Guest Post by Kit Knightly
Dr Judy Wood is a former Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Clemson University in South Carolina, her book Where Did the Towers Go? was first published in 2010.
The central contention of the book is that the damage observed on 9/11 is not explicable by known methods of destruction, specifically citing what she perceives as anomalies.
From these purported anomalies, Dr Wood pieces together a rough hypothesis:
The towers were destroyed by a directed energy weapon (DEW) developed during the Star Wars beam project in the 1980s and potentially in orbit over New York on 9/11. This “DEW” utilises low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR) or “cold fusion” to create and/or siphon the energy from hurricanes, specifically Hurricane Erin which was off the North-East coast of the US in the days immediately before and after 9/11.
The harvested energy is used to create a “giant Tesla coil” which, as a result of “the Hutchison effect”, can create a “field effect” which causes metal and concrete to dissociate at the molecular level – a process she calls “dustification”.
This is Dr Wood’s hypothesis and it’s certainly a potentially interesting one which is worthy of discussion and investigation.
So, let’s take a look at those purported anomalies.
Hurricane Erin was the largest and longest lasting storm of the 2001 Hurricane season. It was “born” in the southern Atlantic in late August, moved westwards to the Caribbean, then turned northwards towards the United States before bending back eastwards.
In Where Did the Towers Go?, Dr Wood suggests – or implies – this was unusual behaviour for a hurricane.
The first question obviously must be – is this true? How does this behaviour compare with other hurricanes that have occurred in the same area over the years, because without comparative data we have no way of knowing whether Erin was actually odd or quite normal.
Unfortunately Wood does not offer any such comparative data in her book, which is a puzzling omission.
Happily, however the national hurricane tracking centre has path data for hurricanes going back decades, so we have tools to do the work that – with respect – should have already been done.
So, how unusual was the path of Hurricane Erin in September 2001?
Here is the path of every Atlantic hurricane of the 2001 season, including Erin:
Can you pick out any that looks especially unusual?
Let’s do another. Here is every hurricane Erin to ever exist:
Which of these Erins would you consider to be behaving unusually? Is it possible to tell from this data?
This is the Hurricane Erin of September 2001:
Dr Wood puts emphasis on the sharp turn northeastwards, which does on the face of it look quite strange, but when we look at the data we can see there are actually several other examples in the above maps showing the same – or very similar – behaviour including one that snaps around to tie itself in bow, and another that travels around three sides of a rectangle.
Here are four more random examples, including a total u-turn:
So, how unusual was Hurricane Erin?
The pathing was not unusual – It is extremely common for hurricanes to follow what they call a recurve or “C-shaped” path. Roughly 86% of Altantic hurricanes are turned back eastwards by “steering currents” and pressure systems before making landfall on the United States.
Even the sharp right turn was not unique or unusual.
The timing wasn’t unusual either, it was the prime of hurricane season and September is by far the most common month for hurricanes to come close to New York. Of the 174 hurricanes to affect the New York area, 79 of them (45%) occurred in September, that is more than double the second most common.
Erin was neither exceptionally strong (category 3, there were two category 4 storms that season), nor exceptionally long-lasting (hurricane Felix lasted just as long in 2001).
Meteorologically speaking, Hurricane Erin seems entirely unremarkable.
But that is not the only claim Dr Wood makes about Erin, she also asserts that the hurricane was “almost totally unreported” [emphasis added, p480]:
Earlier, she uses the phrase [p410]:
Is this accurate?
Well, what do we mean by ‘almost totally unreported’?
Dr Wood herself lists many of the times Erin was reported [p398-405], including on 9/11 itself, by two of the major networks (FOX & CBS) just ten minutes before the first plane reportedly hit the towers. In the preceding days Erin had featured in both national and state level weather forecasts and alerts, and its bend back out to sea was predicted at least 24 hours before hand, due to a cold front coming eastwards.
(David Hughes, who is a Wood supporter but disagrees with her about Erin, has done good work collating the various TV coverage of Erin.)
In more recent writings and interviews, Dr Wood has taken to using the term “underreported” instead of the less ambiguous “unreported” she favours in her book, but here again we encounter the same ever-present issue of subjectivity.
But what does “underreported” mean? Underreported according to whom? How reported should it have been? By what objective measure?
It was reported, and on major networks, we know that. Does it make sense to describe something that was regularly discussed on television news as being “something like a state secret”?
State secrets are state secrets, they are not reported on the weather channel just a bit less than Judy Wood thinks they should be.
In fairness it’s true Erin was not mentioned (much) after the first plane hit the towers, but by that point news networks were – some would say understandably – rather pre-occupied.
If someone wants to make a case that the very normal Hurricane Erin was unusually “underreported” then they need to make a comparative study of the same kind I did above, to show that this is true.
Just saying so is really not enough.
SUMMARY: Meteorological data suggests hurricane Erin behaved entirely normally, neither its path nor intensity mark it as unusual. Erin was repeatedly covered by mainstream television channels in the days preceding 9/11 and on the day itself. Claims it was “underreported” are at this time undefined and unsubstantiated .
In WDtTG, Dr Wood claims that there was anomalous electromagnetic activity in the atmosphere coinciding with the events of 9/11, she produces graphs like this to support her argument:
This is data from the magnetometer archives of the University of Alaska, which monitors this activity at weather stations across Alaska and Canada. The divergence from the mean does, at first glance, perhaps suggest some anomalous activity.
However, as with the Hurricane Erin claims above, Dr Wood doesn’t supply any comparative data that shows this activity to be unusual.
Fortunately, again as with the Erin claims, we do have the resources to do this research ourselves – via the magnetometer data archives of the University of Alaska, the same institute from which Dr Wood sources her data.
For the sake of comparison, let’s look at just the last twenty-four hours (October 10th 2026) from one of their magnetometers at Poker Flats in Alaska:
As you can see, not only is there similarly shaped divergence from baseline activity in just the last day, it’s actually three times as a large as the “anomaly” on 9/11 (-1500 nano-Tesla, vs -500).
Dr Wood’s graph may look more dramatic, but that is because it’s “zoomed in” – ie. it has shorter time covered on the X axis (14 hours vs 24) and much smaller Y axis (600 nT vs 3000 nT).
Here’s another example, March 23rd 2020 – the first day of Lockdown in the UK:
Or February 7th 2021 – the day the Bucs beat the Chiefs in Super Bowl 55:
Or July 16th 2025, the day after my cat disappeared:
We could keep doing this for a long time.
Again, note the numbers, all of those dates show divergence from the baseline of at least -500 nano-Teslas. That’s greater than the claimed anomaly on 9/11/01.
Just as with hurricane Erin, the book presents something as “anomalous” without any context, when ten minutes of research shows it to be entirely normal.
SUMMARY: There doesn’t appear to be any evidence the observed electro-magnetic activity on 9/11 was anomalous, and similar (or greater) levels of activity were recorded on days chosen at random.
In Where Did the Towers Go?, Dr Wood claims that the seismic signals generated by the destrutions of WTC1, WTC2 and even WTC7 were too small for the mass the buildings, and that this suggests a large percentage of the buildings mass “went away” rather than ever hitting the ground.
The main thrust of this argument is that the Seattle Kingdome – an old sports stadium – was a much smaller building than either tower, but the seismic signal its demolition produced in January 2000 (2.3 on the Richter scale) was identical to that of WTC1 (2.3), and slightly greater than that produced by WTC2 (2.1).
