I've kept mulling over Pentagon seismic situation, and the bizarre fact that a very clear shock is registered right on time at the MVL station but there is nothing at the SDMD station and also, even more strangely, nothing at the SSPA station. How could it be that the Pentagon shock registered only at MVL but not at the other two stations? It's a conundrum.
Looking at the New York charts, also included in the Kim & Baum paper, we can estimate approximate transmission speeds for the shocks. Confusingly, Kim & Baum have inserted lines for P-waves and S-waves in the charts, but no lines for the L-waves and R-waves. The 9/11 shocks are not earthquakes so will not go deep enough to create any ordinary P-waves and S-waves, but only surface waves (L-waves and R-waves). These waves also travel more slowly than P-waves and S-waves, and we can readily see in the New York charts that the R-waves are the slowest and the L-waves a little faster but nowhere near as fast as even the S-waves let alone the P-waves.
I've mentioned before that there's a bifurcation in the chart between the two kinds of waves. I think I misspoke calling them P-waves and S-waves when the correct labels should be L-waves and R-waves, respectively. The shock goes off at Ground Zero about 10 seconds into the chart, and around the 70 second mark, the L-wave reaches the MVL station, 210 km out. That's 210 km in 60 seconds, or 3.5 km per second in propagation speed. As to the R-wave, it reaches the MVL station around the 85 second mark so travels 210 km in 75 seconds, or 2.8 km per second. The R-waves are thus about 20% slower than the L-waves.
Also note how the L-waves and R-waves give different imprints on the chart. The L-wave comes first and is somewhat more dense in terms of spikes than the R-wave, which is the second hump to the right on the MVL line. So it's easy to tell the difference between L-action and R-action simply from the appearance of the shock in the chart.
Further note how excellent the MVL station is in terms of signal-to-noise perfomance. There is very little noise and a very clear signal, even at that distance from Manhattan. The same cannot be said about the SDMD station (two lines below), which has a terrible noise level and picks up absolutely nothing of the L-action and only very little or the R-action. SDMD seems to be stone deaf to any kind of L-action, and very hard of hearing with respect to R-action. Looking even further out to the SSPA station (below the SDMD line), we find that this station did pick up some of the L-action but very little of the R-action. If we didn't have the other stations as guidance, we would hardly identify the R-action, and the L-action also comes out very differently than elsewhere. It is more protracted and also muted.
Each station seems to have its own "personality", its own characteristics in terms of what it is good at picking up, and what it is not-so-good at picking up. The SDMD station stands out as the good-for-nothing station, whch is practically deaf to any kind of surface waves and especially to L-waves. The SSPA station, on the other hand, seems capable of hearing both L-waves and R-waves, but only above a certain frequency (amplitude). If the shock isn't big enough, it just won't register.
Going back to propagation speeds, the Pentagon shock seems to be a little slower than the New York shock. I've said before that the travel time for the shock to reach the MVL station would be about 66 seconds, and the distance is 140 km. So that amounts ot a speed of about 2.1 km per second. That's 25% slower than the R-waves in the New York chart, and 40% slower than the L-waves in the New York chart. Looking at the density of the action in the MVL chart for the Pentagon shock, it is readily apparent that this isn't R-wave action but L-wave action. In other words, there is a massive difference in transmission speeds, with the Pentagon shock travelling all of 40% slower than the New York shock. How could this be?
This troubled me a lot until I realised that transmission speeds for L-waves are dependent on the frequency (amplitude) of the shock. A bigger shock will penetrate deeper, and the deeper it goes, the faster it will travel. So the mere fact that the New York shocks were far more powerful (energetic) than the Pentagon shock explains the significant difference in propagation speed.
The pciture is thus getting clearer, and we're in a position to resolve the conundrum. First of all, we're dealing with an L-wave from the Pentagon shock, there is no discernible R-wave. To understand why this is one need only consult the definition of the wave types. The L-waves are "transverse horizontal motion, perpendicular to the direction of propagation"; and the R-waves, "both in the direction of propagation and perpendicular (in a vertical plane)". For an aircraft iimpacting a building, you would expect L-wave action but not much R-wave action. This explains why even the MVL chart, which has the best ear of all station, fails to register any R-action whatever.
We can now also see why the SDMD station picks up nothing. Like I said on the basis of the New York chart, the SDMD station is stone deaf with respect to L-action, so would not pick that up even if it were still stronger. And whilst SDMD isn't completely deaf, but only hard of hearing for R-action, the problem is, there is no R-action to pick up. This is why absolutely nothing registered at SDMD.
But what about SSPA? How come nothing registered there? The explanation has already been given in the comparatively muted levels for the New York shocks. The SSPA station appears a bit dull, in the sense that it takes more stimulus to break through the threshold level of getting through to it. Once you're above the threshold level, SSPA will pick it up but it will be at a muted level. If the shock doesn't reach above a certain frequency, SSPA simply won't pick it up at all. So that's the story here. The L-action doesn't have enough frequency to be picked up at SSPA, and there is no R-action to pick up in the first place. So nothing registers at SSPA.
