Episode #2 - The Explosives

Pillars of Smoke

Transcript:

[searching ebay soundbite]

This is me searching ebay for something called thermite. It’s an ingredient I now believe may be important to bringing down the twin towers. I was surprised to find a bunch of sellers with current listings for it, but my question is, would have listings like this been around back in 2001? I mean probably, right? People have been selling all sorts of weird things on ebay since it’s conception.

[tire screech soundbite]

Actually, let me start a little earlier.

Growing up, seeing R rated movies at an actual theatre could be a little tricky. Because the shooting at Columbine high school in April of 1999 resulted in a lot of pressure on theatres to card customers, to ensure they were at least 17 years old.

Columbine was the shooting in Colorado where two deranged students walked into the school they attended and shot and killed 12 fellow students and 1 teacher, before both committing suicide themselves.

[Columbine news report soundbite]

The attack sparked a lot of public forum about the types of content that are appropriate for youth, because the attackers were rumored to of listened to music like KMFDM and Marilyn Manson, played video games like first person shooter Doom, and watched movies like The Basketball Diaries.

The 1995 movie Basketball Diaries, starred a very young Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Wahlberg. It followed the real life experiences of Jim Carroll as he went from a successful New York City high school basketball player to rock bottom heroin addict to a recovering poet.

By the way, if you want to know why a lot of people talk about how crazy it is that Dicaprio hadn’t won an oscar for his acting abilities until 2016, it’s because he’s basically been giving mind blowingly convincing performances his entire life, and this drug addict Basketball Diaries role is a prime example.

[Basketball Diaries asking mom for money scene]

There’s a scene in the movie though where Leonardo’s character has an angry daydream about walking into his school, all dressed in black, trench coat, pants, boots and he just unloads round after round into his classmates; while Mark Wahlberg’s character sits at a desk and cheers him on.

It’s kind of a disturbing scene, but it matches the films very raw look at the inner deterioration of a young man as he moves from limitless potential to addictive self destructive habits.

And if you’ve seen both this film and the security footage from the Columbine high school on the day of the attack, you’ll notice a very striking visual similarity.

Which led many to ask questions like, did this movie inspire the evil actions of these teenagers? Or, can greater censorship laws prevent future attacks like this?

These can be tough questions to answer, especially in the moments and days immediately following such senseless bloodshed.

But here’s the thing, ID carding or not, six months after columbine, in November of 99, the r-rated movie Fight Club hit theatres, and I, I was going to see that movie.

So after a bit of effortless finagling, there I was, an underage teenager seated in anticipation, my shoes tapping the sticky floor.

[Simpsons sound bite about unlaminated drivers license]

Fight Club stars Edward Norton and Brad Pitt. It’s based on a fictional book by the same title.

Norton plays a character that is leading a very mundane and bland life.

[Sound bite from Fight Club - ‘I used to read pornography, now it was the ikea catalog’]

Pitt plays a philosophical vandal, who leads a life that is the farthest thing from bland. Pitt is skeptical of the material world; believing the pursuit of shiny objects and modern conveniences to be a form of pacifying enslavement.

[Sound bite from Fight Club - ‘what concerns me is tvs with 500 channels, some guys name on my underwear’]

Norton’s character is instantly intrigued by Pitts character after they meet on a flight; they become friends and roommates very shortly after.

Norton’s character starts to feel really alive, as he goes from his old life of spending evenings watching tv, to doing things with Brad Pitt like climbing up on the rooftops of apartment buildings and using satellite dishes for batting practice, liberating others from mundane tv watching evenings.

Pitt’s character also earns income in an unusual way, he pulls human fat out of the dumpsters of liposuction clinics, boils it, adds lye and sells it as high end up scale soap to department stores.

[Sound bite from Fight Club - ‘he was selling their own fat butt’s back to them’]

By the way, if you’ve ever wondered why a disproportionate amount of guys say that their ‘man-crush’ is Brad Pitt; it’s because of this movie. Few argue against the fact that he’s in his physical prime during the filming and he just plays one of the most bad A characters of all time in it.

[Sound bite from Fight Club - ‘I want you to hit me as hard as you can’]

Norton becomes concerned though, as Pitt’s acts of mayhem grow more and more intense. The movie culminates into a final scene where Norton tries to stop Pitt from blowing up 10 or so financial institutions, whose doing so in an effort to free the masses from the yolk of debt. Norton even puts a bullet through the head of Pitt, but it’s too late. And as the song Pixies ‘Where is my mind?’ fades in, Edward Norton looks out onto a skyline where skyscraper after skyscraper falls down in controlled demolition.

For those of you who haven’t seen the movie, I know it seems like I just dropped some major spoilers, but trust me, I didn’t ruin any major surprises...I would never do that, it’s actually part of the rules of Fight Club.

[Sound bite from Fight Club - ‘The first rule of Fight Club is that you don’t talk about Fight Club’]

Now Brad Pitt’s character used home made nitroglycerin to blow up the buildings, a recipe he found was not all that different from that of the soap he was making.

