Deconstructing the Twin Towers Black Magic Programming
BMP for short
I’ve had a lot of time to think lately. As a conspiratorial, cynical and grimdark millennial obviously my favorite topic is 9/11.
When the first plane hit, I was at a computer in the library. The teacher in my first class had the news on the TV. “It’s going to be history” he said. We were let out early.
Someone high up made the call to watch TV that day. The overt purpose was justifying wars against seven countries. There was an esoteric purpose as well.
9/11 was black magic for millennials. Just like boomers and their moon landing, as teenagers we were at peak receptiveness to the story. It was a media event with a script.
Deconstructing the Twin Towers
The conventional narrative is that there was a fatal flaw in the towers which led to their failure. This is a slander on the reputations of the architects, engineers and tradesmen who built them. If anything, the towers were more airplane resistant than the structures that came before them.
The primary architect, Yamasaki Minoru worked closely with structural engineers such as John Skilling to develop the key structural concepts of the towers:
Structural Core which housed the elevators and carried some of the gravity loads. It was used as the base for the self-lifting Kangaroo cranes used to construct the rest of the towers.
Perimeter Walls which carried the other share of the gravity loads and all of the lateral (wind) loads. These were constructed off site in sections and bolted together.
Floor System which used a combination of double trusses and single transverse trusses to carry the floor slabs and their gravity loads to the structural core and perimeter wall.
This is called the framed tube structural system and is still the most common in use on buildings over 40 floors. It’s strong against bending loads the same way a cardboard box is strong when its taped shut - the walls take the shear loads.
A competing real estate baron, Lawrence Wien, conducted a meeting with the press in 1965 in which he alleged the towers were structurally unsound. In response, Richard Roth, partner at Emory Roth and Sons, sent the following telegram:
The structural analysis carried out by the firm of Worthington, Skilling, Helle & Jackson is the most complete and detailed of any ever made for any building structure. The preliminary calculations alone cover 1,200 pages and involve over 100 detailed drawings.
4. Because of its configuration, which is essentially that of a steel beam 209' deep, the towers are actually far less daring structurally than a conventional building such as the Empire State Building where the spine or braced area of the building is far smaller in relation to its height.
5. The building as designed is sixteen times stiffer than a conventional structure. The design concept is so sound that the structural engineer has been able to be ultra-conservative in his design without adversely affecting the economics of the structure.
The Empire State Building uses a beam and girder structural system, with a curtain wall (non structural facade). This is less efficient past 30-40 stories because the bending loads (wind) are carried by the gussets between the beams and girders, not a dedicated shear wall.
The WTC structure was designed from the beginning to handle airplane impacts. In 1945 a B-25 crashed into the Empire State Building. The WTC engineers designed for a 707 crash.
Statement from chief structural engineer John Skilling.
Our analysis indicated the biggest problem would be the fact that all the fuel (from the airplane) would dump into the building. There would be a horrendous fire. A lot of people would be killed - The building structure would still be there.
Note that as a PE, false statements to the public can lead to legal penalties, including imprisonment:
Breaches of engineering law are often sufficient grounds for enforcement measures, which may include the suspension or loss of license and financial penalties. They may also include imprisonment, should gross negligence be shown to have played a part in loss of human life.
Frank DeMartini, construction manager of WTC, describes how the “dense grid” of the exterior structure of the WTC adds to its aircraft resistance:
He notes that an airplane penetrating the exterior structure is equivalent to a pencil puncturing the mesh of a screen door - the structure will still be there.
The 767s from 9/11 are not much different in size than a 707:
Scale Invariance
The special FX in movies was way cooler when it used miniatures. This is because of scale invariance. Basically models of stuff tend to behave the same regardless of size.
Models have practical engineering use in simulating complex systems such as waterworks:
One obvious way to model 9/11 would be to fly an EDF into a model of the towers.
Some obvious downsides to this approach, aside from the questionable legality, are the cost and time required.
To save time, one could build just a portion of the tower. As it happens, the material thickness of the perimeter beams at impact height matches up cleanly to commonly available steel roofing trim coils at 1/28.5 scale.
