Ed Begley, Jr.:  Big round of applause for Mr. Jeff King.

Jeff King, MIT Engineer/Research Scientist.

Thank you.  I studied physics at M.I.T.  I did electrical engineering for about eight years.  I have had quite a bit of practical engineering experience.  When I first saw the collapses I was absolutely convinced that they were not spontaneous.  One of the first things that I did was to speak with one of my patients, who is a retired Army Corps of Engineers fellow who's done a lot of demolition and construction.  I showed him some of the public source videos which are available, and he immediately pointed out that there were squibs which represent little puffs of smoke essentially coming out of the buildings initially, which were clearly a sign of controlled demolition.  He had no opinions beyond that, but he said without doubt that it was controlled demolition.  That sort of set me on the path of continuing to examine it, and trying to gather as much evidence as I could.  And the question I pose, "What don't we know and why don't we know it?" is sort of addressing the fact that at this point we still do not really have a meaningful explanation for what happened to the buildings. 

We have had several studies at this point which I will go into as to trying to determine a plausible scenario for the collapse.  As of this point, none of them have presented us with anything  that I think could be reasonably be called convincing and detailed account of why the collapses occurred, and the question that's been addressed previously, the enormous destruction of physical evidence, as Chris was saying, the site was scrubbed very thoroughly.  Out of the entire mass of the buildings that were destroyed, the National Institutes of Standards and Technology who are now doing the ongoing investigation, managed to save about 240 pieces out of the entire building.  All of the rest of it was basically recycled. 

The obvious question is, "What does it mean that there was a controlled demolition?"  At the simplest level, it means that someone had a lot of access to buildings over a long enough period of time to set this up.  It implies, as many other things have tonight, that people who had effective control of the site had an interest in having it scrubbed and making sure that no information was available so forensic reconstruction couldn't be done.  Even in much smaller catastrophes, we typically will reconstruct things as completely as possible.  For example, TWA Flight 800, pieces were dredged off from the bottom of the sea and reconstruction was done to allow a detailed analysis.  In this case, the exact opposite was done.

The first report that was really issued on this was issued by FEMA in collaboration with the American Society of Civil Engineers, which was basically a volunteer team from ASCE that had very limited access to the site.  A lot of the pieces that they were able to retrieve were retrieved by going to landfills and trying to find interesting pieces before they were disposed of.

FACT:  Only $600,000 Spent Investigating WTC vs. $40,000,000 to Investigate Clinton

The initial FEMA report basically acknowledged that the kerosene would have burned off very quickly.  What wasn't destroyed in the initial fireball would have been consumed fairly rapidly and would have only  really served as ignition for the rest of the material.  And the second point being that the fuel here really was strictly office contents.  If you think of a modern office, with copying machines, computers, and as has been previously mentioned, the smoke, particularly from building 2 just before it collapsed was very black looking. This is generally an indication of an inefficient fire in which there is not enough oxygen for the amount of fuel.  These types of fires typically burn very cool.  They are not hot flames, like blow torches.

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