Twenty-five years have passed since the morning of September 11, 2001.
We are told to never forget. That is the easy part. The harder part — the part official Washington has never wanted to sit with — is to look again at what was actually photographed at the Pentagon that morning, and to ask whether the pictures still support the account we were given.
This is not a piece about New York. It is not a piece about Shanksville. It is not a piece that pretends to name a plot. We said the same thing when we first put these frames in front of readers in March 2024: *without going onto the “who did it” of it all*. What follows is the visual record at the one target that was supposed to be the most defended building on Earth — and the questions that record still will not bury.
If you have not read our earlier collection of Pentagon footage and FBI interior stills, start here: [Revisiting 9/11]
What we were told
The official account is short, and it has not moved in a quarter century.
American Airlines Flight 77, a Boeing 757-200 registered N644AA, left Washington Dulles at 8:20 a.m. bound for Los Angeles. Five hijackers took the aircraft. At 9:37:46 a.m. Eastern, traveling at approximately 530 miles per hour and a few feet off the grass, the jet struck the west face of the Pentagon — Wedge 1, the section that had just been renovated and reinforced. All 64 people on the aircraft were killed. One hundred twenty-five people inside the building were killed. A section of the outer ring came down about twenty minutes later.
That is the story. A 155-foot airliner with a 125-foot wingspan, full of jet fuel, disappeared into reinforced concrete at highway-overpass height, left a comparatively compact wound in the first photographs, punched a neat hole through to an interior service road, and left trees, a flagpole, and stretches of lawn looking as if a storm had missed them.
Look at the pictures. Then decide how comfortable you are with that sentence.
Image One — The fireball, before the façade came down
This is the frame we put in front of readers on March 25, 2024, quoting Alex Jones’s question — *where is the passenger jet?* — and adding our own:
> Imagine a hole roughly the size of the orange fireball you see here — taken before the collapse of that portion of the building. Light pole and tree seem unaffected from the “plane crash.” Now compare that orange glow to the “exit” hole in the last images.
Twenty-five years later the same photograph still does the same work.
What the frame actually shows, without commentary:
A compact orange fireball at the base of the west wall, not a wing-shaped wound 125 feet across.
A column of black smoke already boiling straight up the façade.
A mature tree, still leafed, standing to the right of the fire.
The flagpole standing.
Arlington County rescue apparatus in the left foreground.
Construction trailers and fencing from the renovation still on the lawn.
Firefighters and civilians on the highway barrier, close enough to sit on the wall and watch.
A maroon sedan in the near lane. Ordinary traffic geometry. No wreckage field of engines, landing gear, and fuselage sections in the roadway.
The official explanation for the small-looking wound is that this photograph is taken *before* the outer wall failed, and that the “real” entry hole was about 75 feet wide if you count destroyed first-floor columns rather than the fireball you can see. The American Society of Civil Engineers said as much in The Pentagon Building Performance Report (2003). They also said one wing struck the ground, the other was sheared by columns, and that what remained of the aircraft “flowed into the structure in a state closer to a liquid than a solid mass.”
That is an extraordinary physical claim. It may be true. It is also convenient. It asks the public to ignore the picture in front of them and trust a column-count performed after the façade had already come down.
Our question in 2024 was simpler, and it has not aged out:
If a Boeing 757 arrived on that lawn at 530 miles per hour, where, in this frame, is the path of a 125-foot wing?
The tree is still there. The pole is still there. The trailers are still there. The fireball is the size of a room, not the size of an airliner.
The aircraft we are asked to fit into that frame, a Boeing 757-200 is not a small object.
Length: about 155 feet
Wingspan: 124 feet, 10 inches
Fuselage width: roughly 12 and a half feet
Tail height: about 44 feet
Typical fuel load on a transcontinental departure: measured in the tens of thousands of pounds
The official flight-path study from the NTSB puts the aircraft a few feet above the ground in the last third of a second, after a descending 330-degree right turn, engines near maximum, nose pitched down. Light poles on the approach are said to have been clipped. A 750-kilowatt generator on the construction site is said to have been struck by the right wing. The left engine is said to have hit a steam vault. Then the nose entered the west wall.
That sequence is tidy on paper. In the photograph above, the tidy sequence has to live in a strip of lawn and construction yard that still has a standing tree and a standing flagpole in the same field of view as the fire.
We are not required to pretend that is an easy fit.
The collapse that enlarged the wound
About twenty minutes after the strike — sources put the failure near 9:57 to 10:15 a.m. — a section of the E Ring above the impact came down. The hole the public remembers from the afternoon photographs is not the hole in the first photographs. It is the hole after the building did the work the aircraft, in the official story, did not finish in one piece.
On March 25, 2024, we put it this way:
> After the initial missile strike, they realized that the entry point was WAY too small for a jetliner. They decided to pull down a huge portion of the outer ring corridor.
Call it a missile. Call it a plane. Call it whatever the next document dump requires. The sequence in the photographs is not in dispute: first a compact fire at the base of the wall, then a much larger bite taken out of the façade. The official report says gravity and fire did that work, starting at an expansion joint, after columns on the first floor had already been destroyed.
The public was shown the larger wound. The public was told that was the airplane. The earlier frame — the one with the orange fireball and the standing tree — is the one that still has to be explained, not the one taken after the wall failed.
Image Two — The “exit” hole, and the orange paint
This is the other photograph that will not go away.
Official language has always been careful here. The Army and the ASCE did not say the fuselage came out the other side. They said an engine or the landing gear punched a hole of about twelve feet in the inner wall of Ring C, opening onto AE Drive, the interior service road that rings the building between C and B. The opening in this frame is tight, almost tidy, with a black soot bloom on the lintel and a debris field of office contents, insulation, and broken masonry on the wet floor.
