Below follows a summary of the information on Christine Peterson taken from the posts I did in the introduction and what has been written above plust added comments.
WRHW21: Christine Peterson, Washington resident, Alumni '73 from Northern Arizona University
S20-TS: http://www.naualumni.com/News/News.cfm?ID=613&c=4
Updated link: http://www.naualumni.com/site/apps/s/content.asp?c=evKYLiMSIqG&b=317233&ct=489385
Tragedy at the Pentagon -- An Eyewitness Report
T: Testimony with an introduction and concluding remarks posted on the website of the "NAU Alumni Association"
NAU stands for Northern Arizona University
Date: October 2001, as indicated in the introduction.
SOTT-Forum: http://www.cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php?topic=1154
Location: From a vehicle nearby. From the Boulevard at the heliport. "in front of the helipad at the Pentagon"
The text from the website is divided into sections with titles summarising the content. The part used by What Really Happened is underlined.
[Introduction]
Tragedy at the Pentagon -- An Eyewitness Report
Christine Peterson, '73 found herself in the thick of last month's terrorist tragedy, and submitted this report. It offers a personal perspective on the events in Washington, D.C., which have perhaps been overshadowed in the media by the scope of the horrors in New York.
[Christine's report of the strike]
It was 9:30 a.m. on Tuesday, September 11th, and traffic was terrible. For all of my twenty-eight years living in the Washington, D.C. area, terrible traffic was a constant.
I'd been in Boston the day before and gotten home late. That morning I repacked my suitcase because I was heading out to San Francisco on the 3:20 p.m. flight. I just needed a few hours in the office first, and now I was officially late for work.
I was at a complete stop on the road in front of the helipad at the Pentagon; what I had thought would be a shortcut was as slow as the other routes I had taken that morning. I looked idly out my window to the left -- and saw a plane flying so low I said, "holy cow, that plane is going to hit my car" (not my actual words). The car shook as the plane flew over. It was so close that I could read the numbers under the wing.
And then the plane crashed. My mind could not comprehend what had happened. Where did the plane go? For some reason I expected it to bounce off the Pentagon wall in pieces. But there was no plane visible, only huge billows of smoke and torrents of fire. Now I wanted to get as far away as I could, but that was impossible. The people around me had gotten out of their cars. At least half had cameras and the others were on their cell phones. I experienced a moment of irrelevant amazement that so many people had cameras in their cars.
A few minutes later a second, much smaller explosion got the attention of the police arriving on the scene. They began ordering people back into their cars and away.
[After the event]
I drove to work knowing that I would not be flying anywhere for a while. In the office I handled all the details that an emergency of this magnitude creates.
[Reflections]
But on my way home that night I found myself thinking about the times I had felt safe and protected. In my mind I saw a vivid image from my years at NAU: the bright blue sky, beautiful San Francisco Peaks, and friendly campus -- worlds away from what I had seen this morning.
[Concluding remark]
We have all been deeply affected by the tragedies of September 11th. As we prepare for a future that is uncertain, the memories of a more innocent time -- a time spent in Flagstaff -- are more fondly remembered than ever.
Comments:
The time of 9:30 a.m. is close to the reports in the time indicated by The Washington Post on the 12th of September, see the thread with Terrance Kean and is also close to the time a number of researchers now consider most probable.
From her phrase "In the office I handled all the details that an emergency of this magnitude creates" and "on my way home that night" I conclude that her job was of a character that was affected in some way by the event. However she was not a Government worker of the type that was sent home earlier in the day after the attack.
I undestand her amazement at the amount of cameras people had. Maybe that was part of the reason for the traffic jam before the event, or maybe it was a way for the common people to make up for the black out on the Pentagon strike since quite a few photos have surfaced later. However not everyone was lucky, one of the witnesses in this discussion,
James R. Cissell, a former photographer, said to the reporter that he did not have his equipment in the car, or maybe he was just not telling it as it was.
Regarding the credibility of her report there has already been some discussion:
Regarding the numbers under the wing Hkoehli remarked further up in the thread:
Hkoehli said:
This seems utterly absurd to me. If a plane is travelling 480 MPH only meters above the ground, I think you'd have a difficult time making out anything. Seems to me it would be a noisy blur.