This is excellent comparative research, and exactly what was missing from the hurricane Erin and electromagnetic activity sections.
If the data is real and calculations accurate, it does appear there could be something potentially anomalous here.
But in fairness we should note that some other members of the 9/11 truth movement – such as James Gourley and Greg Jenkins – have raised concerns with both Wood’s reasoning and the figures.
I do not know enough about seismology, or converting potential energy to seismic signals, to offer an opinion as to who is correct. So, for me this question remains open.
It should also be noted, though, that while this looks like a decent argument against the “pancake collapse” theory once favoured by some proponents of the official story, it would not necessarily be an argument against the use of explosives. What’s obvious from observing the towers destruct is that they came apart rather than fell down in a heap, with pieces of them being flung hundreds of feet out of the footprint at upwards of 70 miles per hour.
They fell not as one piece, but as millions of pieces distributed over a vast area, and a large percentage of their weight WAS turned to dust – and it stands to reason this would dissipate the shock applied to the ground to some extent, whether explosives or “directed energy” weapons (or both) were the initiating cause.
But the biggest problem with the seismology anomaly is that the seismic data provided by nearby monitoring stations appears to have been filtered, altered or even manufactured.
That is not my opinion, but that of Dr Wood herself [emphasis added, p. 72]:
Dr Wood was even more forthright on this issue in earlier paper published on her website in October 2006 [again, emphasis added]:
Apparently local monitoring stations refused to release the raw data from 9/11. That is interesting in multiple ways, but it does call the data they did release – and therefore any calculations derived from it – into serious question. So, it might be that we are all wasting our time trying to draw any conclusions from the seismic data at all.
SUMMARY: The seismic data anomalies are potentially interesting and offer a good counter argument to the pancake collapse theory. However, other 9/11 truthers have raised issues with these calculations and Dr Wood herself believes the data might be corrupt, or even manufactured, by “complicit” institutions. This calls the reliability of any conclusions drawn from this data into question.
In Where Did the Towers Go?, Dr Wood claims that the destroyed cars – she uses the word “toasted” – around the World Trade Center show anomalous damage that cannot be accounted for by normal means.
She maintains, for example, that this picture is unusual because of the “abrupt boundary” [p214]:
But this claim is actually quite easy to refute.
Here is a picture from an arson attack in France:
As you can see, the engine block is entirely melted, the paint on the doors bubbled and flaky, but the tyres, hubcaps and paint on the chassis around them appear undamaged.
Here’s another example, a car destroyed by an engine fire that is almost pristine from the doors back:
Patchy and unpredictable damage and even an “abrupt boundary” are just not at all uncommon in vehicle fires. Here’s another one:
And another:
In other places she refers to cars, like the one below, as “disintegrated” not burned:
But a cursory google search of “burnt cars” gives hundreds of similar-looking cars. Here’s one from the site of an erupting volcano:
Here’s another from a bombing in Mogadishu:
Again, we could keep going.
Do any of these “toasted” cars look appreciably different from other cars destroyed by fire or explosives?
Like this one, from a drone strike in Syria:
Or this one from Iraq:
Or this one from Yemen:
We can alternate, if you’d like.
“Toasted” 9/11 car:
Car destroyed by truck bomb in Baghdad:
Toasted 9/11 fire engine:
Car burnt in wild fires in Los Angeles:
Toasted 9/11 cars:
Let’s play a game, shall we?
Which of these cars was “toasted” by advanced technology on 9/11, which burned in a fire, and which was destroyed in a bombing?
Can you tell?
SUMMARY: The ‘toasted’ cars is probably one of the weakest aspects of Wood’s book. They just look too similar – indistinguishable in most cases – to cars destroyed by arson, explosives, shells or the pyroclastic flow from a volcano. More importantly Wood supplies no evidence why these known methods of destruction should be ruled out.
(solution to the above ‘puzzle’ – car 1 was a fire, car 2 was a bombing and both 3 & 4 were from 9/11.)
The “bathtub” is the 70 foot deep, 3500 foot long retaining wall built, like the towers themselves, onto the bedrock of lower Manhattan and encircling the lower levels of the 16 acres World Trade Center complex.
Its purpose was to retain the waters of the Hudson River and prevent them flooding the subbasements, mall and subway tunnels beneath the World Trade Center.
In Where Did the Towers Go?, Dr Wood claims that the bathtub wall was “not significantly damaged” during the destruction of the towers, and cites this as evidence most of the mass of the towers never hit the ground.
This necessitates two questions:
1. How damaged was the bathtub?
2. How damaged should it have been?
Unfortunately Wood never quantifies her statements on this point. We’re told that the bathtub was not “significantly damaged”, and on page 90, that there was “almost no damage to the bathtub”. And that is all.
As with “underreported” earlier, this seems hopelessly subjective.
What counts as ‘significant’?
How damaged should the wall have been?
How much force was it designed to take?
Dr Wood never asks these questions, let alone answers them. So we need to try.
The bathtub certainly was damaged to some extent
This might be significant of itself, since the (alleged) terrorist bombing in 1993 allegedly detonated a 1300 pound bomb in the basement of the North Tower, very close to the bathtub wall itself, and, despite taking out two entire subbasement levels, did no damage at all to the bathtub.
That gives us an idea of the structure’s resilience.
By contrast, the destruction of the towers on 9/11 – however it was done – removed all the bathtub’s internal horizontal supports to the extent it was being held in place almost solely by the rubble itself, and , as the rubble was removed, large sections of the wall begin to shift and cracks began to open.
This meant the rubble had to be removed in a very careful grid pattern, with new steel supports put in place as rubble was moved out. It was a very slow process, taking months.
An engineering firm specialised in groundwater management was brought in to pump 100,000s of gallons away from the site per day, while advanced chemical grouts were injected into faults to patch up cracks around supports and panel joints that were seeping water.
Some of these leaks were letting as much as 200 gallons of water into the site per minute.
In 2004 George Tamaro, the lead on-site engineer overseeing the clean up, wrote a paper titled “The World Trade Center “Bathtub”, a Case History”, in which he details the damage to the bathtub and necessary repairs, including collapsed subway tunnels, the need to replace hundreds of destroyed steel supports, and necessity to build a whole new lining wall
Relevant quotes include:
And:
In May of 2002, eight months into the clean up operation, engineers were still discovering new holes and “gashes” in the bathtub wall. One of these gashes was 30m or 90 feet long – a third of football field.
According to George Tamaro, this gash was caused when the top of the South Tower drove steel supports into the bathtub wall.
We know Dr Wood is aware of this specific damage, because she quotes an article that was written about it [p 55], though she does not actually quote any description of the hole itself. How does a 90 foot gash reconcile with “almost no damage”?
So, reader, does the total damage we list here count as “significant” or not?
If not, what does? Is nothing short of total failure “significant”?
Again, we bump up against the problem of unquantifiable subjectivity.
It is impossible to falsify this kind of argument.
Further, you could simply invert this approach by arguing “In my opinion, new technology capable of turning concrete and steel to dust would have “dustified” the bathtub. The fact it didn’t is evidence this technology was not used.”
Do you see what I mean? This amounts to, essentially, an argument to incredulity. A logical fallacy it’s impossible to disprove.
Another way Dr Wood seeks to establish the bathtub was undamaged is by analysing photographs. She references this one multiple times[figs 36, 55 and 117, pages 45, 59 and 120]:
She describes it as showing no damage to the bathtub [p60]:
This is a fair description of what we can see. But crucially she does not provide either a date or photographer credit for the picture, only a link (which still works).
If we don’t know when this picture was taken, how can we take it as representative of how damaged the bathtub was immediately after 9/11?
We need to try and date this photo.
I have been unable to find a dated original online, but by comparing it to known dated photographs we can establish it was definitely at least 6 months after 9/11, almost certainly over a year after, and perhaps as much as five years after.
The closest match would be this picture:
Note the temporary stairs are in place, that the color-coded remnants of the parking garage are yet to be removed (right hand side), and the presence of the exact same empty, yellow flat-bed trailer (again, circled).
This picture was taken in November 2003.
So the “eloquent” picture showing one short stretch of (apparently) undamaged wall was taken at least six months after 9/11 and likely as much as two years after the event.
This is not evidence about the state of the bathtub on September 11 2001.
Conversely, there are photos taken relatively close to the attacks showing both damage to the bathtub and the men at work repairing it. Like this one:
New York, NY, March 15, 2002 — This portion of Ground Zero of the World Trade Center is used as a sorting area to sort out the thousands of tons of debris still left.
Photo by Larry Lerner/ FEMA News Photo
This is from March 2002, after six months of rolling repairs and clean up. Note the damage to the wall (and, indeed, the amount of debris still there). We also know they were still uncovering new damage, since this is two months before the 90 foot “gash” was found.
Later in her chapter on the bathtub, Wood seems to make a rather major mistake.
Quoting contemporaneous articles [p53], she highlights engineers expressing concern that cranes or bulldozers moving over the debris field might cause the bathtub to fail.
Based on these quotes Wood concludes [p485]:
But this is clearly a misreading, if not outright misrepresentation. Obviously the earthmoving equipment would not have damaged the bathtub if the buildings had still been standing, because it had survived thousands upon thousands of vehicles driving over it, every day, for 30 years. It had cranes and bulldozers driven all over it while the towers were being built.
The engineers’ post-9/11 concern was that the bathtub was already so unstable because the of the destruction of the buildings that any further disturbance by heavy equipment might worsen the damage or cause it to fail completely.
Their concern is NOT evidence the bathtub was undamaged, quite the opposite, it’s evidence of the extent of the damage done to the bathtub by the destruction of the towers, and its resulting fragility.
SUMMARY: The bathtub was damaged by the destruction of WTC1 & 2, whether this damage was “significant” vs “insignificant” is subjective absent data specifics. Pictures showing “no damage” are selectively chosen and undated in the book but can be shown to be from months or years after 9/11. Claims it was more damaged by the clean-up equipment than the collapse are false and absurd.
In WDtTG?, Dr Wood claims the majority of the buildings were “dustified” – a word she has coined to describe molecular dissociation by some unknown covert technology.
This is only a partly controversial statement. Nobody disputes that a sizeable amount of the WTC’s mass (mainly lightweight concrete and gypsum wall boards) was indeed pulverised – or “dustified” if you prefer – by one process or another.
But Dr Wood goes further and suggests the vast majority of the structural steel was also turned to dust.
She asserts two arguments in favour of this conclusion –
A) That the debris field was too small to contain the original mass of the Towers (we discuss this in Anomaly 7), and
B) That videos and photographs seem to show steel turning to dust.
The example of these videos/images most often cited by proponents of Dr Wood’s work is this one:
Dr Wood claims this video shows ‘the spire’ – a section of core columns – dissolving into dust. That is one potential interpretation, another explanation – suggested by other 9/11 truthers – is that the video simply shows the spire collapsing, leaving behind the dust that had settled on it during the earlier stages of collapse.
But in either case analysing short low res video clips is not going to provide us any solid information, and is no basis for forensic science.
We have a hypothesis – The vast majority of the structural steel from the World Trade Center was “dustified”.
And the easiest way to test this hypothesis is to simply analyse the dust.
If any significant amount of the steel had been dustified, then you would expect it to be reflected in the composition of the dust. There ought to be more steel or iron in there than would be reasonable if the dust was actually just powdered concrete, gypsum etc.
So, how much did the towers weigh, and how much of that weight was steel?
For some reason, estimates for the weight of the towers vary. Dr Wood uses ~500,000 tons each, this is by far the most commonly repeated estimate, but some people contend it may be a mistake that conflates the weights of both towers.
Contemporary articles in the New York Times list the weight of each tower as ~275,000 tons, while the official 9/11 museum cites “over 250,000 tons each”.
Whichever figure is correct, we do know the weight of structural steel is undisputed – about 100,000 tons per tower.
With these figures in hand, we can reason that, since structural steel made up 20%-40% of the towers’ mass (not including steel furniture, ducting, elevators etc.), then – if that steel was dustified in line with Dr Wood’s hypothesis – the dust itself should be AT LEAST 20% iron/steel.
We also need to establish a baseline – ie. how much iron would we normally expect to find in pulverised concrete.
That is relatively simple to establish – In 2006 the USGS published a short textbook titled “Urban Aerosols and Their Impacts”, detailing their studies of the dust and its potential adverse effects on the health of the people who inhaled it.
From this book [p 93], we know the WTC towers used lightweight concrete, which is “composed of aggregate, sand, and Portland cement.”
According to the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, one of the key ingredients of Portland cement is a chemical called tetra-calcium aluminoferrite – a compound of aluminium, calcium and iron oxide.
This is backed up by a study done at Penn State University on the chemical composition of Portland cement, which found it to be about 8% tetra-calcium aluminoferrite – that translates to about 2% iron.
Modern cement companies list iron oxide in their ingredients at levels between 0.5% and 6.0%, depending on the type.
In short, all concrete has a small amount of iron in it.
So, we have our parameters. If the structural steel was “dustified”, iron should be at least 20% of the dust. If the dust is just concrete, gypsum etc. we would expect iron levels in the low single digits.
So, how much iron was in the dust?
Chemical studies of the dust undertaken by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and published in Critical Reviews in Toxicology estimate it was 80-90% concrete, gypsum, and synthetic fibres.
Their elemental analysis shows iron levels of 2300-10,000 micro-grams per gram of dust – that’s between 0.23% and 1%.
USGS surveys of the dust found iron present at only “minor or trace levels”, testing eight dust samples from different areas around the city [p 91 of “Urban Aerosols”], and finding an average iron content of 1.02%
These figures are right in line with the known chemical composition of pulverised concrete. It doesn’t seem as if the dust samples that have been analyzed contain any evidence suggestive of “dustified” steel.
SUMMARY: If there is any steel missing, it is not in that dust.
But what if the steel was dustified steel right along with the concrete, but it simply isn’t present in any of the dust samples that have been analysed? What if it simply blew away on air currents or was deposited in locations where no dust samples were taken?
This bring us to –
The most fundamental argument of the book is – as its title implies – that World Trade Center 1 & 2 “went away”. That the debris field left after the buildings “went poof” was “remarkably small” and could not possibly represent the original mass of The Twin Towers.
This, Dr Wood posits, is evidence the majority of the towers’ mass – steel as well as concrete – was “dustified”.
The book never fully quantifies exactly how much of the towers were “dustified”, or how much remained. The only figure provided is 80-90% dustification, but that is based on seismic signal analysis not analysis of the debris field.
