crash and intense fire.

L.
 
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I always like to show them the landing gear in the street. It wasn't on fire either. It simply flew through the building and landed on the street, just like that passport did.

It is pretty wild that the passport was found, but it's not impossible by any means.
 
When I watched "102 Minutes" this past Friday (a collection of videos shot by various people in Manhattan from just after the first crash to the collapse of the north tower) what struck me was how much paper was flying around the streets. There was a lot of paper in those two office buildings, and some of it, probably a small fraction, survived. But a small fraction of 2 big buildings' worth is still a lot.

The Twoofer claims about the passport illustrate 2 of their tendancies: flat outright making things up (i.e., it wasn't Atta's) and leaving out parts of the story to make it seem spookier (i.e., a guy handed a passport to a police detective and left before being identified -ooooooo! They leave out the next line, about the debris falling from the tower: who'd stick around to talk when flaming debris is falling all around you?)
 
Thanks for all the feedback.

It is a freak occurrence.
But such a big and unusual event will cause quite a few freak occurrences, I suppose.
 
I'm just curious as to how the "no planers" we have on the forum can read a thread like this and still insist that no planes hit the WTC. That's a lot of stuff to plant.
 
Eddie Dane said:
Thanks for all the feedback.

It is a freak occurrence.
But such a big and unusual event will cause quite a few freak occurrences, I suppose.
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it is not really a freak occurrence. it is to be expected.
http://911stories.googlepages.com/insidethesouthtower:eyewitnessaccounts
Later that evening, there was a wind blowing from the direction of Manhattan. Looking out the living room window, I saw a sheet of 81⁄2 by 11 sheet of paper blowing around in the parking lot. Remembering the paper flying through the air right after the North Tower was hit, I couldn’t resist the urge to find out if one of those sheets of paper was in our parking lot. I went outside. I picked it up. Sure enough, it was a sheet of letterhead from a company that had been in the World Trade Center. I held it in my fingers. I smelled smoke and kerosene in its fiber. I read the address. This had been on someone’s desk or in some photocopy room. In another life, this piece of paper represented business as usual.
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It is not a freak occurrence. Here are 2 IDs from the Caspian Airlines crash in Iran. The plane left a hole in the ground just like the one in Shanksville, but still left a lot of undamaged personal items down range of the crash site.


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