Pentagon hit

On September 11, 2001, five al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 en route from Washington D.C. to Los Angeles. At 9.37 AM, the plane hit the Pentagon building, the US Department of Defense, as part of a major coordinated terrorist attack that day. All 64 passengers, as well as 125 people who worked in the building, were killed. The building was severely damaged by the attack and the section where the aircraft hit collapsed in part.

Below, we investigate various conspiracy theory claims related to the attack on the Pentagon.

Impossible to identify the terrorists from DNA

Epilogue, Flight 93 crashes, Pentagon hit, WTC 1 hit, WTC 2 hit

Allegedly, it should be implausible that any human tissue or bone material would survive the massive destruction. It would also be impossible to compare surviving DNA with DNA from the terrorists, since they had not given DNA samples to the authorities before the terror attack. Furthermore, the claim suggests that there weren’t any hijackers on board the four planes, which means that the planes must have been remotely controlled or that the planes must have been flown into their targets by the airline pilots.

Flight 77’s route was suspicious

Flight 77 hijacked, Pentagon hit

The claim is used to support the claim that Flight 77 was not flown by one of the hijackers, Hani Hanjour, because the maneuver was supposedly too complicated for an untrained pilot. The claim is thus used to support the claim that Flight 77 was remotely controlled, which again should point to someone other than al Qaeda being involved in the terror attack on September 11, 2001. Instead, the attack was a so-called “inside job”. The claim leads to yet another claim: That it wasn’t even Flight 77 that hit the Pentagon but a Global Hawk drone.

No plane hit the Pentagon

Pentagon hit

The claim points to something else than Flight 77 hitting the Pentagon, which would mean that the terror attack was not carried out by Islamic terrorists.

It took several court trials to release images from the Pentagon

Epilogue, Pentagon hit

The claim is used to support the notion that a government conspiracy, and not al Qaeda and Osama bin laden, was behind the terror attack on, among other targets, the Pentagon. The alleged purpose of preventing the public from seeing these images was to hide that they didn’t show a hijacked plane hitting the building.

Videos from surveillance cameras were confiscated

Pentagon hit

The claim indicates that conspirators were already in position to seize recordings that might show that it was not a plane that hit the Pentagon.

Flight 77 could not fly fast close to the ground

Pentagon hit

Due to the so-called ground effect, it should not be possible for a Boeing 757 to fly close to the ground at a speed of 500 mph (800 km/h). The consequence of the claim is thus that something other than Flight 77, a Boeing 757, hit the Pentagon after having flown the last part of the stretch at 529 mph (852 km/h) a few meters above the ground.