Deseret Morning News, Monday, April 10, 2006
Physicist says heat substance felled WTC
Extremely hot fires caused structures to fail, BYU expert says
By Suzanne Dean
For the Deseret Morning News
EPHRAIM — A Brigham Young University physicist said he now believes an
incendiary substance called thermite, bolstered by sulfur, was used to
generate exceptionally hot fires at the World Trade Center on 9/11,
causing the structural steel to fail and the buildings to collapse.
"It looks like thermite with sulfur added, which really is a very
clever idea," Steven Jones, professor of physics at BYU, told a
meeting of the Utah Academy of Science, Arts and Letters at Snow
College Friday.
The government requires standard explosives to contain tag elements
enabling them to be traced back to their manufacturers. But no tags
are required in aluminum and iron oxide, the materials used to make
thermite, he said. Nor, he said, are tags required in sulfur.
Jones is co-chairman, with James H. Fetzer, a distinguished professor
of philosophy at the University of Minnesota of Scholars for 9/11
Truth, a group of college faculty members who believe conspirators
other than pilots of the planes were directly involved in bringing
down New York's Trade Towers.
The group, which Jones said has 200 members, maintains a Web site at
www.st911.org. A 40-page paper by Jones, along with other
peer-reviewed and non-reviewed academic papers, are posted on the
site.
Last year, Jones presented various arguments for his theory that
explosives or incendiary devices were planted in the Trade Towers, and
in WTC 7, a smaller building in the Trade Center complex, and that
those materials, not planes crashing into the buildings, caused the
buildings to collapse.
At that time, he mentioned thermite as the possible explosive or
incendiary agent. But Friday, he said he is increasingly convinced
that thermite and sulfur were the root causes of the 9/11 disaster.
He told college professors and graduate students from throughout Utah
gathered for the academy meeting that while almost no fire, even one
ignited by jet fuel, can cause structural steel to fail, the
combination of thermite and sulfur "slices through steel like a hot
knife through butter."
He ticked off several pieces of evidence for his thermite fire theory:
First, he said, video showed a yellow, molten substance splashing off
the side of the south Trade Tower about 50 minutes after an airplane
hit it and a few minutes before it collapsed. Government investigators
ruled out the possibility of melting steel being the source of the
material because of the unlikelihood of steel melting. The
investigators said the molten material must have been aluminum from
the plane.
But, said Jones, molten aluminum is silvery. It never turns yellow.
The substance observed in the videos "just isn't aluminum," he said.
But, he said, thermite can cause steel to melt and become yellowish.
Second, he cited video pictures showing white ash rising from the
south tower near the dripping, liquefied metal. When thermite burns,
Jones said, it releases aluminum-oxide ash. The presence of both
yellow-white molten iron and aluminum oxide ash "are signature
characteristics of a thermite reaction," he said.
Another item of evidence, Jones said, is the fact that sulfur traces
were found in structural steel recovered from the Trade Towers. Jones
quoted the New York Times as saying sulfidization in the recovered
steel was "perhaps the deepest mystery uncovered in the (official)
investigation." But, he said, sulfidization fits the theory that
sulfur was combined with thermite to make the thermite burn even
hotter than it ordinarily would.
Jones said a piece of building wreckage had a gray substance on the
outside that at one point had obviously been a dripping molten metal
or liquid. He said that after thermite turns steel or iron into a
molten form, and the metal hardens, it is gray.
He added that pools of molten metal were found beneath both trade
towers and the 47-story WTC 7. That fact, he said, was never discussed
in official investigation reports.
And even though WTC 7 was not connected to the Trade Towers — in fact,
there was another building between it and the towers —and even though
it was never hit by a plane, it collapsed. That suggests, he said,
that it came down because a thermite fire caused its structural steel
to fail.
Jones said his studies are confined to physical causes of the
collapses, and he doesn't like to speculate about who might have
entered the buildings and placed thermite and sulfur. But he said 10
to 20 people "in the know," plus other people who didn't know what
they were doing but did what they were told, could have placed
incendiary packages over several weeks.
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