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Conspiracy theory gains momentum
Internet fringe groups question official line about 9/11 attacks
By Geof Wollerman
gwollerm@mscd.edu

Photo courtesy of U.S. Department of Defense Wreckage at ground zero after Sept. 11. Conspiracy theorists allege the World Trade Center towers were rigged with explosives and their collapse was controlled.

More than five years after Sept. 11, conspiracy theories alleging government complicity in the attacks still abound, and instead of waning, the movement is gaining momentum.

In addition to numerous websites that have been active since the attacks, several magazines found on the shelves of national booksellers have recently featured cover articles seeking to illuminate the validity of conspiracy claims. Despite the fact that competing claims about the events of that day may never be reconciled, one thing is almost certainly true: Conspiracy theories have been around for years and, according to some professors, the paranoia will continue to fuel itself.

“I think that the momentum for conspiracy theory grows as the (Iraq) war turns into … a situation which we never thought would happen initially,” said Lance Denning, an assistant professor of political science at Metro. “And so I think the conspiracy theorists are always going to be out there when popular opinion begins to sour.”

Conspiracy theories surrounding Sept. 11 generally consist of two main allegations: that the World Trade Center towers were rigged with explosives and were set to fall, and that whatever hit the Pentagon was not a commercial airliner. One needs only to conduct an Internet search using the terms “9/11” and “conspiracy” and thousands of pages come up, laying out in grainy detail the events of that day.

“There’s an inherent human quality to want to tell stories to explain important events,” said Bill C. Henry, an assistant professor of psychology at Metro. This suggests that conspiracy theories have been around for a long time, he said. Henry brought up the examples of the assassination of Julius Caesar and the use of the Trojan horse during the Trojan War.

“Those would be instances in which the conspiracy theories would be appropriate because there were conspiracies going on,” Henry said. “We try to tell stories to make sense of these things that might otherwise be inexplicable.”

There is not a lot of empirical evidence regarding why individuals are prone to believe in conspiracy theories.

“People on the fringes feel less empowered in society in general and thus feel more comfortable accepting the idea that there are larger forces at work manipulating important situations,” Henry said.

Conspiracy beliefs about things such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy or the events of 9/11 are more likely to be constructed than a conspiracy regarding why Denver couldn’t clear the snow off the streets in the last snowstorm, Henry said.

He noted that Metro’s Psychology Research Club is conducting a study this semester about the different individual characteristics associated with the propensity to endorse conspiracies. One part of what the club is looking at is to what extent conspiracy theories overlap, he said. If someone believes in a conspiracy regarding Sept. 11, are they also likely to believe in a conspiracy involving the Catholic Church?

After Sept. 11 the National Institute of Standards and Technology was put in charge of trying to understand the physics of why the World Trade Center towers fell. James Dove, an associate professor of physics at Metro, attended the presentation, which he described as convincing.

“I don’t actually know the conspiracy theories other than that (conspiracy theorists) don’t think the towers would have fallen so nicely if there hadn’t been some kind of synchronized explosion at different points. And this presentation completely refuted that, saying how the result of what we saw is completely consistent with this type of blow,” Dove said.

NIST’s theory, as Dove explained it, centered on the immense amount of heat and structural damage that the planes’ initial impacts caused. Because the floors of the towers were not built to withstand the weight of another floor collapsing into them, it created an unstoppable domino effect. Dove pointed out that though NIST is not an institution independent of the government – possibly, as some conspiracy theorists see it, calling into question the validity of its claims – it is at least nonpartisan.

“That presentation looked solid. And even though it was run by NIST, you had about at least 100 physicists from different universities involved in the task force,” Dove said.

Conspiracy theory website http://www.patriotsquestion911.com disagrees with these explanations, however. The site boasts the collected statements of 100 other prominent academic figures from around the United States and the world who are demanding answers to questions unaddressed by either NIST’s findings or those of the official 9/11 Commission.

“We may differ over the political plausibility of conspiracies that have been proposed in connection with the destruction of 9/11. But the physical implausibility of the official scenario concerning the towers’ collapse should be beyond dispute,” says Joshua Mitteldorf, a researcher at Arizona University, on the website. “This is an area where physicists’ calculations and our commonsense notions of how tall objects fall down both point to the conclusion that sophisticated engineering and carefully-timed explosive charges would be required for the towers to fall in the manner that they did.”

For Metro student Jonathan Wright, there is no question that the U.S. government could have been complicit in the Sept. 11 attacks.

“I think the government could have easily done something like that. I mean, who knows what they’re up to?” Wright said. “It’s just incredible that they could actually pull something like that off. I mean, can you imagine what the implications of that would be?”

Wright paused, perhaps pondering those implications.

“Maybe we’ll find out in a hundred years,” he said.