BYU NewsNet - Prof. calls for 9/11 investigation

BYU NewsNet - Prof. calls for 9/11 investigation

BYU NewsNet

Prof. calls for 9/11 investigation


Photo by Dana Tanner
Steve Jones, a BYU physics professor, explains his ideas on the September 11 attacks. He hypothesized, based on the evidence he has researched, explosives were planted in the buildings, casing them to crumble. Daily Universe
14 Nov 2005


By Ryan McIlvain

BYU Physics Professor Steven E. Jones doesn't look like a conspiracy theorist. Sitting in his office in the Eyring Science Center, he's wearing a button-up shirt, dress slacks, matching socks. He's soft-spoken, polite — the picture of the mild-mannered professor.

What's more, Jones doesn't sound like a conspiracy theorist. He won't try to tell you about second gunmen on grassy knolls or trick photography with the Apollo 11 mission. Nothing like that has really swayed him before.

But now, what he will try to tell you, in his quiet, confident way, is that official explanations of what happened on Sept. 11 — that the World Trade Center buildings collapsed from damage and superheated fires — are shaky, if not unscientific.

"It just does not add up," says Jones, referring specifically to the 47-story building known as WTC 7. "It doesn't add up that this [collapse] was caused by planes hitting the other buildings."

Jones, who studies fusion and solar energy at BYU, has lately turned his attention to Sept. 11 research and has turned more than a few heads in the process.

In a paper posted online Tuesday, Jones suggests that "pre-positioned explosives," not planes, were what brought down the three World Trade Center buildings — the two Twin Towers and WTC 7. Jones' article, which has been accepted for peer-reviewed publication next year, can be found at www.physics.byu.edu/research/energy/htm7.html.

Two days after Jones' article appeared, The Deseret Morning News ran a front-page story on it. Later that night it made the evening news.

The media attention is welcome, Jones says, especially as it drums up interest in the scientific community, from which Jones hopes to cull an independent, international investigative team that would consider his "explosive demolition hypothesis."

"It is quite plausible that explosives were pre-planted in all three buildings and set off after the two plane crashes — which were actually a diversion tactic," he writes in his article. "Muslims are (probably) not to blame after all."

Jones says previous government investigations, including those by FEMA, the 9/11 Commission and NIST (the National Institutes of Standards and Technology), failed to address even the possibility of pre-planted explosives. This, despite the fact that WTC 7 wasn't even hit by a plane and that fire damage has never brought down a steel building before or since Sept. 11, he says.

"[WTC 7] is the most mysterious collapse and it does suggest an inside job," Jones says. "If the explosive hypothesis…" He corrects himself: "If the explosive demolition hypothesis — it is rather explosive — if this hypothesis is correct, that would imply an inside job because to bring a building down symmetrically using explosives … takes a lot of planning."

Pressed about the implications of his hypothesis, Jones leans back in his chair and says, "Okay, let me back up."

He mentions a few lesser-known details about the Sept. 11 attacks, appending little comments like "and that's a fact" or "and that's on tape" at several points along the way:



Larry Silverstein, WTC leaseholder, insured the buildings against terrorist attack for billions of dollars less than two months before Sept. 11, Jones says.

The towers were loaded with asbestos — "not anymore," Jones adds, "but they were. There was discussion for a long time: 'We've got to either get rid of the asbestos in these buildings or take them down and start over.'"

In the aftermath of the buildings' collapse, Silverstein said of WTC 7, "We decided to pull it." Jones says "pull" is a common demolition term. "To pull a building means you initiate the demolition."

Much of the steel from the collapsed towers was shipped to Asia for recycling, Jones says. "This was done over the objections of serious scientists and engineers, saying, 'Look, you're destroying evidence. We want to know how fire and damage could have possibly caused these buildings to collapse.'"

"You didn't know that, did you?" Jones says. He leans back farther in his chair. "We need an investigation," he says again.

When asked if he's afraid of getting brushed aside as a conspiracy theorist, Jones says, "Brushing things aside without reading a serious paper, well, that would be an unfortunate thing."

The professor says he's content to let stock labels like "conspiracy theorist" and "fringe author" fly where they will. As a scientist, his responsibility is to the truth, he says.

At this Jones swivels his chair around to face the computer, accesses his paper online, and brings up several video clips of WTC 7's collapse.

One clip is from the CBS Evening News. You watch the 47-story tower tremble, dip slightly in the middle, then drop beneath the cityscape. You hear Dan Rather's distinctive voice: "It's reminiscent of those pictures we've all seen of buildings that are deliberately destroyed by well-placed dynamite …"

Jones replays the clip. "That's a perfect demolition," he says. "It's just what they shoot for. Middle goes down, they pull the core supports, the sides lean in, and then it goes straight down at near free-fall speed.

"And again, I'm not saying this proves it," he adds. "There's just a lot of evidence, and so it needs to be investigated."

Now Jones shows a different clip, from a different angle. The building trembles, dips, falls again.

"See that fall?" Jones says. "It's symmetric. Notice it dips in the middle. Did you see that? It dips in the middle first, which implies that the core supports there in the middle were pulled before the other supports. And that's common for demolition."

In his paper, Jones says the Twin Towers dipped in a similar way. He includes video footage of the north tower's antenna dropping some 10 feet before the rest of the tower begins to move.

"We look at the collapse of the tower's themselves," Jones says, "and there are a number of mysteries there as well."

Given the implications of Jones' research, the professor says he was extra careful in preparing it. He stresses how the paper was peer-reviewed and then explains something of that rigorous, anonymous process.

"If it hadn't been peer-reviewed," he says, "I wouldn't be talking about it now."

He also mentions the seminar he gave — on Sept. 22, as it happened — to a group of colleagues from the BYU Physics and Astronomy Department. It was a sort of dry-run test for how his research would be received, a final behind-closed-doors check before he went public with his provocative suggestions.

After the seminar, all but one of Jones' colleagues said they agreed an investigation was in order, Jones says. And the lone dissenter, physics professor Harold Stokes, came around the next day.