9/11 attack conspiracy theorist launches plan to crash plane into a building

Washington: Paul Salo, a 51-year-old American expatriate living in Bangkok, has launched his "9/11 Redux" project, to recreate the collapse of the World Trade Center in New York.

According to a report in the Washington Post, Salo has decided to undertake this costly new venture to reconstruct the 9/11 terrorist attacks in order to ‘put to rest the doubts of the people.’

Read: US Senate passes bill allowing 9/11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia

Accordingly, Salo plans to fly a plane into a building very similar to the World Trade Center at 500 miles per hour. He hopes to demonstrate what happens on impact and thus examine the conspiracy theory that the Towers did not collapse because of collision of aircraft.

Salo is now trying to raise $1.5 million to purchase a fully loaded aeroplane similar to a Boeing 757 or Boeing 767 and a building as comparable to the World Trade Center as possible.

Salo first announced his idea in a YouTube video early this month, saying that he planned to purchase an airplane going out of commission - but still with a working black box - and fill it with jet fuel. He has also assured that the building he plans to destroy would be located in the countryside in a safe place. The plane would either be flown on autopilot or by a pilot who would parachute out before impact.

Salo set up a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo to raise $1.5 million and got good response before it was shut down by the website. But Salo is not disheartened.

Engineers and scientists have concluded that when the hijackers flew the aircraft into the World Trade Center, it cut through the buildings' support systems, fire made the structural steel soft, and the towers could not support themselves. The North Tower collapsed at 9:59 am under the force of gravity, and then the South Tower followed 29 minutes later.

Experts are confounded and dismissive of Salo’s campaign. A computer science expert from the US has said that the simulation of 9/11 clearly showed that the Towers collapsed under gravity after their steel support systems had been smashed and then destroyed by fire. He questions the purpose of the campaign, implying that there does not seem to be any definite objective. Another expert said, “"It doesn't make any sense to get a plane and hit a building. You can't just hit a building and say, 'See, it doesn't collapse.'”

According to the expert, Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl, a structural engineer, Salo’s biggest challenge will be to find a building very similar to World Trade Center One.

"It's very unlikely another building would collapse unless it was similar to the World Trade Center," he said, reasoning that the Towers collapsed because their skeletons were made of steel ‘bearing walls’ unlike other buildings.

But Salo might face legal hurdles, especially aviation laws which may prevent him from carrying out such an act. Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl also feels that the project cost would not be $1.5 million, but closer to $500 or $600 million.

But Salo shared an email on Facebook over the weekend from a supporter who called him a "real patriot."
”I have never believed the official 911 story,” the author wrote. “Like many people, when it first happened, I was shocked and didn't know what to think. But shortly after it happened, I wondered about many things. If done correctly, Salo wrote, it will either put doubts to rest for good or open a Pandora's Box.”

Over the years, various conspiracy theories have floated around the events of 9/11. Some claim that the attack was done by the US government as a pretext to launch wars in the Middle East. Some feel the attack was the handiwork of Israeli spy agencies, and yet others claimed that a secret group called the Illuminati carried out the attacks. Perhaps the most bizarre theory is that no planes were used at all, but through digital compositing, missiles were made to appear like planes.

Perhaps Paul Salo might get to the bottom of the matter?