[Sound bite from Fight Club - ‘with enough soap, one could blow up just about anything’]

In the book Fight Club, the author Chuck Palahniuk, describes and uses the real recipes and process for making the dynamite, but when that book was adapted into the films screenplay, likely because it was post columbine, those real recipes were switched it to fake recipes, I imagine to reduce the risk of viewers seeing the movie and trying those recipes out themselves.

After I released the first episode of this podcast, and people heard the premise for the series, which is to think through the logistics of blowing up the trade towers on 9/11 in an effort to either disprove a conspiracy theory or to shed new light/evidence/clues on the attack, I received feedback from a couple of friends who expressed a concern, that same concern, that got Fight Club to switch to fake recipes.

I would be very devastated if a piece of content I produced ever inspired or gave vision to some evil act, but here are the two main reasons I won’t be sharing a dumbed down version of the demolition plans and why all the details will be very raw and real.

Number One: Almost every piece of information I’ll be sharing in this podcast, can be found elsewhere on the internet. I’ll be organizing that information and presenting it in a little bit more of a digestible way, but none the less, it’s all out there for someone currently already.

Number Two: As I’ve dived into this project, I’ve found that the specific details is what leads to the most interesting trains of thought. Answering questions like, which explosives were used, how do you obtain them, can they be home made, what ingredients do you need to make them homemade, does the government track the purchases of those ingredients, do you use remote detonation, could the planes be used as detonators, if the planes were used to detonate, which floors did they hit on each tower, what was located on each of the floors hit, etc. I believe getting into the nitty gritty details is what will ultimately help answer the question ‘Could planes alone have brought down the trade towers?’

Soo, all that being said…

[Ghoti Hook theme song]

You’re listening to the podcast Pillars of Smoke, I’m your host Neal Schmidt, and I’m going to figure out how to blow up the trade towers.

My knowledge in the realm of acquiring explosives is very small, basically limited to purchasing gasoline at gas stations for my car’s combustion engine or traveling a half hour out of Chicago to cross the Illinois/Indiana state border where someone can buy fireworks, from places like Krazy Kaplan or Phantom, like a free man.

See, in Indiana the sale of professional grade fireworks to normal consumers is legal. Which means lots of people drive over there from Chicago to pick up great looking fireworks for their summer 4th of July parties.

I usually purchase mortar fireworks, those are the ones where you light the explosive, drop it into a cylinder mortar (like those in WWII movies) and it shoots into the sky and mesmerizes with color and sparkle.

But the last time I was in one of those stores I remember seeing something that was labeled ‘quarter stick of dynamite’ and I don’t know if that was just marketing talk or if it really is a loud noise maker that is an actual ¼ stick of dynamite. So I decided to give them a ring and ask.

[Sound bite of Phantom Fireworks call]

Yeah, I kinda figured this would be the case. I think the thing I was thinking of was actually called M-80s, which are red tubes about a couple inches in length and have a wick coming out of them, but even M-80s are actually not at all equivalent to a quarter stick of dynamite.

There’s no behind the counter, extra strength when it comes to the firework industry either. Like it is when you buy ce0rtain allergy medicine at the pharmacy and the pharmacist has to scan your driver's license so that they don’t sell too much pseudoephedrine to the next crystal meth cooking Walter White.

But let’s say I was able to get several truck loads of dynamite, and I took those trucks and parked them underneath the twin towers, which is essentially the method Brad Pitts character from Fight Club uses, igniting a big explosion in the parking structure underneath the building, and in the movie that method works, the buildings all fall, but there’s precedent that says it wouldn’t work on the twin towers.

And when I say precedent, I mean, somebody has already tried this, 8 ½ years before 9/11, on February 26th 1993 someone filled a van with a 1,300 pound complex dynamite-based bomb and parked it underneath Tower number 1 (the north tower in the trade center).

When it exploded, at around lunch time, it created a 30 meter wide hole through four floors of concrete sublevels, it killed 6 people and flooded the entire building with smoke, as that smoke rose through the stairways and elevator shafts.

[Sound bite of news reports of the 1993 bombing]

This was a massive bomb, exploding directly at the foundation, which is the most vulnerable part of any building, the whole structure stands upon it. And despite this, Tower #1 didn’t budge. The attackers had no doubt desired for its collapse. But it didn’t go that way at all.

They closed the building for a few weeks after the attack to investigate and do repairs, but people continued working there for almost a decade till it finally did collapse in 2001 from a plane crash.

I didn’t know much about this 1993 attack before I started doing research for this podcast, I was young when it happened, 8 or 9 years old, I don’t know what type of news coverage the story got the day of, but I have zero recollection of that February 26th day, 24 years ago.

There’s a couple things that stand out to me about this attack though, one, the twin towers seem to be extremely well engineered and strong, I mean to experience an explosion like this to the foundation without any major structural integrity issues afterwards, says a lot. And two, that such a blow could be done to the foundation without bringing it down, but a plane hitting the 90th-something floor could bring it to rubble within two hours. Seems very strange.