The 767 could be idealized as a simple aluminum cylinder.
The thickness of the cylinder can be back calculated by taking the max takeoff weight of a 767-200ER and assuming a fuselage weight mass fraction similar to other wide body jetliners. The thickness of this cylinder matches up cleanly to aluminum roofing trim coils.
To achieve the scale speed requires a drop height of 14.2 ft. Representing the max takeoff weight requires a 2 gallon bucket full of water.
The pink string lines are used as guides for the falling 2 gal bucket and aluminum cylinder. This is where I messed up - the leading edge of the cylinder needs guides, in addition to the bucket. It didn’t hit dead center as intended:
I was hoping to prove my pet theory (no planes) and went fast and loose on the experiment design. One set of the screws holding the beams were left loose, and there were no spandrels at all in the structure.
Even with the glancing blow, it’s pretty obvious from the results that a 767 fuselage traveling at 587 mph can immediately buckle the .25” thick columns of the WTC.
It also seems very likely that if a further experiment were conducted with more perimeter wall structure, the results would look a lot like this:
The failure modes are buckled columns and clean breaks at the bolted joints. The perimeter wall absorbs most of the energy and the remains of the 767 become embedded into the denser structural core as the fuel load in the wings lights off.
Exactly the scenario described by Frank DeMartini and John Skilling, and very similar to the B-25 crash:
Nose out video
Which is weird because there is also live video of an airplane going completely through the towers with no damage to the nose. This is the NY Good Day footage, which is hard to find:
The noses of jetliners are fiberglass or similar materials that are transparent to weather radar waves:
And are easily damaged by bird strike:
Just in case you missed it, the classic nose out footage slowed down and zoomed in:
Tower 7 Collapse
In 2020, A Structural Reevaluation of the Collapse of the World Trade Center 7 was released by engineers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. This is a comprehensive report on computer-based structural modeling which demonstrates conclusively that Tower 7 was brought down by controlled demolition.
Sub-models of all the different beam connections were created and their responses to different load cases mapped out.
These were used to create idealized non-linear response curves which were then fed into a full model as non-linear springs.
They also took into account the response of the structure to the temperature gradients from fire:
They did not find sufficient displacements to push beams off girders and reproduce NIST’s claimed failure mode.
They reproduced the failure of WTC7 when they simultaneously failed all the core and exterior columns:
Based on this analysis, we found that the simultaneous failure of all core columns followed by the simultaneous failure of all exterior columns produces almost exactly the behavior observed in videos of the collapse.
The obvious question here is why reproduce the WTC 7? Were WTC 1 & 2 too hard?
Tower 1 and 2 Collapse
I still haven’t heard a good theory for the WTC 1 & 2 failures. Here’s the ranking, from mild to wild:
Plausible theories
Exotic theories
Untenable theories
Esoteric theories
Cognitive Dissonance
In addition to maximizing psychological impact, the script also maximized cognitive dissonance in the skeptics (you). Hopefully you noticed me highlighting this:
Planes
Remote controlled 767s (Lone Gunman Pilot) that damaged towers as predicted by engineers.
OR
Fake and Gay no-planes that were inserted into live footage by video compositing techniques.
Tower Demolition
Obvious proof of textbook controlled demolition in WTC 7 from U. Fairbanks study.
VS
Pyroclastic flows and high energy collapse that ejected debris horizontally in the Twin Towers - calling the very reality of the footage into question.
Picking my favorite dissonances here from a vast menu. Lets call it Black Magic Programming (BMP) - a sophisticated full spectrum version of Neurolinguistic Linguistic Programming:
The point of NLP is usually to induce a no-thinking state through various dissonances then introduce demoralization and axiomatic thinking. These already existed in the mass culture of the era:
Luciferian Adrenochrome Drinking Satanic Pedophiles
Bill Cooper & Alex Jones, Eyes Wide Shut
Adrenochrome supplied by Huxley and Thompson.
Popular with Christians for obvious reasons.
Grey Aliens and Shape Shifting Reptilians From Another Dimension
David Icke, X Files
Popular with Atheists and Liberals
Simulation Theory Gnosticism
The Matrix
As I teenager I was quite stimulated by the idea of jacking in and rendezvousing with Trin.
