Based on information received from five different sources within the U.S. intelligence community who worked at three different agencies, WMR can report that on the morning of September 11, 2001, the U.S. Air Force shot down two air targets over a rural Pennsylvania area near the small town of Shanksville.
In what has become a story of mythic proportions, United Flight 93 took off from Newark International Airport at 8:42 am and was bound for San Francisco. The flight departed 41 minutes late from Newark. At 9:27 am, United 93 was allegedly hijacked by terrorists who turned off the plane's transponder at 9:30 am and changed course, heading to Washington. Passenger Todd Beamer, according to folklore, made a cell phone call at 9:45 am from the plane and ended the call with an announcement that the passengers were going to revolt. Beamer allegedly said "Let's Roll," a phrase that would be used by President George W. Bush in his speech from Atlanta on November 8, 2001.
At 9:58, a Flight 93 passenger allegedly made a cell phone call and said that he saw an explosion and smoke and that the plane was "going down."
The wife of United 93 passenger Mark "Mickey" Rothenberg, Meredith, expressed curiosity why her husband, who "lived by the phone," as she put it, never bothered calling her from the plane.
What WMR has uncovered from conversations with U.S. intelligence personnel who were on duty at National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters on September 11 and at other intelligence activities is that:
- the tactical air communications unit at the National Security Operations Center (NSOC) at NSA was broadcasting live the cockpit communications between two U.S. Air Force F-16s over Somerset County, Pennsylvania. One F-16 pilot said "we are now engaging the target."
- the NSA CRITICOM messaging system contained a flash message called a "CRITIC" that stated a commercial aircraft was "intercepted" over Pennsylvania. The latitude and longitude of the interception was provided along with the time of the interception.
- A highly-classified and specially encrypted special communications network that linked Air Force Chief of Staff General John Jumper to the Vice President and National Security Council, and very few other intelligence officials contained a message on the morning of September 11 that confirmed the U.S. Air Force shot down United flight 93. The message stated that a U.S. Air Force fighter jet shot the engine on flight 93 with a heat-seeking missile "over Pennsylvania." The plane, according to the report, did not break up in the sky but crashed. The engine shot off the plane by the Air Force was later located 3,000 yards from the main wreckage site and the engine was riddled with shrapnel as was the surrounding fuselage. The following day, the comments stream for the special communications system was erased, something that had never before occurred with the particular system.
- On September 11, President George W. Bush was overheard stating: "We shot a plane down over Pennsylvania."
However, WMR has learned from sources in Shanksville and the surrounding area that the "official" Stony Creek crash site where no Boeing 757 wreckage was seen when first responders from Shanksville arrived at 10:06 am, was not the crash site of United 93 but the impact crater of what closely matches the description of a Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle that was first reported by one witness at a nearby junk yard to have "collided" with United flight 93 but another witness witnessed a small white aircraft pass over Ginger Hill Road and clear some trees before exploding in a small mushroom cloud on the other side of the tree line. When the aircraft passed over the trees, there were no disturbance to the foliage. The fallout from the explosion was described by the witness as "glittery." There was hardly any wind that morning in the Shanksville area. Government investigators later claimed that the reported 8-mile long debris field from United 93 was due to debris being carried by the wind.
Perpetuating the flight 93 myth with financial help from the owner of 84 Lumber. The 9/11 Memorial Chapel.
A 911 emergency call to the Somerset Hospital Critical Care unit stated that the hospital should prepare for mass casualties since "two planes collided over Pennsylvania."
Some thirty minutes after first responders arrived at the Stony Creek impact datum, helicopters and SUVs descended on the quiet community and remained there in force for up to three days. Although all planes had been ordered grounded by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), one large plane that swooped in low over the area was said at the time to be carrying Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge on an inspection tour of the crash site.
The mysterious crash site was placed under 24-hour armed guard. The area remains restricted to the public with a chain link fence to the present day. On the evening of September 11, two hapless teens who entered the restricted area around the crash datum were wrestled to the ground by security personnel and had loaded guns placed on them until they could be escorted away.
At the same time, the Air Force shot down United 93 but its crash impact area was not where the government and media claimed it had crashed -- in a reclaimed landfill area in Stony Creek Township. WMR learned that there were five different debris locations discovered on the morning of September 11: (1) the Stony Creek location where the Global Hawk drone crashed; (2) a reported engine location near the Global Hawk location but supposedly found in dense woods near the Global Hawk datum; (3) debris and reportedly a part of a body found in Indian Lake, to the east of the Global Hawk datum; (4) a debris field consisting only of singed paper on a single property on the east side of Huckleberry Highway, southeast of Indian Lake; and (5) another debris field, also consisting mostly of singed paper, in New Baltimore, some 8 miles from the fourth debris field, just off the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
At the Huckleberry Highway residential debris field, singed paper was gathered up that filled two lawn-sized plastic garbage bags. Witnesses described the paper as being insurance papers, bank statements, and stock and bond certificates. None of the neighboring homes reported any debris attributed to United 93. The New Baltimore debris field also reportedly consisted of singed bonds and insurance and bank papers.
The only witness who saw the non-Boeing 757 aircraft that crashed in the landfill in Stony Creek described it as "not a plane" with no engine, pure white, tubular, with no markings or windows, soundless, and with the appearance of a molded piece of plastic. The aircraft banked to the right before ascending over a tree line before crashing. Under the aircraft and mid-belly could be seen what the witness described as a "fin and spoiler."
The gaudy temporary United 93 memorial is run by the National Park Service before a permanent memorial is constructed.
After the crash of the reported unmanned aerial vehicle, the witness noticed two fighter jets in the area that circled and departed rapidly from the scene.