To properly test this hypothesis first we must establish how much debris there was, and then compare it with how much there should have been.
Let’s tackle the second question first…
How much rubble should there have been?
It would be reasonable to assume that Dr Wood has done this calculation, since it’s absolutely crucial in order to establish her basic hypothesis.
However, it would seem she has not. So, ok we shall do it ourselves.
Let’s start by acknowledging that most buildings are mostly empty space. That is the point of buildings – to have plenty of room inside them for people to live and work.
The actual solid mass of any building (ie the stuff its made from) is only a small percentage of its volume (the space it occupies).
Think about the way in which a single deck of playing cards can make a house of cards 16 inches high, over a foot wide and 2.5 inches deep – giving it a volume of 480 cubic inches.
But the actual mass of this house – the cards themselves – can all be packed into a box 3 inches long and less than an inch deep – a volume of only ~6 cubic inches.
The twin towers were obviously enormous, 1368 feet tall and 208 feet along each side – that’s a total volume of ~59,000,000 cubic feet. But the vast majority of this volume – something between 90% and 95% by most estimates – was the aforementioned and all important empty space.
That means the solid material of the towers was between 5 and 10% of their volume, that would be 2.9-5.9 million cubic feet.
As we go forward I will do calculations with both these numbers, giving the results as a range determined by these min-max values.
Based on those estimates, if you were to remove the empty space from both WTC1 and 2, and then pack the actual material of each tower into a solid rectangle with the same 208×208 foot footprint as the actual building, it would only be between 5 and 11 storeys tall, ~60-120 feet.
Spread that out over the 5 acre area of the World Trade Center plaza, and the the same amount of material would be 26-53 feet high, between 2 and 4 storeys.
Spread it out over the whole 16 acre area of the WTC complex, it would be maybe 9-18 feet high.
Bear in mind this is including everything. Steel, concrete, glass, aluminium, gypsum, ceramics, wire, ducting…everything.
So, we’ve established the rough range for how much debris there could, or should, have been after the towers “collapsed”.
Now we ask…
How much rubble was actually there?
Unfortunately, life is messier than hypotheticals, and unlike our theoretical neatly stacked material described above, the reality of the 9/11 debris field was chaotic.
We know that a significant portion of the mass of the buildings (ie. the concrete) was indeed ‘dustified’ (pulverised) into a dust cloud that covered the entirety of lower Manhattan and even parts of Brooklyn
We also know a significant portion of what was left (ie. large pieces of structural steel, aluminium siding etc.) was thrown as much as 500-800 feet outside the towers footprint, onto streets and buildings nearby.
All this makes the actual amount of debris quite hard to calculate exactly.
Official sources on the size of remaining heaps, what rescue workers called “the pile”, are pretty scant, so we need to do a little investigating.
Firstly we can do a comparison with objects of known size:
This shows engineers beginning clearing work on the ruins of WTC1, the smaller of the two piles. We can see an almost intact exterior steel panel lying flat on the slope of the pile to the right of center. We know these panels are exactly 36 feet tall, and we can see the pile is ~1.5 times the height of the panel – that suggests a height of ~45-55 feet
Topographical lidar data produced by NOAA and some private contractors in the days following the attacks, which Dr Wood cites in her book [p175], suggests narrow, small spikes of rubble standing as much as ~150 feet tall, but in general the LIDAR data tends to agree with our photo analysis above – a reasonable average of around 40-60 feet of rubble spread over the footprints of the two towers.
And of course, this is only what was above ground. What tends to be forgotten is that below the Twin Towers there was a concourse level, and then 6 further sub-basement levels constructed in the “bathtub” – the 70 foot deep, 16 acre underground area spanning the entire width of the World Trade Centre complex we discussed earlier.
After 9/11 these subterranean structures contained substantial amounts of rubble which took most of the next year to remove. (Punctures down to those levels show up as the deep red pits in the topographical data).
So, does a rubble pile in the footprint averaging 40-60ft in height plus unknown quantities of debris in the sub-basements or hurled outside the footprint or pulverised into layers of dust over Lower Manhattan really suggest 80-90% of the towers “went away”?
Clearly not. On the contrary our calculations show that the average height of the above ground debris pile is basically what you would expect to see after two buildings of that size were destroyed in the violent way they obviously were. When you take into account the dispersed concrete and the fact there were large amounts of debris underground, it’s pretty clear that the vast majority (probably close to 100%) of the original mass of the towers can be accounted for after they were destroyed.
SUMMARY: It is mathematically possible for the known mass of the towers to cover the known size of the debris field given the dispersal over a wide area and collapse into subbasement levels. Statements that structural steel is “missing” rely on subjective interpretation of photographs for evidence, no scientific data supports this claim and no attempt is made to measure the amount of steel debris.
The subtitle of Where did the Towers Go? is “evidence of directed free-energy technology on 9/11”. It is an inaccurate title, as Wood makes clear herself throughout the book, there is no evidence FOR this technology – she doesn’t even claim to know exactly what this technology IS, much less exactly how it works.
Rather, it is an argument of inference. She observes phenomena she considers anomalous and reasons – rightly or wrongly – that since these are unknown phenomena an unknown technology must be responsible.
The ‘steel is missing’ – so some new technology must have made it disappear.
The ‘hurricane was behaving strangely’ – so this new technology must relate to hurricanes in some way.
And so on.
So, if these anomalies do not exist, the corollary is there’s no reason to think any theoretical “directed energy weapon” was deployed on 9/11.
If the rubble is accounted for….
…And the hurricane behaves normally…
…And the atmospheric electromagnetic activity was routine…
…And the cars were burnt…
…And the bathtub was damaged…
…then what requires the hypothesised use a new kind of technology, the existence of which is entirely theoretical?
If there is nothing extraordinary to explain, there is no need to reach for an extraordinary explanation.
The book’s core claims are based simply on a failure to verify the initial perceived anomalies before hastening to draw conclusions.
In this review we have taken these alleged anomalies one by one and, by simply doing some basic comparative analysis, have shown they are NOT anomalous at all.
Which brings us to our biggest question –
Why aren’t these calculations or this research in the book?
If you think the rubble is missing, why not try counting it?
If you think the steel has been “dustified”, why not look for steel in the dust?
If you think the hurricane was odd, why not compare it to other hurricanes?
If you think the cars were “toasted” rather than just burned, why not compare them to other burned cars?
Why, in place of this objective research, are we supplied with endlessly subjective judgments, interpreted images and video stills – sometimes presented with zero context?
This is my biggest recurring issue with Where Did the Towers Go? – its use of subjective qualitative statements in place of objective measured realities, and its reliance on inference and assumption to make its arguments.
It is so sure of the self-evident nature of its premise that it never sets about to actually test it.
This is the very foundation of the book, its core argument, its title – “Where did the towers go?” – and yet it never establishes that they went anywhere at all.
Continue reading...
[ H/T The Burning Platform ]
A review of “Where Did the Towers Go?”
The book
Dr Judy Wood is a former Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Clemson University in South Carolina, her book Where Did the Towers Go? was first published in 2010.
The central contention of the book is that the damage observed on 9/11 is not explicable by known methods of destruction, specifically citing what she perceives as anomalies.
- Hurricane Erin was underreported and behaved abnormally.
- There was unusual electro-magnetic activity in the atmosphere on the day of 9/11.
- The destruction generated a smaller than expected seismic signal.