And is it just me, or do these buildings seem cursed, I mean, being the target of so many attacks makes them feel like they are the Gotham City of buildings. At a certain point, you just gotta be like F-it, I’m moving to Blüdhaven.

There’s a buzz word that I see in almost all 9/11 truther articles and blogs, the word is thermite.

Thermite is a powder, most commonly made up of Aluminum and Iron Oxide, when ignited, it creates Aluminum Oxide and molten iron. And that molten iron it produces is really hot, burning at over 4,000 degrees fahrenheit, which is well over the 2,700 degrees of heat necessary to melt structural steel.

I found a video online of guys lighting a pile of thermite on top of the hood of a car, and you can watch it burn through the car hood, the entire engine block and fall out the bottom. The stuff just looks pretty powerful in it’s ability to cut through metal.

[Sound bite of youtube video of burning thermite]

As you heard in the beginning of this episode, thermite is not hard to purchase, it can be bought on ebay, for not much money actually.

And that’s because thermite in it’s basic form is an incendiary (meaning it’s just flammable) not an actual explosive.

There’s a version of thermite, called thermate, which is thermite with the addition of sulfur, and this version is even more efficient at cutting through steel, but it’s not an explosive either.

In the beginning of my research I couldn’t understand why so many people talked about thermite/thermate, it seemed to be a possible explanation for the molten steel found in the wreckage of the the twin towers, because this stuff definitely burns really hot, but if it doesn’t explode, how was it really responsible for bringing down the towers.

Well, as it turns out, in the late 90s, the Los Alamos National Laboratory pioneered a method called the dynamic gas condensation phase which made it possible to create ultra fine grains of aluminum. And in chemistry, the general rule is, the smaller the particles, the faster the reaction.

So, when thermite was made with this new ultra fine/small grain method, it was appropriately named nano-thermite (or super-thermite), and when gas-releasing substances were added to it, it becomes very explosive.

By the way, the Los Alamos National Lab is located in the Santa Fe New Mexico area and was originally organized and founded during WWII for the purpose of designing and building nuclear weapons.

There are a handful of scientists that have collected and tested dust and debris from the fallen trade towers and have found traces of nano-thermite.

One of those scientists is Steven Jones, a former BYU professor, who’s well known in the fusion community for various published papers. His intrigue into 9/11 and building 7 came a few years after the actual attack. In 2005 he began rounding up samples of the dust/debris from the towers. Here he is explaining how and where some of the samples came from and swearing to the validity of them.

[Sound bite of Steven Jones talking about sample source and the traces of red nano-thermite material found in them]

If this is true, it’s big news and a big clue. But one of many things could be happening here, maybe the samples he received from these people were tainted beforehand, or maybe Professor Jones is straight up lying, planting the nano-thermite into the samples after he received them to prove his own theory.

Sometimes you gotta trust your gut though, and my gut is inclined to believe that the traces of nano-thermite found in these samples are legit. So I’m going to pursue this direction, but I’ll be proceeding with caution, because I can’t put my full stock into these samples, I mean they were tested years after the fact, so I have to maintain a certain amount of reservation.

But for now, my question becomes, how do I get my hands on nano-thermite?

Spoiler alert, it’s much harder than regular thermite. It’s something that was invented by a government funded lab and pre-2001 it was almost exclusively manufactured by places like the Indian Head Division of the Naval Surface Warfare Center.

In other words, the main ones making nano-thermite back then...was the United States Military

[Doors - ‘Riders on the storm’]

Thanks for listening everyone, episodes for this podcast come out every few weeks.

So if you enjoyed this particular episode, be sure to click subscribe to stay up-to-date.

In between official episodes I’ll be releasing some bonus content. A lot of this podcast so far has focused on the scary and negative aspects of 9/11. So in the next upcoming bonus episode we’re going to be diving into some of the amazing and heroic stories, of men and women that rose to the occasion on 9/11, helping save lives and unify a city in disarray.

So we’ve been together for a couple episodes now, and I think we should do it. Let’s take this relationship to the next level. I think we should go all the way. Let’s write reviews for each other. You can write a review for this podcast. And I will write a review for your podcast, or your yelp listing, or just a hand written letter of recommendation, just a little something to carry around with you that says ‘Yo Dawg, Neal F’n Schmidt vouched for me’.

Some people don’t know, but podcast mp3 files aren’t stored on iTunes, it’s a decentralized system, all the Apple Podcasts app does is follow the RSS feed of whatever website is posting the mp3 files. And luckily, setting up a website to host the mp3 files for this podcast was super easy and cheap thanks to squarespace. So I wanted to give them a special shoutout. You don’t need to be able to code, and there are easy to follow video tutorials for just about everything you’d want to do. So checkout Squarespace.com and start your own website today. Use promo code gimme10 to receive 10% off your first purchase.

Intro music was by Ghoti Hook. Outro music was by The Doors.