Although Shanksville and environs were far from the chaos in New York and Washington on the morning of September 11, all the phones circuits were tied up in the rural Pennsylvania area when the two aircraft went down at around 10:00 am. However, one phone call that got through to a witness from a relative in Lancaster, Pennsylvania said that a friend in the Air Force said that the service had "shot down a plane in Pennsylvania."
WMR learned that witnesses, including Amish and non-Amish farmers who were working in their fields that morning and saw U.S. Air Force fighter planes shoot down United 93 were threatened by FBI agents. One witness had a security gag order placed on him by the FBI. As the years went by, a number of farmer witnesses changed their stories to coincide with the official story that rebel passengers crashed a Boeing 757 into a reclaimed landfill and that it was simply "absorbed" into the ground with scant plane debris.
One FBI agent with an accompanying policeman, who was not wearing a uniform known to the region, pounded on one witness's door at 11:30 pm on the night of 9/11 and was extremely nasty with the witness and her family, including an ailing elderly mother. The police officer, who was neither with the Somerset County Sheriff's Department or the Pennsylvania State Police, never showed the witness a badge nor did he introduce himself. The FBI scoffed at the witness, claiming the witness had no idea what a Boeing 757 actually looked like. The witness told the FBI agent that what was seen "could have been from another country."
The temporary memorial has cockpit voice recorder transmission transcripts available with the Islamic-oriented comments of the alleged hijackers highlighted.
The next day, three FBI agents came to the same witness and told the witness: "Do not lose faith in your government. We are handling it." The FBI tried to explain the small white plane as someone flying around taking pictures of the crash scene and that the pilot was heavily fined as a result. The FBI was informed by the witness that the white aircraft was in the area before the explosion.
The "Flight 93" crash site remains fenced in and restricted. The reason is because a Boeing 757 never crashed there. It was the impact point of a Global Hawk UAV likely shot down by the Air Force. The crash site shown on TV lies beyond the small US flag in the center of the field but before the tree line.
A reporter for the Newark Star-Ledger, who arrived in Shanksville to cover the story, later was quoted as saying, "As time goes by, this is not going to the official story," a reference to the myth-lore surrounding the fate of United 93.
What was described by the closest witness nearest the Stony Creek impact area was a Global Hawk UAV.
Among the first responders was the Shanksville Fire Department. Initially, the Shanksville and New Baltimore volunteer fire departments were skeptical about the official story because neither saw any plane wreckage. However, after brand new fire trucks with "9/11" painted on them showed up shortly after 9/11, their stories changes and became much more aligned with the jingoistic explanation of brave Americans sacrificing themselves to protect the nation's capital from another attack. Shanksville's twenty-year Mayor Ernie Stull stated that when he arrived at the crash scene he saw no evidence of a plane crash. Stull died of heart failure at age 82 in 2006 after retiring as mayor in 2005.
Initial skepticism by Shanksville first responders was quickly erased with a new fire engine and a piece of the World Trade Center shaped into a cross.
Somerset coroner Wallace Miller said that when he first arrived at the crash datum he was stunned to see how small the 10 foot deep hole was and the absence of bodies. A nearby cabin belonging to Barry Hoover was destroyed by a "blast" from what he described as a tornado or hurricane.
Flight 93 temporary memorial is full of kitsch but lacking in truth.
Unlike New York and the Arlington-Washington areas, the rural area around Shanksville has never had a town activist meeting of those witnesses who saw things that do not fit neatly into the government's description. Most people accept the government's theory and are supporting the building of a permanent National Park Service memorial to honor Flight 93. A 100-year old church has been bought with private funds, mainly from the fortune of 84 Lumber owned Joseph Hardy, and transformed into a kitschy 9/11 chapel with letters from George W. Bush and police and fire department badges from around the country. The chapel is run by "Reverend Al" Alphonse Mascherino, whose certificate is on display: an honorary doctorate of divinity from the Midwest Seminary of Bible Theology in Missouri.
The small town of New Baltimore, some 10 miles from Shanksville had a Flight 93 debris field, one consisting of singed financial documents. New Baltimore lies alongside the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
A number of questions have arisen based on the new information about the aerial fireworks that involved at least four planes over the the Shanksville area on 9/11.
One of the primary questions is the role the U.S. Air Force Global Hawk Program office at the Air Combat Command (ACC) at Langley Air Force Base, Virginia played on 9/11. On September 6, 2001, just three working days prior to 9/11, the Air Combat Command chief, General John P. Jumper, assumed control of the Air Force as Chief of Staff. In August 2007, after just three months on the job as Commander of the 5th Bomb Wing at Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota, six nuclear-armed cruise missiles were shipped to Louisiana for, what WMR reported, was a planned secret nuclear strike on Iran utilizing a separate chain-of-command from the Pentagon. The mission was aborted after three high-ranking Air Force officers leaked the movement of the weapons to the media. After being relieved of his command over the missing nuclear weapons incident, Emig was transferred to the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Division at the Air Combat Command at Langley Air Force Base, Virginia. One of the Air Force's primary UAV contractors is Northrop Grumman, which has a cooperative relationship with Israel Aircraft Industries on using Israeli UAV technology, particularly for the Global Hawk UAV.
Another is who ordered FBI agents and unknown police officers to badger witnesses in the Shanksville area into silence? Was it FBI director Robert Mueller who said there was no proof that Osama Bin Laden was responsible for 9/11. Or was it someone else known for threatening people and worse: Vice President Dick Cheney whose own dubious fingerprints are all over the anomalies associated with American Airlines flight 77 that allegedly crashed into the Pentagon. One retired senior U.S. Air Force official told WMR today that what he saw make a hole in the side of the Pentagon had to have been a UAV. Like Stony Creek, there were no indications that a commercial aircraft had crashed into the Pentagon.
And those two questions are just for starters.