- The “bathtub” – the subterranean wall built to prevent the Hudson River flooding lower Manhattan – was undamaged.
- Cars and other vehicles exhibited strange damage not explicable by known means
- Structural steel was “dustified”.
- The destruction of WTC1 and WTC2 produced considerably less rubble than one would expect.
From these purported anomalies, Dr Wood pieces together a rough hypothesis:
The towers were destroyed by a directed energy weapon (DEW) developed during the Star Wars beam project in the 1980s and potentially in orbit over New York on 9/11. This “DEW” utilises low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR) or “cold fusion” to create and/or siphon the energy from hurricanes, specifically Hurricane Erin which was off the North-East coast of the US in the days immediately before and after 9/11.
The harvested energy is used to create a “giant Tesla coil” which, as a result of “the Hutchison effect”, can create a “field effect” which causes metal and concrete to dissociate at the molecular level – a process she calls “dustification”.
This is Dr Wood’s hypothesis and it’s certainly a potentially interesting one which is worthy of discussion and investigation.
So, let’s take a look at those purported anomalies.
Anomaly 1 – Hurricane Erin
Hurricane Erin was the largest and longest lasting storm of the 2001 Hurricane season. It was “born” in the southern Atlantic in late August, moved westwards to the Caribbean, then turned northwards towards the United States before bending back eastwards.
In Where Did the Towers Go?, Dr Wood suggests – or implies – this was unusual behaviour for a hurricane.
The first question obviously must be – is this true? How does this behaviour compare with other hurricanes that have occurred in the same area over the years, because without comparative data we have no way of knowing whether Erin was actually odd or quite normal.
Unfortunately Wood does not offer any such comparative data in her book, which is a puzzling omission.
Happily, however the national hurricane tracking centre has path data for hurricanes going back decades, so we have tools to do the work that – with respect – should have already been done.
So, how unusual was the path of Hurricane Erin in September 2001?
Here is the path of every Atlantic hurricane of the 2001 season, including Erin:
Can you pick out any that looks especially unusual?
Let’s do another. Here is every hurricane Erin to ever exist:
Which of these Erins would you consider to be behaving unusually? Is it possible to tell from this data?
This is the Hurricane Erin of September 2001:
Dr Wood puts emphasis on the sharp turn northeastwards, which does on the face of it look quite strange, but when we look at the data we can see there are actually several other examples in the above maps showing the same – or very similar – behaviour including one that snaps around to tie itself in bow, and another that travels around three sides of a rectangle.
Here are four more random examples, including a total u-turn:
So, how unusual was Hurricane Erin?
The pathing was not unusual – It is extremely common for hurricanes to follow what they call a recurve or “C-shaped” path. Roughly 86% of Altantic hurricanes are turned back eastwards by “steering currents” and pressure systems before making landfall on the United States.
Even the sharp right turn was not unique or unusual.
The timing wasn’t unusual either, it was the prime of hurricane season and September is by far the most common month for hurricanes to come close to New York. Of the 174 hurricanes to affect the New York area, 79 of them (45%) occurred in September, that is more than double the second most common.
Erin was neither exceptionally strong (category 3, there were two category 4 storms that season), nor exceptionally long-lasting (hurricane Felix lasted just as long in 2001).
Meteorologically speaking, Hurricane Erin seems entirely unremarkable.
But that is not the only claim Dr Wood makes about Erin, she also asserts that the hurricane was “almost totally unreported” [emphasis added, p480]:
Earlier, she uses the phrase [p410]:
Is this accurate?
Well, what do we mean by ‘almost totally unreported’?
Dr Wood herself lists many of the times Erin was reported [p398-405], including on 9/11 itself, by two of the major networks (FOX & CBS) just ten minutes before the first plane reportedly hit the towers. In the preceding days Erin had featured in both national and state level weather forecasts and alerts, and its bend back out to sea was predicted at least 24 hours before hand, due to a cold front coming eastwards.
(David Hughes, who is a Wood supporter but disagrees with her about Erin, has done good work collating the various TV coverage of Erin.)
In more recent writings and interviews, Dr Wood has taken to using the term “underreported” instead of the less ambiguous “unreported” she favours in her book, but here again we encounter the same ever-present issue of subjectivity.
But what does “underreported” mean? Underreported according to whom? How reported should it have been? By what objective measure?
It was reported, and on major networks, we know that. Does it make sense to describe something that was regularly discussed on television news as being “something like a state secret”?
State secrets are state secrets, they are not reported on the weather channel just a bit less than Judy Wood thinks they should be.
In fairness it’s true Erin was not mentioned (much) after the first plane hit the towers, but by that point news networks were – some would say understandably – rather pre-occupied.
If someone wants to make a case that the very normal Hurricane Erin was unusually “underreported” then they need to make a comparative study of the same kind I did above, to show that this is true.
Just saying so is really not enough.
SUMMARY: Meteorological data suggests hurricane Erin behaved entirely normally, neither its path nor intensity mark it as unusual. Erin was repeatedly covered by mainstream television channels in the days preceding 9/11 and on the day itself. Claims it was “underreported” are at this time undefined and unsubstantiated .
Anomaly 2 – Electromagnetic Data
In WDtTG, Dr Wood claims that there was anomalous electromagnetic activity in the atmosphere coinciding with the events of 9/11, she produces graphs like this to support her argument:
This is data from the magnetometer archives of the University of Alaska, which monitors this activity at weather stations across Alaska and Canada. The divergence from the mean does, at first glance, perhaps suggest some anomalous activity.
However, as with the Hurricane Erin claims above, Dr Wood doesn’t supply any comparative data that shows this activity to be unusual.
Fortunately, again as with the Erin claims, we do have the resources to do this research ourselves – via the magnetometer data archives of the University of Alaska, the same institute from which Dr Wood sources her data.
For the sake of comparison, let’s look at just the last twenty-four hours (October 10th 2026) from one of their magnetometers at Poker Flats in Alaska:
As you can see, not only is there similarly shaped divergence from baseline activity in just the last day, it’s actually three times as a large as the “anomaly” on 9/11 (-1500 nano-Tesla, vs -500).
Dr Wood’s graph may look more dramatic, but that is because it’s “zoomed in” – ie. it has shorter time covered on the X axis (14 hours vs 24) and much smaller Y axis (600 nT vs 3000 nT).
Here’s another example, March 23rd 2020 – the first day of Lockdown in the UK:
Or February 7th 2021 – the day the Bucs beat the Chiefs in Super Bowl 55:
Or July 16th 2025, the day after my cat disappeared:
We could keep doing this for a long time.
Again, note the numbers, all of those dates show divergence from the baseline of at least -500 nano-Teslas. That’s greater than the claimed anomaly on 9/11/01.
Just as with hurricane Erin, the book presents something as “anomalous” without any context, when ten minutes of research shows it to be entirely normal.
SUMMARY: There doesn’t appear to be any evidence the observed electro-magnetic activity on 9/11 was anomalous, and similar (or greater) levels of activity were recorded on days chosen at random.
Anomaly 3 – Seismic Signals
In Where Did the Towers Go?, Dr Wood claims that the seismic signals generated by the destrutions of WTC1, WTC2 and even WTC7 were too small for the mass the buildings, and that this suggests a large percentage of the buildings mass “went away” rather than ever hitting the ground.
The main thrust of this argument is that the Seattle Kingdome – an old sports stadium – was a much smaller building than either tower, but the seismic signal its demolition produced in January 2000 (2.3 on the Richter scale) was identical to that of WTC1 (2.3), and slightly greater than that produced by WTC2 (2.1).
This is excellent comparative research, and exactly what was missing from the hurricane Erin and electromagnetic activity sections.
If the data is real and calculations accurate, it does appear there could be something potentially anomalous here.
But in fairness we should note that some other members of the 9/11 truth movement – such as James Gourley and Greg Jenkins – have raised concerns with both Wood’s reasoning and the figures.
I do not know enough about seismology, or converting potential energy to seismic signals, to offer an opinion as to who is correct. So, for me this question remains open.
It should also be noted, though, that while this looks like a decent argument against the “pancake collapse” theory once favoured by some proponents of the official story, it would not necessarily be an argument against the use of explosives. What’s obvious from observing the towers destruct is that they came apart rather than fell down in a heap, with pieces of them being flung hundreds of feet out of the footprint at upwards of 70 miles per hour.
They fell not as one piece, but as millions of pieces distributed over a vast area, and a large percentage of their weight WAS turned to dust – and it stands to reason this would dissipate the shock applied to the ground to some extent, whether explosives or “directed energy” weapons (or both) were the initiating cause.
But the biggest problem with the seismology anomaly is that the seismic data provided by nearby monitoring stations appears to have been filtered, altered or even manufactured.
That is not my opinion, but that of Dr Wood herself [emphasis added, p. 72]:
Dr Wood was even more forthright on this issue in earlier paper published on her website in October 2006 [again, emphasis added]:
Apparently local monitoring stations refused to release the raw data from 9/11. That is interesting in multiple ways, but it does call the data they did release – and therefore any calculations derived from it – into serious question. So, it might be that we are all wasting our time trying to draw any conclusions from the seismic data at all.
SUMMARY: The seismic data anomalies are potentially interesting and offer a good counter argument to the pancake collapse theory. However, other 9/11 truthers have raised issues with these calculations and Dr Wood herself believes the data might be corrupt, or even manufactured, by “complicit” institutions. This calls the reliability of any conclusions drawn from this data into question.
Anomaly 4 – “toasted cars”
In Where Did the Towers Go?, Dr Wood claims that the destroyed cars – she uses the word “toasted” – around the World Trade Center show anomalous damage that cannot be accounted for by normal means.
She maintains, for example, that this picture is unusual because of the “abrupt boundary” [p214]:
But this claim is actually quite easy to refute.
Here is a picture from an arson attack in France:
As you can see, the engine block is entirely melted, the paint on the doors bubbled and flaky, but the tyres, hubcaps and paint on the chassis around them appear undamaged.
Here’s another example, a car destroyed by an engine fire that is almost pristine from the doors back:
Patchy and unpredictable damage and even an “abrupt boundary” are just not at all uncommon in vehicle fires. Here’s another one:
And another:
In other places she refers to cars, like the one below, as “disintegrated” not burned:
But a cursory google search of “burnt cars” gives hundreds of similar-looking cars. Here’s one from the site of an erupting volcano:
Here’s another from a bombing in Mogadishu:
Again, we could keep going.
Do any of these “toasted” cars look appreciably different from other cars destroyed by fire or explosives?
Like this one, from a drone strike in Syria:
Or this one from Iraq:
Or this one from Yemen:
We can alternate, if you’d like.
“Toasted” 9/11 car:
Car destroyed by truck bomb in Baghdad:
Toasted 9/11 fire engine:
Car burnt in wild fires in Los Angeles:
Toasted 9/11 cars:
Let’s play a game, shall we?
Which of these cars was “toasted” by advanced technology on 9/11, which burned in a fire, and which was destroyed in a bombing?
Can you tell?
SUMMARY: The ‘toasted’ cars is probably one of the weakest aspects of Wood’s book. They just look too similar – indistinguishable in most cases – to cars destroyed by arson, explosives, shells or the pyroclastic flow from a volcano. More importantly Wood supplies no evidence why these known methods of destruction should be ruled out.
(solution to the above ‘puzzle’ – car 1 was a fire, car 2 was a bombing and both 3 & 4 were from 9/11.)
Anomaly 5 – The “undamaged” bathtub
The “bathtub” is the 70 foot deep, 3500 foot long retaining wall built, like the towers themselves, onto the bedrock of lower Manhattan and encircling the lower levels of the 16 acres World Trade Center complex.
Its purpose was to retain the waters of the Hudson River and prevent them flooding the subbasements, mall and subway tunnels beneath the World Trade Center.
In Where Did the Towers Go?, Dr Wood claims that the bathtub wall was “not significantly damaged” during the destruction of the towers, and cites this as evidence most of the mass of the towers never hit the ground.
This necessitates two questions:
1. How damaged was the bathtub?
2. How damaged should it have been?
Unfortunately Wood never quantifies her statements on this point. We’re told that the bathtub was not “significantly damaged”, and on page 90, that there was “almost no damage to the bathtub”. And that is all.
As with “underreported” earlier, this seems hopelessly subjective.
What counts as ‘significant’?
How damaged should the wall have been?
How much force was it designed to take?
Dr Wood never asks these questions, let alone answers them. So we need to try.
The bathtub certainly was damaged to some extent
This might be significant of itself, since the (alleged) terrorist bombing in 1993 allegedly detonated a 1300 pound bomb in the basement of the North Tower, very close to the bathtub wall itself, and, despite taking out two entire subbasement levels, did no damage at all to the bathtub.
That gives us an idea of the structure’s resilience.
By contrast, the destruction of the towers on 9/11 – however it was done – removed all the bathtub’s internal horizontal supports to the extent it was being held in place almost solely by the rubble itself, and , as the rubble was removed, large sections of the wall begin to shift and cracks began to open.
This meant the rubble had to be removed in a very careful grid pattern, with new steel supports put in place as rubble was moved out. It was a very slow process, taking months.
An engineering firm specialised in groundwater management was brought in to pump 100,000s of gallons away from the site per day, while advanced chemical grouts were injected into faults to patch up cracks around supports and panel joints that were seeping water.
Some of these leaks were letting as much as 200 gallons of water into the site per minute.
In 2004 George Tamaro, the lead on-site engineer overseeing the clean up, wrote a paper titled “The World Trade Center “Bathtub”, a Case History”, in which he details the damage to the bathtub and necessary repairs, including collapsed subway tunnels, the need to replace hundreds of destroyed steel supports, and necessity to build a whole new lining wall
Relevant quotes include:
And:
In May of 2002, eight months into the clean up operation, engineers were still discovering new holes and “gashes” in the bathtub wall. One of these gashes was 30m or 90 feet long – a third of football field.
According to George Tamaro, this gash was caused when the top of the South Tower drove steel supports into the bathtub wall.
We know Dr Wood is aware of this specific damage, because she quotes an article that was written about it [p 55], though she does not actually quote any description of the hole itself. How does a 90 foot gash reconcile with “almost no damage”?
So, reader, does the total damage we list here count as “significant” or not?
If not, what does? Is nothing short of total failure “significant”?
Again, we bump up against the problem of unquantifiable subjectivity.
It is impossible to falsify this kind of argument.
Further, you could simply invert this approach by arguing “In my opinion, new technology capable of turning concrete and steel to dust would have “dustified” the bathtub. The fact it didn’t is evidence this technology was not used.”