The more I delve into this issue, the more I parse these charts, the more convinced I get that the MVL shock is in fact the Pentagon plane impact shock. What do Kim & Baum say about the matter? Here is their explanation: "The largest signal at MVL at around 09:38:50 is probablly generated by electrical disturbance." Pardon my French, but electrical distrubance my ass! That's the most ridiculous cover-up story I've heard since Shyam Sundar's idiocies!
The reason they covered it up is that the shock doesn't look like they want it to look. Kim & Baum even admit that the shock doesn't look like they expected it to look. Here is what they say about it: "There appears to be strong seismic signals around 09:38:52 at station MVL (Millersville, Pa; Δ = 139 km), but the signals are too high frequency (5-10 Hz) and too high amplitude (328 nm/s at 139 km)." Well, maybe the amplitude is too high because there is something else going on in addition to the plane hitting the building? The shock is too high in frequency and amplitude, which means its local magnitude came out too high compared to the expected ML 0.8 which Terry Wallace had calculated.
When the shock didn't come like they expected it, they simply dismissed it instead of looking for alternative explanations of why the shock looked different. The reason why they chose to dismiss it should be obvious by now. The shock was too powerful for only a plane hitting, and it was also a bit too long for only a plane hitting the buildng. The reason it was too strong and too long is that there was another large explosion in addition to the plane hitting, and that's what they covered up in this silly way.
The cover-up doesn't get any less silly by Terry Wallace literally covering up the time window of the shock recorded at the Corbin station (CBN), and which looks identical to the one that registered at MVL. What kind of fools do they take us for? If the CBN shock isn't right on the timeline, why on earth would they put masking tape over the timestamp? The ONLY reason to put that masking tape over the timestamp is that the time window for the chart is exactly right. If it was off, they wouldn't need to cover it up but could use it as negative evidence, quoting the fact that its timing was off. These guys are not very good at lying.
Speaking of timestamps, the whole Kim & Baum chart analysis is predicated on an assumption , about a "presumed origin time of 13:38:09 EDT" for the Pentagon shock. The presumed origin time is their lingo for the time when the plane hits the building (or the frst explosion goes off, rather). The analysis of the jetlner's black box (flight data recorder) set the impact time at 9:37:46, which is all of 23 seconds earlier than the "presumed origin time" according to Kim & Baum. For this kind of analysis, being off by 23 seconds must be considered a rather major, not to say massive, error.
Turning, finally, to the Shanksville chart, we see R-wave action starting at the 46 second mark in the chart. The shock seems to go on for up towards 10 seconds, which rings familiar as we've seen the very same thing, the very same shape of the activity hump, at the World Trade Center. I have the North Tower plane impact shock in mind, not the South Tower one. Unlike the South Tower shock, which lasts for 3-4 seconds, the North Tower shock goes on for about 10 seconds and also has the very same shape as the Shanksville shock. The reason it has is that there is "something else" going on in addition to the plane hitting the tower and the ground, respectively.
Clearly there is a massive explosion in connection to the plane hitting, if that is indeed what the chart shows (we'll return to this issue shortly). In New York, I've put forth that there was a series of explosions in the basement, which gave rise to continuous seismic activity for over 10 seconds. The plane hit somewhere inside this activity window, presumably at the peak. In Shanksville, however, the activity seems divided into two parts. First there is a shock of 3-4 seconds, then a quick interlude of 1-2 seconds, followed by another shock of about 5 seconds. Total duration is 10 seconds.
My interpretation of the Shanksville chart, when juxtaposed against the New York chart and everything else we know about the seismic evidence for 9/11, is that there is a large explosion followed by the plane hitting the ground. This also jibes with the photographic evidence, as the famous snapshot of the Shanksville mushroom cloud does not appear to show the dark grey and black smoke from a plane crash but the grey smoke from a massive ordnance blast in the ground, making a big hole down into the decomissioned mine that swallowed up the plane much like the Twin Towers and the Pentagon mysteriously swallowed up the planes. Point is, they did the very same thing in all four places, the only difference being that the Shanksville hole was in the ground rather than in the perimeter wall of a building.
Kim & Baum seem overly confident about the "time of origin" for Shanksville, certainly considering that they're wide of the mark about the Pentagon "time of origin". The official time appears to have varied a lot. Kim & Baum set it at 10:06:05 AM. The R-waves have to travel nearly 110 km to reach the SSPA station, which is the only station where they registered properly. Applying the New York propagation speed of 2.8 km per second, the propagation time from origin to SSPA station would amount to about 40 seconds. But because propagation speeds were slower for the Pentagon shock than for the New York shock, we've got every reason to think these Shanksville R-waves could be a bit slower also. Because the other stations don't pick up any of this action, it's impossible to draw a propagation gradient and determine the "time of origin" on that basis. All we've got is the SSPA reading to which we can apply an assumed propagation speed based on an educated guess. This is no basis for determining the "time of origin" down to the second. It's more like a plus/minus 10 seconds window, and I would probably put that window around 10:06:00 AM.