However sexy Hollywood made all these theories to their target audiences, at their core they are all demoralizing and axiomatic because they propose that a malevolent and powerful force is behind unexplainable events. They minimize agentic behavior.
The moon landings fostered the Boomer’s childlike faith in corporations and government. But what 9/11 did to Millennials is worse. It stunted their growth by making the smartest and most skeptical among them conspiratorial, cynical and grimdark.
I’m pleading with you. The time is now to make the obvious life changes to facilitate that your family prospers, that you own and care for land and find a leadership role in a real community:
Get out of debt.
Move to a rural area or small town.
Start finding ways to lead the next generation.
I've been a 9/11 skeptic since 9/12/2001. Great article.
Erik, I'm very glad that you have covered this topic - it is so important that it should be periodically re-discussed.
You are of course right in that it was one of the defining events of our generation, and not in a nice way. I remember that day distinctly, in my corner of the world it was almost lunch time, i was at home preparing my September college exams, and "the show" started almost during the TV news time- for added, real time shock.
Regarding your model: i am (thank god) no structural engineer, just took some mandatory materials science, mechanics and industrial structure design courses, but i've spent quite some time with MechEngs, looking in awe at their AutoCAD, SolidWorks or CATIA screens so that maybe some of their knowledge has percolated by osmosis into me. Having said that, here my comments:
1. Yes, the plane body is very stiff resistant against compression (like, when flying - obviously), but what if the strike against the tower "skin" is not perfectly perpendicular but at an angle? I would guess even if the attack angle is just 80deg instead of 90deg, things would start to look different.
2. Related - while the plane body might be very stiff against orthogonal compression, what about the slenderness coefficient? (i guess this is the right English term) - Once the plane body hits the building, might it be the case that the body would start to knick in the same way as a soda crumples when compressed at an angle?
3. The floor structure - i guess this should have been included into the model as this is a lot of steel supporting the building "skin" and in the way of the plane trajectory and the planes by their size would have hit i guess at least 2 to 3 floors.
4. The building core itself. From my quick search here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_Trade_Center_Building_Design_with_Floor_and_Elevator_Arrangment.svg
there was between 12m and 20m of free space inside the tower between the outer skin and the tower hardcore. Then, that would be the final stop of the plane trip, and with extreme prejudice at that. That means that the plane (ca. 50m long) would embed itself roughly up to that distance into the building until hit the proverbial wall, leaving 30 to 35 more meters of extra fuselage, body, tail, etc. to be crumpled and "disappeared" into the open space inside the building. We have seen the images a million times already. The whole plane "disappears" inside the building. Not even a small part of the tail (that supposedly is some of the most resistant areas) remains to be seen. Rather, the holes look... empty. Suspicious.
5. F.E.M. - i haven't the slightest clue of how to to these, but i guess (from my time in the machine building industry) that those tools could to a good job modelling the plane impact & its deformation.
Anyway, as you also kind of suggest, the investigation has reached a hopeless dead point. There are so many false clues, dead ends, open questions, contradictory evidence, and general unspecific shyte, that it is almost impossible to formulate a solid hypothesis of the main towers collapse. Even the most "mainstream" ones, like the demolition using thermite or similar stuff is in itself pretty wild, as the amount of explosives needed (like, fucking truckloads!) and number of points where the cutting charges would have to be placed (like, freaking hundreds across the whole TWO buildings!!) would have made the operation quite a logistics nightmare.
I admit that at some point i was fascinated with the nuclear demolition theory put forward by a very shady Russian guy. Not only is nuclear demolition a thing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_demolition_munition
But, also, a shallow underground nuclear explosion can (more or less) be shaped into a kind of focused "nuclear blowtorch" shooting up and vaporizing most of the building, while leaving molten metal in the depths of the rubble heap and "glassifiying" the soil deep down the building foundations.
See e.g. here & feel free to fall down the rabbit hole:
https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Library/Effects/UndergroundEffects.html
https://www.atomicarchive.com/resources/documents/effects/glasstone-dolan/chapter6.html
But this is still pretty wild...