Do you see what I mean? This amounts to, essentially, an argument to incredulity. A logical fallacy it’s impossible to disprove.
Another way Dr Wood seeks to establish the bathtub was undamaged is by analysing photographs. She references this one multiple times[figs 36, 55 and 117, pages 45, 59 and 120]:
She describes it as showing no damage to the bathtub [p60]:
This is a fair description of what we can see. But crucially she does not provide either a date or photographer credit for the picture, only a link (which still works).
If we don’t know when this picture was taken, how can we take it as representative of how damaged the bathtub was immediately after 9/11?
We need to try and date this photo.
I have been unable to find a dated original online, but by comparing it to known dated photographs we can establish it was definitely at least 6 months after 9/11, almost certainly over a year after, and perhaps as much as five years after.
The closest match would be this picture:
Note the temporary stairs are in place, that the color-coded remnants of the parking garage are yet to be removed (right hand side), and the presence of the exact same empty, yellow flat-bed trailer (again, circled).
This picture was taken in November 2003.
So the “eloquent” picture showing one short stretch of (apparently) undamaged wall was taken at least six months after 9/11 and likely as much as two years after the event.
This is not evidence about the state of the bathtub on September 11 2001.
Conversely, there are photos taken relatively close to the attacks showing both damage to the bathtub and the men at work repairing it. Like this one:
New York, NY, March 15, 2002 — This portion of Ground Zero of the World Trade Center is used as a sorting area to sort out the thousands of tons of debris still left.
Photo by Larry Lerner/ FEMA News Photo
This is from March 2002, after six months of rolling repairs and clean up. Note the damage to the wall (and, indeed, the amount of debris still there). We also know they were still uncovering new damage, since this is two months before the 90 foot “gash” was found.
Later in her chapter on the bathtub, Wood seems to make a rather major mistake.
Quoting contemporaneous articles [p53], she highlights engineers expressing concern that cranes or bulldozers moving over the debris field might cause the bathtub to fail.
Based on these quotes Wood concludes [p485]:
But this is clearly a misreading, if not outright misrepresentation. Obviously the earthmoving equipment would not have damaged the bathtub if the buildings had still been standing, because it had survived thousands upon thousands of vehicles driving over it, every day, for 30 years. It had cranes and bulldozers driven all over it while the towers were being built.
The engineers’ post-9/11 concern was that the bathtub was already so unstable because the of the destruction of the buildings that any further disturbance by heavy equipment might worsen the damage or cause it to fail completely.
Their concern is NOT evidence the bathtub was undamaged, quite the opposite, it’s evidence of the extent of the damage done to the bathtub by the destruction of the towers, and its resulting fragility.
SUMMARY: The bathtub was damaged by the destruction of WTC1 & 2, whether this damage was “significant” vs “insignificant” is subjective absent data specifics. Pictures showing “no damage” are selectively chosen and undated in the book but can be shown to be from months or years after 9/11. Claims it was more damaged by the clean-up equipment than the collapse are false and absurd.
Anomaly 6 – “Dustified” Steel
In WDtTG?, Dr Wood claims the majority of the buildings were “dustified” – a word she has coined to describe molecular dissociation by some unknown covert technology.
This is only a partly controversial statement. Nobody disputes that a sizeable amount of the WTC’s mass (mainly lightweight concrete and gypsum wall boards) was indeed pulverised – or “dustified” if you prefer – by one process or another.
But Dr Wood goes further and suggests the vast majority of the structural steel was also turned to dust.
She asserts two arguments in favour of this conclusion –
A) That the debris field was too small to contain the original mass of the Towers (we discuss this in Anomaly 7), and
B) That videos and photographs seem to show steel turning to dust.
The example of these videos/images most often cited by proponents of Dr Wood’s work is this one:
Dr Wood claims this video shows ‘the spire’ – a section of core columns – dissolving into dust. That is one potential interpretation, another explanation – suggested by other 9/11 truthers – is that the video simply shows the spire collapsing, leaving behind the dust that had settled on it during the earlier stages of collapse.
But in either case analysing short low res video clips is not going to provide us any solid information, and is no basis for forensic science.
We have a hypothesis – The vast majority of the structural steel from the World Trade Center was “dustified”.
And the easiest way to test this hypothesis is to simply analyse the dust.
If any significant amount of the steel had been dustified, then you would expect it to be reflected in the composition of the dust. There ought to be more steel or iron in there than would be reasonable if the dust was actually just powdered concrete, gypsum etc.
So, how much did the towers weigh, and how much of that weight was steel?
For some reason, estimates for the weight of the towers vary. Dr Wood uses ~500,000 tons each, this is by far the most commonly repeated estimate, but some people contend it may be a mistake that conflates the weights of both towers.
Contemporary articles in the New York Times list the weight of each tower as ~275,000 tons, while the official 9/11 museum cites “over 250,000 tons each”.
Whichever figure is correct, we do know the weight of structural steel is undisputed – about 100,000 tons per tower.
With these figures in hand, we can reason that, since structural steel made up 20%-40% of the towers’ mass (not including steel furniture, ducting, elevators etc.), then – if that steel was dustified in line with Dr Wood’s hypothesis – the dust itself should be AT LEAST 20% iron/steel.
We also need to establish a baseline – ie. how much iron would we normally expect to find in pulverised concrete.
That is relatively simple to establish – In 2006 the USGS published a short textbook titled “Urban Aerosols and Their Impacts”, detailing their studies of the dust and its potential adverse effects on the health of the people who inhaled it.
From this book [p 93], we know the WTC towers used lightweight concrete, which is “composed of aggregate, sand, and Portland cement.”
According to the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, one of the key ingredients of Portland cement is a chemical called tetra-calcium aluminoferrite – a compound of aluminium, calcium and iron oxide.
This is backed up by a study done at Penn State University on the chemical composition of Portland cement, which found it to be about 8% tetra-calcium aluminoferrite – that translates to about 2% iron.
Modern cement companies list iron oxide in their ingredients at levels between 0.5% and 6.0%, depending on the type.
In short, all concrete has a small amount of iron in it.
So, we have our parameters. If the structural steel was “dustified”, iron should be at least 20% of the dust. If the dust is just concrete, gypsum etc. we would expect iron levels in the low single digits.
So, how much iron was in the dust?
Chemical studies of the dust undertaken by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and published in Critical Reviews in Toxicology estimate it was 80-90% concrete, gypsum, and synthetic fibres.
Their elemental analysis shows iron levels of 2300-10,000 micro-grams per gram of dust – that’s between 0.23% and 1%.
USGS surveys of the dust found iron present at only “minor or trace levels”, testing eight dust samples from different areas around the city [p 91 of “Urban Aerosols”], and finding an average iron content of 1.02%
These figures are right in line with the known chemical composition of pulverised concrete. It doesn’t seem as if the dust samples that have been analyzed contain any evidence suggestive of “dustified” steel.
SUMMARY: If there is any steel missing, it is not in that dust.
But what if the steel was dustified steel right along with the concrete, but it simply isn’t present in any of the dust samples that have been analysed? What if it simply blew away on air currents or was deposited in locations where no dust samples were taken?
This bring us to –
Anomaly 7 – Missing Rubble
The most fundamental argument of the book is – as its title implies – that World Trade Center 1 & 2 “went away”. That the debris field left after the buildings “went poof” was “remarkably small” and could not possibly represent the original mass of The Twin Towers.
