A Rough Guide to Trutherism

Over the past 10 years, the 9/11 conspiracy theory—the basic belief that the attacks were not orchestrated by al-Qaida but by, or at least with the permission of, the Bush administration—has spawned a whole slew of corollaries and subtheories. Here’s a guide to 10 of the more prevalent and bizarre of these theories, presented in rough order from provably false to irredeemably paranoid.

Left: Leading conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, New York, New York, Sept. 11, 2007.
Photograph by CREDIT: 911conspiracy via Flickr.
The planes didn’t bring down the Twin Towers.

It wasn’t the impact of the planes and subsequent fires that brought down the South and North Towers of the World Trade Center; it was a controlled demolition. Although an extensive study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and a number of peer-reviewed papers disproved this hypothesis, 15 percent of Americans still find such a claim credible, according to one 2010 poll.

Left: World Trade Center, New York, Sept. 11, 2001.

Photograph by Thomas Nilsson/Getty Images.
No plane hit the Pentagon.

This theory, first articulated by French author Thierry Meyssan in his book 9/11: The Big Lie, is that the hole in the Pentagon was too small to have been made by a jet and that there wasn’t any debris at the crash site, so the Pentagon must have been hit by a drone or a missile. Photographic evidence and more than 100 eyewitnesses prove otherwise.

Left: Pentagon, Washington, Sept. 11, 2011.

Photograph by Alex Wong/Getty Images.
Military aircraft could have intercepted the planes.

Audio recordings from the NORAD Northeastern command center demonstrate that military officials did not know that there were hijacked flights in the air before it was much too late to act. Initially, however, the official timelines—later corrected—indicated otherwise, and this gave conspiracists fodder to speculate that they had had enough time. Some argue that Dick Cheney issued a “stand-down” order to American air defenses or that he intentionally scheduled war games for that morning to confuse military pilots.

Left: Madison, Wisc., April 15, 2008.

Photograph by David Drexler via Flickr.
Flight 93 didn’t crash in Pennsylvania.

Many conspiracists say United Airlines Flight 93 was shot down by a military jet. Some even argue that the cell-phone calls from passengers to the families on the ground were faked in order to get the American public behind the war against al-Qaida.

Left: Shanksville, Pa., Sept. 12, 2001.

Photograph by David Maxwell/AFP/Getty Images.
Building 7 was exploded on purpose.

World Trade Center 7 was not hit by a plane but caught on fire after debris from the falling North Tower crashed into it and it collapsed seven hours later. Because the collapse was such an anomaly—no other steel-frame high-rise building has ever previously been brought down by fire alone—and because it took NIST seven years to come up with its final report on the cause of collapse, conspiracists have focused on it. They claim that the building had to have been brought down by controlled demolition. Some argue that it was destroyed because it housed the secret command center from which the 9/11 plot was planned and conducted.

Left: World Trade Center 7, New York, Sept. 12, 2001.

Photograph by Marcos Townsend/AFP/Getty Images.
The explosion was very quiet.

Traditional controlled demolitions are very loud, but no one heard anything like one on 9/11, and no incendiary devices have been found in the rubble. So conspiracy theorists have argued that a high-temperature incendiary called nano-thermite was used to bring down the buildings. They haven’t been able to prove that such a reaction occurred, Carnegie Mellon professor of metallurgical engineering Richard Fruehan told Popular Mechanics in its definitive debunking.

Left: Atlanta, Ga., March 22, 2011.

Photograph by Pwaully73 via Flickr.
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It was all an insurance scam.

Another possible motive that conspiracists posit for why WTC 7 was taken down is that its owner, Larry Silverstein, wanted to collect the insurance money. The conspiracists’ main “evidence” is that Silverstein told a PBS documentary in 2002 that he had told the fire department commander to “pull it” in reference to bringing the building down. He was actually referring to “pulling” the firefighters out of the building, which is a common firefighting term.

Left: Larry Silverstein, Manhattan, July 24, 2001.
Photograph byCREDIT: Budd Williams/New York Daily News Archive via Getty Images.
This conspiracy goes even deeper than you think.

At a certain point, conspiracists realize that it would have been beyond the scope of the Bush administration to pull off the 9/11 conspiracy on its own. When they reach that point, they either leave the movement or find some more demonic, all-powerful group to pin the blame on. For conspiracy theorists that power can be the Illuminati, or Jews, or the “globalists,” or the New World Order, or the Freemasons, or the Bilderberg group, or the Lizard People, or any number of all-powerful secret groups, often referred to with the generic term “they.”

Left: St. Moritz, Switzerland, June 9, 2011.

Photograph by Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images.
Osama Bin laden died a long time ago.

Many 9/11 conspiracists believe numerous video and audio recordings from Osama Bin Laden over the past 10 years were faked. Their proof usually relies on either incredibly low-resolution versions of the videos to prove that the Bin Laden in the recordings was a fat double, or the fact that he dyed his beard later in life. The theory is that Bin Laden likely died of kidney failure years ago and that the government has had him “on ice” ever since, ready to pull out whenever necessary.

Left: Osama Bin Laden, from a video released in September 2007.

Photograph by AFP/Getty Images.
George Bush knew about it ahead of time.

Some conspiracy theorists say that the government didn’t orchestrate the attacks but knew they were coming and let them happen in order to have a reason to start a war in the Middle East. David Ray Griffin cited Bush’s lack of response when he learned of the second attacks while reading The Pet Goat during a photo-op with Florida schoolchildren as evidence that he knew terrorists weren’t going to target him at the school and must have known in advance about the attacks.

Left: George W. Bush, Sarasota, Fla., Sept. 11, 2001.

Photograph by Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images.