Red/Gray Chips Match Advanced Thermitic Materials Developed in US Government Labs

Berkeley, CA, April 23, 2009— A team of scientists that includes 9/11 luminaries Steven Jones, Kevin Ryan, and seven other authors from three countries announced this month the long-awaited publication of their 25-page article "Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe."

The team analyzed dust samples that were collected from four locations near Ground Zero. One sample was collected ten minutes after the North Tower exploded, so it could not have been contaminated with particles from the cleanup efforts. All four samples contained the same unusual, tiny red/gray chips, which turned out to consist not only of the ingredients of conventional thermite but also carbon, silicon, and other elements.

The ingredients are all found in an ultra-fine-grained form that speeds the chemical reaction when the mixture is ignited. While conventional thermite is considered an incendiary, burning hot and fast at steel-melting 4500-degree temperatures, so-called "nano-thermite" or "super-thermite" mixtures can be explosive — as proudly noted in the Los Alamos announcement below (click to enlarge).

According to lead author Niels Harrit, a professor of chemistry at the University of Copenhagen, "These new findings confirm and extend the earlier finding of previously molten, iron-rich microspheres in the World Trade Center dust. They provide strong forensic evidence that the official explanation of the WTC's destruction is wrong. Office fires and jet fuel cannot produce these highly engineered, dangerous particles."

Taken together with all the other anomalies and contradictions in what we have been told, these new findings further support the international movement demanding a new, legitimate investigation of the 9/11 disaster. They also shed new light on statements by officials with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) denying that there is any evidence of explosives at the WTC. The findings underscore the absence from their reports of any mention of the molten metal caught on videoflowing out of the South Tower before it came down, seen in the rubble by dozens of people, and corroborated by hot spots in NASA thermal images of Ground Zero.

What many 9/11 activists are not aware of is that some of the same NIST engineers who wrote those reports and issued that disingenuous denialactually worked on nanothermite. Even before the dust evidence came to light, the obvious speed, symmetry, explosiveness, and completeness of the destruction strongly pointed to explosives. How can these NIST engineers have ruled out explosive controlled demolition without even discussing it in their more than 10,000 pages of reports? Perhaps for the same reasons they ruled out consideration of key evidence from the very beginning:

"For brevity in this report, this sequence [of events analyzed] is referred to as the "probable collapse sequence," although it does not actually include the structural behavior of the tower after the conditions for collapse initiation were reached... (NIST, 2005, p. 82, fn. 13; http://wtc.nist.gov/; see alsohttp://911research.wtc7.net/essays/nist/)

For popularized versions of the science behind the study—and how it withstands criticism—see the collection of essays featured on the home page of 9-11 Research.

The Open Chemical Physics Journal, part of the Bentham Open family of peer-reviewed journals lauded by several Nobel Laureates, make all its articles available online free of charge. Another Bentham Open journal, The Open Civil Engineering Journal, published an earlier article by some of the same authors,Fourteen Points of Agreement with Official Government Reports on the World Trade Center Destruction.