And:
Vulcan59 said:
well again the "numbers" are usually found towards the tail end of the fuselage, never under the wing.
One point is that we do not know if the plane really travelled that fast. But in any case probably even at three hundred miles per hour it would be difficult to read something if there was any glyphs. Much depends on far away it was up or away from her, however if she was near the heliport and was influenced by the air, she must have been very close.
I tried to experiment to get an idea of what one can read at a close distance. An object moving at a speed of at 300 Mhp or 133 m/s at a distance of 32 feet appears as an object which moves at half the speed at half the distance, that is 66,5 m/s at a distance of 16 feet, which then appears as 33,25 m/s at a distance of 8 feet, which appears as about 16,61m/s at 4 feet, which appears as 8,3 m/s at 2 feet which appears as 4,2 m/s (14,4km/h) at a distance of 1 foot. Now take up a book and move it fast past your eyes. But not at the speed of a martial arts artist: 70 km/h!. Did you see the title? I had a difficulty reading mine, but then I am not yet a fast reader either.
One can level this critique against her, that she said that she could read the number under the wing, but note that she is not trying to convince anyone of any particluar plane, she wants to describe that she was very close. And she also describes in this fashion that the plane was at an angle to her view which allowed her to see the underside of the wing.
Regarding the thrust of the airflow affecting the car, Vulcan59 posted the following in
this thread
Vulcan59 said:
Jetblast can create havoc. If the alleged B757 was flying that low, it would have left a trail of destruction in it's wake.
Vulcan59 said:
Here is another short
MPEG Video of Wing Tip votices. You can see clearly the wing tip vortices in the movie clip. If the aircraft was flying so low as alleged by so many witnesses, why was there no reports of a trail of devastation left behind the low flying aircraft?
To which Laura added this link: http://www.cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php?topic=1182 and later Anders posted one topic with the title:
Former Pilot Says 'Jet Blast' Dismissal Doesn't Fly
In the article about
James R. Cissell he is alleged to have said:
"Then the plane, which was taking out telephone and power lines on its way in, hit the building." Elsewhere one can find that it took out some lampposts, I remember reading a number like three.
The question is then if not the testimony of Christine Peterson supports that the plane was something rather different than a B-757. If the engine was placed on the tail or above the hull the jet blast effects on the ground could be mitigated, similarly if the weight of the plane did not require a large wing area, the wingtip vortices could be decreased. Most likely a construction design was chosen that had a high probability of making it to the target, low hanging wings and engines would be at risk, if something entered the jet turbine it could reduce revolutions, make steering much more difficult. If fuel laden wings got penetrated by lamp posts they could ecxplode.
Her experience of the damage done to the Pentagon is very similar to that of
Terrance Kean in the article from the Washington Post on the 12th of September:
"It just plowed right into the side of the Pentagon. The nose penetrated into the portico. And then it sort of disappeared, and there was fire and smoke everywhere. . . . It was very sort of surreal."
Whereas Christine Peterson writes
"My mind could not comprehend what had happened. Where did the plane go? For some reason I expected it to bounce off the Pentagon wall in pieces. But there was no plane visible, only huge billows of smoke and torrents of fire."
One can say that her expectation is a bit innocent or one may conclude that the plane was not that large, or that the Pentagon was much more impressive. One could also suggest that her report is all fake, she just read the Washington Post before writing. But although I raise the point, I think it is would be a harsh judgement, I see very little politics or agenda in her report. After all there were people on the street, the wonder is not that there are so many alleged witnesses, rather that there are not more.
Conclusion of analysis:
If it comes to using the testimony of Christine Peterson as a Flight 77 witness there is
very little basis indeed. All one can say is that she saw what appeared as a plane of some type that did not create too much of wingtip vortices or jet blasts. Therefore to include her in a group of reports in order to support that Flight 77 crashed at the Pentagon is faulty reasoning.
Of her important observations are the time of the event 9:30 a.m., the fairly small amount of turbulence below the plane indicating something else than a 757, the lack of wreckage in front of the building, the reporting of a second blast, that police ordered people away, and that a lot of people had cameras and took pictures. Who knows maybe some art students had showed up for the occasion ;)
thorbiorn