What bothers me with this isn't that Kim & Baum may be off by a few seconds, but that the NTSB analysis of the flight data recorder set the time for the plane hitting the ground at 10:03:11 AM. If that is correct, then Kim & Baum aren't off by a few seconds but by three whole minutes. If 23 seconds off for the Pentagon was a major error, then what is one to say about three minutes? It's an egregious error by any standards. What is worse, as far as I'm aware they have presented no updated analysis using a different time window, so we don't even have published seismic charts for the official crash time. This is very bad, and it calls for remedial action.
At this point we can only speculate about the reason why they haven't updated the analysis by publishing charts for the official time window and identifying another shock there. The only reason I can think of is that the charts for the relevant time window do not display any shocks, which means the NTSB analsysis must be off. There is absolutely no chance that the plane could have hit the ground like it did without leaving a seismic footprint. So this is another conundrum which needs to be tackled somehow. Why is there such a huge time discrepancy between NTSB and Kim & Baum? I don't know the answer, but as the above discussion shows, the Kim & Baum chart is certainly consistent with a plane hitting the ground right after a large explosion. So my suspicion is that something is off about the NTSB analysis, although it is hard to tell what precisely is going on here.
Waht is the bottom line of all this? What I wanted to achieve here is an improved analysis of the Pentagon seismic evidence, especially with respect to the types of seismic wavss, their propagation speeds and why they differ, and also, of course, why neither the nearest station (SDMD) nor the next station (SSPA) picked up the Pentagon shock whilst the station in between (MVL) picked it up very clearly. I think we've developed satisfactory answers to all these questions. Not only do our previous conclusions stand, but they're reinforced by answering all these remaining questions. There are probably more questions that could be tackled, although I can't really think of any at the moment. I'm confident that we have found the Pentagon shock in the MVL (and also CBN) chart, and the shock reveals that there was a large explosion in connection to the plane hitting the building. The explosion occurred 2-3 seconds before the plane hit. I'll submit that this is also the reason why they covered up the seismic findings, and in a very silly and shoddy way at that.
We've also looked briefly into the Shanksville shock and made a first evaluation of it. The conclusion is that the evidentiary situation is unsatisfactory. Time estimates differ sharply between the seismologists (Kim & Baum) and the NTSB's report on the Flight 93 black box. The time discrepancy of three minutes is way too large to be acceptable, and at this point we have no way of telling why there is such a huge discrepancy and which of the two time estimates is the better one. Not that it matters a terrible lot in the grand scheme of things if the plane crashed at 10:03 AM or at 10:06 AM, but it still matters a great deal for the seismographic analysis, which ties in with all the other seismograms. If the seismographic time estimate is correct, then that implies NTSB's estimate is off by three minutes. There must be some reason for that, and I submit that reason will reveal a lot about what actually went on with Flight 93.
More specifically, i think the black box time is off because the plane was a substitute not the regularly used machine for that flight. The explanation could be as simple as the black box timer not having been set properly so was off by 3 minutes. That, of course, would never happen for the regular machines, but I'm thinking it could happen for a substitute plane. So this timing discrepancy might actually provide a way to prove that the plane was a substitute, much like the airphones of the American Airlines flights could provide a way to prove that those airliners were substitutes as well. For Flight 175 we already have proof that the machine was a substitute, namely the nacelle (cigar-shaped pod) mounted on the belly of the plane, and which appears in the footage. That nacelle shouldn't be there on the regularly used machines, so this proves the machine was indeed a substitute.
That's where we stand at the moment. We'll keep tackling the remaining issues at whatever pace we can muster. So many questions, so little time...
Best,
- Per
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Sources and references:
• Seismic Waves: P-S-L-R waves
https://asyafe.wordpress.com/
• Won-Young Kim & Gerald R. Baum, "Seismic Observations during September 11, 2001, Terrorist Attack"
http://911research.wtc7.net/
• Terry C. Wallace, "Forensic Seismology Analysis of the Terrorist Attacks on the Pentagon"
https://web.archive.org/web/
• NTSB, "Flight Path Study - United Airlines Flight 93" (PDF, download only)
https://www.hsdl.org/?view&
• 9-11 Research: Seismic Records of the Major Events in Manhattan
http://911research.wtc7.net/
Sources and references:
• Seismic Waves: P-S-L-R waves
https://asyafe.wordpress.com/
• Won-Young Kim & Gerald R. Baum, "Seismic Observations during September 11, 2001, Terrorist Attack"
http://911research.wtc7.net/
• Terry C. Wallace, "Forensic Seismology Analysis of the Terrorist Attacks on the Pentagon"
https://web.archive.org/web/
• NTSB, "Flight Path Study - United Airlines Flight 93" (PDF, download only)
https://www.hsdl.org/?view&
• 9-11 Research: Seismic Records of the Major Events in Manhattan
http://911research.wtc7.net/