Look at it the way a crime-scene photographer would look at it.
The opening is not 155 feet long. It is not 125 feet wide. It is a punch.
The wall around it is standing.
The spray-paint tags — “MD” inside an inverted V — are the markings of the Military District of Washington / responder teams working the scene, not some occult signature. They are still part of the picture. They tell you this frame was processed as evidence.
The debris on the floor is real. What is not obvious in the frame is a Boeing 757.
In 2024 we asked readers to put Image One next to this one: the orange fireball on the west face, and this punch-out on an interior ring. That comparison is the whole case for a second look. A large commercial aircraft is supposed to have connected those two points, through three rings of a fortified office building, and left this as the far-side souvenir.
The official answer is that most of the aircraft disintegrated into the first ring, and only a heavy component — gear or engine — continued. That is possible. It is also the sort of answer that should have been accompanied, in a country that claims to believe in evidence, by an unedited, high-resolution camera record of the half-second before impact. That record was never given to the public in a form that settles the question.
The cameras that should have ended the argument
The Pentagon is not a farmhouse. It is ringed with cameras.
What the public received were a handful of low-resolution security frames from a Pentagon parking-gate camera, released by the Department of Defense years after the fact, in which a blur streaks across a few frames and a fireball appears. Independent researchers have argued for two decades over whether those frames show a 757, a smaller object, or almost nothing that can be identified at all.
Citizens who stood on Route 27 and on the overpasses that morning described a large silver airliner. Other citizens described something they could not identify. A C-130 crew circling the area radioed that an aircraft had hit the building. Forensic teams later said they identified the remains of the people on Flight 77.
None of that is nothing. None of that is a substitute for the raw, unedited camera takes from every Pentagon-facing lens that was running at 9:37 a.m. Those takes were collected. They were not published as a set. Twenty-five years later, that is still the hole in the public record that no press conference has filled.
When the most fortified office building in the United States is struck in daylight, and the public is asked to accept a liquid-metal explanation for why the first photographs do not show an airliner-shaped wound, the cameras are not a courtesy. They are the case.
What the FBI Vault added — and what it did not
In 2017 the FBI’s FOIA library, The Vault, posted a set of Pentagon investigation stills that had sat out of circulation: overheads, exteriors, debris fields, emergency-response frames, and interior shots of agents working the scene. We published a run of that material in [Revisiting 9/11], in March 2024, alongside emergency-response video most readers had never been shown.
The Vault release was useful. It was not a substitute for the missing seconds of video. It showed fire, water, debris, and men in raid jackets standing in rooms that had been offices that morning. It showed the punch-out. It did not show a 757 at rest. It did not show a 757 in the last hundred yards. It showed the aftermath of whatever arrived.
That is the honest description of the file.
The questions that are still not crank questions
Twenty-five years is long enough for slogans to harden into liturgy. It is also long enough for a free people to demand that a photograph be allowed to mean what it shows.
These are the questions the pictures still ask. They do not require a theory of the crime. They require an answer in evidence.
1. Why does the first public photograph of the west face show a compact fireball rather than a 125-foot wound?** If the answer is “the wall fell in later,” say so every time the afternoon photographs are used as if they were the impact.
2. How did a 757 cross that lawn at a few feet of altitude and leave the tree and flagpole in Image One standing in the same frame as the fire?** If the flight path ran elsewhere on the grass, publish the surveyed path against this exact photograph.
3. Why was the far-side opening in Ring C the size of a truck bay, and why was it attributed to landing gear rather than a fuselage?
4. Where is the complete, time-stamped camera record from every Pentagon exterior lens running at 9:37 a.m.? Not five frames. The take.
5. Why did it take until 2017 for a basic FBI photo set to reach The Vault, and why are so many of those frames still the kind of image that raises more questions than it closes?
We can honor the dead — 184 at the Pentagon, thousands in New York, forty in a Pennsylvania field — without agreeing that curiosity about a photograph is a moral failure. The people who died in Wedge 1 are not protected by a blurry gate camera. They are protected by a record that can stand in daylight.
What we published in 2024, and why we are publishing it again
On March 25 and 26, 2024, we put these frames on X and on this desk.
The first post is here: [x.com/georgenews/status/1772351283552510209]
The follow-up piece, with the video record from the Pentagon grounds, is here: https://www.georgenews.org/p/revisiting-911
We said then that recent events had put 9/11 back in front of people who had been told the file was closed. Two more years have gone by. The file is the same. The photographs are the same. The official sentences are the same.
What has changed is the anniversary. Twenty-five years is the point at which a government that was confident in its account would have released the rest of the tape, because there would be nothing left to protect except the feelings of people who were wrong.
They have not released the rest of the tape.
So we will keep putting the pictures on the table. The orange fireball. The standing tree. The standing pole. The small punch-out with the orange paint. The collapse that arrived later and did the work the first frame did not show.
Readers can hold those images next to a Boeing 757. They do not need a laboratory to do it. They need permission to look.
Never forget — including the part they asked you not to look at
We will say the names when the memorials say the names. We will not pretend that a slogan is the same thing as a closed investigation.
September 11, 2001, at the Pentagon, is a morning that still has a photograph problem. Twenty-five years is long enough to admit that.
Look at the fireball. Look at the tree. Look at the pole. Look at the hole they called an exit. Then ask the only question that has ever mattered in this file:
If that is a 757, why does the first picture still look like this?
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Regards,
George