The root fallacy that is in play here is the fallacy of the argument from personal incredulity. In almost every case the signers are basing their belief in controlled demolition on the fact the collapses looked odd, and they could not figure out how such odd-looking collapses were possible without explosives. Far from bringing their expertise to bear on the problem, they have instead failed to use that expertise, and instead relied firstly on their initial gut assessment and visual perception of the extraordinary events, and secondly on confirmation of the assessment from compelling YouTube videos.

Even when the source of AE911 Truth’s information seems like a genuine expert, there’s a pretty good chance they have made some mistakes along the way if they are buying into a mistaken conclusion. Steven Jones, for example, is an actual scientist, a physicist. He claimed in 2006 to have found the chemical signature of thermite in a sample of residue on a 9/11 memorial sculpture that was created with some of the site debris. This claim was repeated as fact by AE911 Truth for the entire lifetime of their organization. Then in 2018, twelve years later, I looked into one of his claims and in the course of a day discovered that Jones had been reading the graph wrong, seeing a peak for manganese where there was none, and the sample was probably just slag from the cutting of the beam with an oxyacetylene torch.7 The elements he claimed to have identified were in fact textbook examples of common misidentification for that specific technique.

Richard Gage, the head of AE911 Truth, used that incorrect analysis in his presentations for ten years. He also used a photo of a column from the World Trade Center that had been cut at an angle. Gage claimed it was cut with thermite charges during the collapse. I was able to find a series of photos of the column, intact and cut, that were both taken six weeks after the collapse.8 Gage, a licensed architect, had been using it incorrectly for ten years. Steven Jones, the originator of the “nanothermite” hypothesis, has also continued to use it. Expertise does not mean infallibility, especially when making extraordinary claims.

The challenge for you with your friend is to show them this fallibility in AE911 Truth, this tendency to make mistakes. It’s a tricky thing because the same people who think that all the other scientists are incompetent and/or corrupt often also hold AE911 Truth in the highest regard. Avoid simply telling them that AE911 Truth don’t have any credibility, and instead focus on showing your friend where AE911 Truth has gotten it wrong, and where they sometimes make the most ridiculous claims. Tell your friend about AE911 Truth’s history, and how they did not come to “9/11 Truth” via any special investigation. They originally came to it via the work of non-expert conspiracy promoters, like Hoffman or Griffin. And show them where their nominal experts, like Jones and Gage, made mistakes that went unnoticed for over a decade.

Molten Steel and Nanothermite

A foundational mistake made by AE911 Truth and others in the 9/11 Truth movement is the idea that molten steel was found in the debris pile weeks after the collapse. Here’s David Chandler writing on AE911 Truth’s site:

He’s referring to a common belief held by 9/11 Truthers that there were literal pools of white-hot molten steel underneath the rubble pile. They don’t just mean red-hot steel girders, they mean liquid steel. They mean molten metal bubbling and flowing like lava for weeks after the collapse.

Steel has a very high melting point, 2500°F, far higher than the temperatures reached in building fires, and a lot higher than the temperatures that the steel columns of the building reached (as calculated by NIST). So pools of molten steel would be very suspicious.

The first problem here is that there was no physical evidence that these pools ever existed. There were certainly some eyewitness accounts of molten something being seen at various points under the rubble pile, but it could quite easily have been aluminum, lead, or glass that simply melted at some point in the underground fires. But leaving that aside, if there were “pools” of molten steel then at some point those pools would have cooled and solidified into huge chunks of solid steel. No such chunks were ever found.

(One large piece of debris known as “the meteorite,” on display at the 9/11 Memorial Museum, is sometimes presented as such a chunk. But it’s just compressed never-melted steel, concrete, and other debris. It contains pieces of paper, so obviously was not part of a pool of molten steel which have incinerated any paper.)

Chandler says “indicating a continuing energy source” because no matter how hot a supposed pool of molten steel could be, it is physically impossible for it to remain fully molten for more than a few hours, due to the radiation and conduction of heat.10 To get around this, Chandler introduces an equally impossible notion—that something was continually burning under the rubble to keep the steel molten. Exactly how this something managed to burn for weeks without being consumed, and also managed to be right next to the pool of steel, is an implausible conundrum.

That special “something” is, in 9/11 mythology, “nanothermite.”

Thermite is an incendiary substance, typically a mixture of aluminum powder and iron oxide power. It burns at an incredibly high temperature, 4000°F, making it capable of melting through steel. One of the byproducts of the combustion is molten iron. If you were to burn a ton of thermite you’d get half a ton of molten iron as well as molten steel from whatever you were cutting. So if you are looking for something that made “pools of molten steel,” thermite is a good candidate.

The origin of the nanothermite myth can be traced back to before June 22, 2003, in an article by Michael Rivera of our friend Willie’s then-favorite news source, What Really Happened:

The early version of the thermite myth makes no real sense as melting the core columns (of the World Trade Center Towers) would require a literal lake of molten iron. Filling up the 200 feet square basement level of either World Trade Center tower to a depth of one foot with molten steel would take 40,000 cubic feet of steel. This lake would eventually have solidified into a huge slab of iron weighing five thousand tons, which, again, was not found during cleanup. But this wild speculation is the origin of the nanothermite story. Rivera was actually something of a thermite fan having suggested it in previous conspiracy theories like the 1996 plane crash that killed Ron Brown12 and possibly in the explosion of TWA Flight 800.