This, Dr Wood posits, is evidence the majority of the towers’ mass – steel as well as concrete – was “dustified”.
The book never fully quantifies exactly how much of the towers were “dustified”, or how much remained. The only figure provided is 80-90% dustification, but that is based on seismic signal analysis not analysis of the debris field.
To properly test this hypothesis first we must establish how much debris there was, and then compare it with how much there should have been.
Let’s tackle the second question first…
How much rubble should there have been?
It would be reasonable to assume that Dr Wood has done this calculation, since it’s absolutely crucial in order to establish her basic hypothesis.
However, it would seem she has not. So, ok we shall do it ourselves.
Let’s start by acknowledging that most buildings are mostly empty space. That is the point of buildings – to have plenty of room inside them for people to live and work.
The actual solid mass of any building (ie the stuff its made from) is only a small percentage of its volume (the space it occupies).
Think about the way in which a single deck of playing cards can make a house of cards 16 inches high, over a foot wide and 2.5 inches deep – giving it a volume of 480 cubic inches.
But the actual mass of this house – the cards themselves – can all be packed into a box 3 inches long and less than an inch deep – a volume of only ~6 cubic inches.
The twin towers were obviously enormous, 1368 feet tall and 208 feet along each side – that’s a total volume of ~59,000,000 cubic feet. But the vast majority of this volume – something between 90% and 95% by most estimates – was the aforementioned and all important empty space.
That means the solid material of the towers was between 5 and 10% of their volume, that would be 2.9-5.9 million cubic feet.
As we go forward I will do calculations with both these numbers, giving the results as a range determined by these min-max values.
Based on those estimates, if you were to remove the empty space from both WTC1 and 2, and then pack the actual material of each tower into a solid rectangle with the same 208×208 foot footprint as the actual building, it would only be between 5 and 11 storeys tall, ~60-120 feet.
Spread that out over the 5 acre area of the World Trade Center plaza, and the the same amount of material would be 26-53 feet high, between 2 and 4 storeys.
Spread it out over the whole 16 acre area of the WTC complex, it would be maybe 9-18 feet high.
Bear in mind this is including everything. Steel, concrete, glass, aluminium, gypsum, ceramics, wire, ducting…everything.
So, we’ve established the rough range for how much debris there could, or should, have been after the towers “collapsed”.
Now we ask…
How much rubble was actually there?
Unfortunately, life is messier than hypotheticals, and unlike our theoretical neatly stacked material described above, the reality of the 9/11 debris field was chaotic.
We know that a significant portion of the mass of the buildings (ie. the concrete) was indeed ‘dustified’ (pulverised) into a dust cloud that covered the entirety of lower Manhattan and even parts of Brooklyn
We also know a significant portion of what was left (ie. large pieces of structural steel, aluminium siding etc.) was thrown as much as 500-800 feet outside the towers footprint, onto streets and buildings nearby.
All this makes the actual amount of debris quite hard to calculate exactly.
Official sources on the size of remaining heaps, what rescue workers called “the pile”, are pretty scant, so we need to do a little investigating.
Firstly we can do a comparison with objects of known size:
This shows engineers beginning clearing work on the ruins of WTC1, the smaller of the two piles. We can see an almost intact exterior steel panel lying flat on the slope of the pile to the right of center. We know these panels are exactly 36 feet tall, and we can see the pile is ~1.5 times the height of the panel – that suggests a height of ~45-55 feet
Topographical lidar data produced by NOAA and some private contractors in the days following the attacks, which Dr Wood cites in her book [p175], suggests narrow, small spikes of rubble standing as much as ~150 feet tall, but in general the LIDAR data tends to agree with our photo analysis above – a reasonable average of around 40-60 feet of rubble spread over the footprints of the two towers.
And of course, this is only what was above ground. What tends to be forgotten is that below the Twin Towers there was a concourse level, and then 6 further sub-basement levels constructed in the “bathtub” – the 70 foot deep, 16 acre underground area spanning the entire width of the World Trade Centre complex we discussed earlier.
After 9/11 these subterranean structures contained substantial amounts of rubble which took most of the next year to remove. (Punctures down to those levels show up as the deep red pits in the topographical data).
So, does a rubble pile in the footprint averaging 40-60ft in height plus unknown quantities of debris in the sub-basements or hurled outside the footprint or pulverised into layers of dust over Lower Manhattan really suggest 80-90% of the towers “went away”?
Clearly not. On the contrary our calculations show that the average height of the above ground debris pile is basically what you would expect to see after two buildings of that size were destroyed in the violent way they obviously were. When you take into account the dispersed concrete and the fact there were large amounts of debris underground, it’s pretty clear that the vast majority (probably close to 100%) of the original mass of the towers can be accounted for after they were destroyed.
SUMMARY: It is mathematically possible for the known mass of the towers to cover the known size of the debris field given the dispersal over a wide area and collapse into subbasement levels. Statements that structural steel is “missing” rely on subjective interpretation of photographs for evidence, no scientific data supports this claim and no attempt is made to measure the amount of steel debris.
CONCLUSION
The subtitle of Where did the Towers Go? is “evidence of directed free-energy technology on 9/11”. It is an inaccurate title, as Wood makes clear herself throughout the book, there is no evidence FOR this technology – she doesn’t even claim to know exactly what this technology IS, much less exactly how it works.
Rather, it is an argument of inference. She observes phenomena she considers anomalous and reasons – rightly or wrongly – that since these are unknown phenomena an unknown technology must be responsible.
The ‘steel is missing’ – so some new technology must have made it disappear.
The ‘hurricane was behaving strangely’ – so this new technology must relate to hurricanes in some way.
And so on.
So, if these anomalies do not exist, the corollary is there’s no reason to think any theoretical “directed energy weapon” was deployed on 9/11.
If the rubble is accounted for….
…And the hurricane behaves normally…
…And the atmospheric electromagnetic activity was routine…
…And the cars were burnt…
…And the bathtub was damaged…
…then what requires the hypothesised use a new kind of technology, the existence of which is entirely theoretical?
If there is nothing extraordinary to explain, there is no need to reach for an extraordinary explanation.
The book’s core claims are based simply on a failure to verify the initial perceived anomalies before hastening to draw conclusions.
In this review we have taken these alleged anomalies one by one and, by simply doing some basic comparative analysis, have shown they are NOT anomalous at all.
Which brings us to our biggest question –
Why aren’t these calculations or this research in the book?
If you think the rubble is missing, why not try counting it?
If you think the steel has been “dustified”, why not look for steel in the dust?
If you think the hurricane was odd, why not compare it to other hurricanes?
If you think the cars were “toasted” rather than just burned, why not compare them to other burned cars?
Why, in place of this objective research, are we supplied with endlessly subjective judgments, interpreted images and video stills – sometimes presented with zero context?
This is my biggest recurring issue with Where Did the Towers Go? – its use of subjective qualitative statements in place of objective measured realities, and its reliance on inference and assumption to make its arguments.
It is so sure of the self-evident nature of its premise that it never sets about to actually test it.
This is the very foundation of the book, its core argument, its title – “Where did the towers go?” – and yet it never establishes that they went anywhere at all.
Part One of our review has focused on the facts and positions taken up by Dr Wood, in Part Two we will take a more in depth, opinion-based look at Dr Wood’s rhetoric and methodology.
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[ H/T The Burning Platform ]
