Category File
9/11
4 documented theories filed under this subject.
- The Dancing IsraelisFive Israeli nationals working for a New Jersey removals company were arrested on 11 September 2001 after a neighbour reported them watching the burning towers and giving each other high fives. They were held seventy-one days and deported for working without visas. Two FBI divisions concluded they had no prior knowledge of the attacks and were not engaged in clandestine intelligence work. The companion claim that Israelis were warned to stay away traces to a Jerusalem Post report of families ringing to ask whether their relatives were alive, inverted five days later by a Hezbollah-linked broadcaster.
- The Pentagon Missile TheoryA 9/11 theory claiming that the Pentagon was not struck by American Airlines Flight 77, but by a missile or smaller military-type projectile. The theory developed from early press photographs that seemed to show limited visible wreckage, the size of the exterior damage before collapse, eyewitness confusion, and the rapid emergence of competing narratives about what a commercial-jet impact should have looked like.
- The Pentagon MASCAL ExerciseA claim that the Pentagon rehearsed the attack that later struck it, built on a series of pre-2001 mass casualty exercises in which a passenger aircraft hit the building. The exercises are real and are recorded in the Defense Department's own history of 9/11, which notes that one of them, held in May 2001, supposed an airliner striking the west side.
- The Passport MiracleA 9/11 theory claiming that the discovery of one hijacker’s passport near the World Trade Center was too improbable to be authentic and therefore must have been planted as a ready-made evidentiary token for the FBI. The story focuses most strongly on the passport of Satam al-Suqami, reportedly found in lower Manhattan after Flight 11 hit the North Tower, before the towers collapsed.
- The Project for the New American Century (PNAC)A post-9/11 theory claiming that the neoconservative think tank Project for the New American Century had already outlined the strategic shape of a more aggressive U.S. military century and that its language about a “catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor” reflected not only strategic wishfulness but foreknowledge, intent, or readiness to exploit a major attack in order to justify wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
- The Stand Down OrderA 9/11 theory claiming that U.S. air defenses were not merely confused, delayed, or trapped by outdated protocols, but were intentionally restrained by orders from high authority so that the hijacked planes could proceed unimpeded. The theory focuses on NORAD timelines, FAA-military miscommunication, delayed scrambles, and the contrast between expectations of American airpower and the actual response on September 11.
- The Missing 2.3 TrillionA major post-9/11 theory claiming that the September 11 attacks functioned as a distraction from Donald Rumsfeld’s September 10, 2001 statement that the Pentagon could not properly track trillions of dollars in transactions. The theory does not usually argue that the full amount was physically stolen in a single act, but rather that the attacks buried scrutiny of a massive accounting crisis inside the Defense Department.