At this point in time Truthers thought it was just regular thermite. Later writers upgraded it to “super thermite,” and then settled on “nanothermite.” Nanothermite sounds exotic, but it’s really just regular thermite with finer particles, so it burns faster, somewhat more like a conventional explosive than regular thermite. This results in a lot less melting of steel. It’s also not something that has ever been documented as being used for demolition either before 9/11, or in the seventeen years after.

How would burning thermite keep steel molten for weeks? It couldn’t. One of the largest thermite burns in history was performed by Mythbusters, who used half a ton of thermite to cut a car in half.13 This burned out in just a few minutes, and the area quickly cooled enough to approach shortly after that. Even if you had an implausible giant block of hundreds of tons of thermite, it would still be consumed in a few hours at most—and much less if it were the faster-burning nanothermite.

AE911 Truth talked themselves into a corner with their embrace of the “pools of molten metal” evidence. Even though the pools did not exist (and physically could not exist), they had to concoct an explanation for them consistent with their controlled demolition theory. Once they had fixed on thermite they went looking for more evidence to confirm their theory.

In the dust of the building they found two things: microscopic iron spheres and small chips that were red on one side and gray on the other. They claimed these were both evidence of thermite. But the iron microspheres were actually something expected in the dust from the fires, as explained in 2012 by R. J. Lee, an independent analyst who extensively studied the dust.

But burning flaking iron is not the only way of making iron microspheres. I’ve done some experiments and discovered numerous other methods, as have scores of scientists and researchers.15 You can easily make millions of microspheres with common construction activities such as arc welding, angle grinding, or hammering steel. Shielded from the elements inside the building, these microspheres could last for decades, until the eventual collapse of the building freed them into the dust. Microspheres are also created by mundane items like the sparks from cigarette lighters or flint ignitors used by steel workers. The pre- and post-collapse fires would create them by burning small pieces of iron dust (you can make then yourself by burning steel wool) but also by burning other things, like laser printer toner, and printed documents (the toner contains iron). After the collapse there was a lot of iron that needed to be cut to be removed, and the cutting produced huge amounts of iron microspheres which ended up in the general site dust.

Not only are iron microspheres an expected component of the dust, that same dust was also missing an expected product of thermite combustion. When thermite burns it makes twice as much aluminum oxide (by volume) as it does iron. When we burn thermite we find many white aluminum oxide spheres and a large number of hybrid “eyeball” spheres with a dark iron sphere embedded in a larger white oxide sphere. These were absent from descriptions of the dust. The simplest explanation is that the iron spheres are from mundane sources, and thermite was not used.

What of the curious red/gray chips? They look exactly like paint chips. I’ve found some of these chips myself simply by hitting a red painted steel wheelbarrow with a hammer.16 Identical looking paint chips flaked off. They were red on one side, had a gray layer of rust on the back, and were attracted to a magnet. When I heated them in a flame they formed microscopic shiny spheres of some iron-rich material (it was magnetic). This is all exactly like the flakes that AE911 Truth claims were leftover thermite. All the steel used in the World Trade Center was painted with red primer paint like my wheelbarrow. Therefore you would expect to find millions of tiny chips of this primer paint in the dust.

AE911 Truth claims that analysis shows it’s not paint. But their own tests do not really back up such claims. They determined the gray layer to be iron oxide, which is rusted iron—exactly the same as the chips from my wheelbarrow. The red side was more complex, but was consistent both chemically and morphologically (shape and texture) with paint ingredients like kaolin, containing aluminum and silicon. They also found several different types of chips with different chemical signatures and behaviors—consistent with various different types of paint.

How do you convey this to your friend? It can be difficult as things like chemical analysis are not easily digestible to most people. You need to identify what simple information they are missing. They will generally have been aware of this thermite claim as a simple list of evidence: molten steel was found, and the signature of thermite was found in the dust in the form of iron microspheres and red/gray chips. What you need to convey is: solidified pools of previously molten steel were never found during cleanup, iron microspheres are an expected result of a raging fire in a steel frame building, and the red/gray chips look and act just like the expected paint chips from the millions of square feet of red painted steel.

With iron microspheres, get a lighter and make some of your own. Just spark the lighter a few times over a sheet of white paper over a magnet, and you will get a dusting of microspheres. Look at them through a microscope. Bring up how AE911 Truth likes to quote expert R. J. Lee about how many iron microspheres were found in the dust (sampled months after the collapse in an area with lots of steel cutting activity), and yet they ignore or reject his explanation of those spheres. This cherry picking of an expert’s testimony is not new for AE911 Truth; they also did it with Danny Jowenko.

Danny Jowenko

On the home page of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth there’s a list of the top eight pieces of evidence for controlled demolition of Building 7. Number seven on that list is:

That sounds very compelling—if the top European demolition professional agrees it was controlled demolition, then that’s it, right? The expert in question is Danny Jowenko, who died in a car accident in 2011. Back in 2006, he was interviewed for a Dutch TV show Zembla.18 They showed him footage of Building 7 collapsing in the Loose Change conspiracy documentary. He had not seen this before and his immediate assessment was that it looked like a controlled demolition.19

What most 9/11 Truthers don’t know is that Zembla also interviewed him regarding the collapses of the Twin Towers, where he had nearly the opposite assessment. He thought that controlled demolition of the towers was basically an impossible idea. Here are some excerpts of that section, which is almost always omitted or evaded by Truthers:

Jowenko on why the second building hit was first to fall:

Jowenko on why explosives were not used:

Jowenko on why it looks like there are explosions in the sides of the building: