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The
answer of course is that its just one of those strange co-incidences, those
little quirks of fate that do happen from time to time. You know, like the same
person winning the lottery four weeks in a row. The odds are astronomical, but
these things do happen... This
is another favourite deductive
method of the conspiracy theorist. The
"improbability drive" , in which they decide upon a conclusion without
any evidence whatsoever to suggest it, and then speculate a series of wildly
improbable events and unbelievable co-incidences to try to support it, shrugging
off the implausibility of each event with the vague assertion that sometimes the
impossible happens (just about all the time in their
world). There
is a principle called "Occam's razor" which suggests that in the absence of
evidence to the contrary, the simplest explanation is most likely to be
correct. Having
for the sake of amusement, allowed them to get away with the silly story of the
19 invisible Arabs, we move on to the question of how they are supposed to have
taken over the planes. Hijacking
a plane is not an easy thing to do. Hijacking it without the crew being able to
alert Air Traffic Control (ATC ) is almost impossible. The crew needs only to
punch in a four digit code to alert ATC to a hijacking. Unconcerned with the
awkward question of plausibility, the conspiracy buffs maintain that on that
Sept 11, the invisible hijackers took over the plane by the crude method of
threatening people with box cutters and knives, shooting and stabbing passengers
to try to lure the crew out of the cockpit and spraying gas (after they had attached
their masks, obviously). And yet, miraculously they were able to take control of
the plane without the crew first getting a chance to punch in the hijacking
code. Not just on one plane, but on all four. At
this point in the tale, the conspiracy theorist is again forced to call upon the
services of the improbability drive. So
now that our incredibly lucky hijackers have taken control of the planes, all
four pilots fly them with breath taking skill and certainty to their fiery end,
all four pilots unflinching in their steely resolve for a swift meeting with
Allah. Apart from their psychotic hatred of "our freedoms", it was their
fanatical devotion to Islam which enabled them to summon up the iron will for
this dreadful deed. Which
is strange, because according to another piece of hearsay peddled by the
conspiracy buffs, these guys actually went out drinking and womanizing the night
before their great martyrdom, even leaving their Korans in the bar -really
impeccable Islamic behaviour - and
then got up at 5am the next morning to pull off the greatest covert operation in
history. This also requires us to believe that they were even clear headed
enough to learn how to fly the huge
planes by reading flight manuals in Arabic in the car on the way to the airport.
We know this because they supposedly left the flight manuals there for us to
find. It
gets better. Their practical training had allegedly been limited to Cessnas and
flight simulators, but this was no barrier to the unflinching certainty with
which they took over the planes and skilfully guided them to their doom. If they
are supposed to have done their flight training with these tools, which would be
available just about anywhere in the world, its not clear why they would have
decided to risk blowing their cover to US intelligence services by doing the
training in Florida, rather than somewhere in the Middle East, but such
reasoning is foreign to the foggy world of the conspiracy theorist , too trapped
in the constant rotation of the fruit loop to make their unsubstantiated
fabrications seem even semi- believable. Having
triumphantly established a circular delusion in support of the mythical Arabs,
the conspiracy theorist now confronts the difficult question of why there's
nothing left of the planes. Anybody who has seen the endlessly replayed footage
of the second plane going into the WTC will realize that for a plane to
instantly blow itself up into nothing like that, it would have to be packed with
explosives. Planes do not and cannot blow up into nothing in that manner when
they crash. One
only has to slow down the video of the “impact” to see that the so called plane
is as phoney as a $3 bill—like a Hollywood action stunt with really bad special
effects, the way that it disappears through the wall like a ghost—without
breaking off any parts and with no hole appearing until well after the $3 bill
has completely disappeared. But
lets humour the conspiracy theorists and suppose that this crude cartoon
designed to hide whatever really hit the building was actually a real
plane. Did
the mythical Arabs also haul a huge heap of explosives on board, and mange to
deploy them in such a manner that they went off in the exact instant of the
crash, completely vaporising the plane? This is a little difficult even for the
conspiracy theorist, who at this point decides that its easier to invent new
laws of physics in order to keep the delusion rolling
along. There
weren't any explosives. It wasn't an inside job. The plane blew up into nothing
from its exploding fuel load! Remarkable!
Sluggishly combustible jet fuel which is basically kerosene, and usually burns
at about 400c has suddenly taken on the qualities of a ferociously explosive
demolition agent, vaporizing 70 tons of aircraft into a puff of smoke. Never
mind that a plane of that size contains around 23 tons of steel and titanium, of
which even the melting points are about four times that of the normal combustion
temperature of kerosene. And forget about the boiling point of these metals,
which is what would be required to vaporize a plane. And then there's about 47
tons of aluminium to be accounted for. In excess of 15lbs of metal for each
gallon of kerosene. For
the conspiracy theorist, such inconvenient facts are vaguely dismissed as "mumbo
jumbo". This convenient little phrase is their answer to just about anything
factual or logical. Like a conjurer pulling a rabbit out of a hat, they suddenly
become fanatically insistent about the devastating explosive qualities of
kerosene, something hitherto completely unknown to science, but just discovered
by them, this very minute. Determinedly
ignoring the fact that never before or since in aviation history has a plane
vaporised into nothing from an exploding fuel load, the conspiracy theorist
relies upon Hollywood images, where
the effects are always larger than life, and certainly larger than the
intellects of these cretins. "Its
a well known fact that planes blow up into nothing on impact!" they state with
pompous certainty. "Watch any Bruce Willis movie!" "Care
to provide any documented examples? If it's a well known fact, then presumably
this well known fact springs from some kind of documentation - other than Bruce
Willis movies ?" At
this point the mad but cunning eyes of the conspiracy theorist will narrow as
they sense the corner into which they have backed themselves and plan their
escape by means of another stunning back flip. "Ah,
but planes have never crashed into buildings before, so there's no way of
telling." they counter with a sly grin. “Well,
actually planes have crashed into buildings before and since, and not vaporised
into nothing.” "But
not big planes, with that much fuel ! ", they shriek in hysterical denial.
“Or
that much metal to vaporise. “ "Yes,
but not hijacked planes !" "Are
you suggesting that whether the crash is deliberate or accidental affects the
combustion qualities of the fuel?" "Now
you're just being silly". Although
collisions with buildings are rare, planes frequently crash into mountains,
streets, other aircraft, nosedive into the ground, or have bombs planted aboard them, and
don't vaporise into nothing. What's so special about hitting a building?
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