Mangoose
Muse
- Joined
- Apr 19, 2007
- Messages
- 921
When discussing the witnesses proclaimed by CIT as proving a "NOC" flight path, most people mention the unreliability of memory and the way leading questions could bias memory. Even CIT acknowledges that memory can be inaccurate in the details, as they recently said:
Of course, they don't really expect memory to be fallible in the case of normal, innocent witnesses. If a "south side" witness puts the plane on the "official" flight path, he or she is automatically suspect for contradicting what the NOC witnesses claim -- they must be lying (this is the logic used by CIT to discredit Madelyn Zackem and Lloyd England, and Stephen McGraw is regarded as discredited for admittedly being unsure if he was recalling correctly one particular detail and for not noticing light poles on his side of the road). Moreover, CIT exempts details like the witness' exact location and the location of the plane as the kind of "details" that witnesses could be wrong or inaccurate about. In this case, CIT admits no possibility of error by witnesses who placed the plane on the north side of the Citgo.
Although the fallible and error-prone nature of human memory is no doubt a major factor in the general wide variability in terms of witness recollection (although there is no variability in terms of whether the plane hit the building or rather flew over it, as CIT maintains against 100% of their witness testimony), it is not the only factor. What I would like to talk about in this thread is something a little different: the possibility that the original perception itself may be distorted in the utterly shocking spectacle of seeing an airplane hurtle nearby at almost tree-top level. It follows that if perception of that sudden unexpected event was distorted, then memory of that perception will similarly be distorted. This is directly counter to CIT's claim in The PentaCon that witnesses at the Citgo or nearby should be expected to be reliable because of "the extreme magnitude of the event being something that is virtually impossible to forget" (source). It is precisely the "extreme magnitude" of the event that can cause a witness to have an altered perception of a traumatic event.
The trauma that people experienced was widely reported at the time. The Florida Times-Union of 9/15/2001 for instance mentions what one witness was going through in the days after the attack:
Similarly, the Washington Post (10/14/2001) reported that La Verne Le Grand, 60, who was in a car on the Columbia Pike when she saw the plane crash into the Pentagon, "has been admitted twice to Washington Hospital Center for treatment of severe anxiety." For other people, what they saw amounted to disbelief and horror. James Robbins, who described watching the plane fly into the building, said: "At the time I did not immediately comprehend what I was witnessing." Dan Creed, who was in a car near the Navy Annex, said: "I can still see the plane. I can still see it right now. It's just the most frightening thing in the world, going full speed, going full throttle, its wheels up." Mary Ann Owens, stuck in traffic on Washington Boulevard, described what went through her mind when she saw the approaching plane: "The thought that I was about to die was immediate and certain. This plane was going to hit me along with all the other commuters trapped on Washington Boulevard." Aydan Kizildrgli on the highway related that "everybody was in shock. I turned around to the car behind me and yelled 'Did you see that?' Nobody could believe it" (USA Today, 9/11/01). James Mosley who was outside the Navy Annex watched "this big silver plane run into the side of the Pentagon...It almost knocked me off. I couldn't believe it." Madelyn Zackem, who saw the plane practically fly over her, also expressed disbelief and horror: "It was huge! It was silver. It was low-- unbelievable! I could see the cockpit. I fell to the ground, I was crying and scared." Ian Wyatt, almost close witness of the plane, said: "I was so scared I thought it was coming after me and just ducked for cover ... I could hear cars squealing all around and people were just stunned." Scott Perry at the Navy Annex said that "there was about five seconds of disbelief and the next thing I heard was, down the hallway, a friend of mine screaming." Similar statements from witnesses could easily be multiplied.
The effects of trauma on perception are well-known and there are many articles and studies on this subject. One article by Don Beere, professor of psychology at Central Michigan University, lists various dissociative symptoms of trauma victims. Derealization is one common symptom and the unprecedented spectacle of seeing a commercial airliner flying very low to the ground to then disappear into the Pentagon would certainly impart to many viewers a sense of unreality -- a "I can't believe what I'm seeing" feeling widely reported by witnesses. Skarlet, who posted a blog at the time, related her experience of unreality: "Buildings don't eat planes. That plane, it just vanished." So when she called her boss, she told him that she thought a helicopter must have hit the building: "I knew that wasn't true, but I heard myself say it. I heard myself believe it, if only for a minute." Another common symptom is detemporalization -- the sense of time stopping or slowing down under the influence of adrenaline. This similarly can be found attested in Pentagon witness accounts. Penny Elgas reported: "In that split second, my brain flooded with adrenaline and I watched everything play out in ultra slow motion, I saw the plane coming in slow motion toward my car and then it banked in the slightest turn in front of me, toward the heliport." The account of Steve Storti is summarized in an article for the Providence Journal (9/12/2002) along similar lines: "Time seemed to slip into slow motion as he watched the plane cross over Route 395, tip its left wing as it passed the Navy annex, veer sharply and then slice into the Pentagon." I believe this distortion in time perception may also account for all those accounts that estimated a much slower speed for the plane than is known from the flight data recorder.
Another very common distortion in perception is an acute narrowing of the senses, i.e. tunnel vision. Penny Elgas gives a good description of what this was like for her: "At the second that I saw the plane, my visual senses took over completely and I did not hear or feel anything -- not the roar of the plane, or wind force, or impact sounds". This would explain why some witnesses described the plane as quiet or silent. But in such a situation the visual field narrows down so much that the threatening object takes all the person's attention (as opposed to background objects which in that moment may not be noticed at all). Depth perception becomes flattened and distance becomes much harder to estimate, and threatening objects commonly become perceived as much closer to the person than they really are. One article on post-traumatic stress experienced by combat soldiers describes this situation well:
The paper by Don Beere also mentions the tendency to see objects closer than they really are as a symptom of trauma-induced dissociation. What is also interesting about this phenomenon is that it can also impact long-term memory, such that revisualizations of the event may misplace the position of the threatening objects and even result in misplaced positions of similar objects in future events. In the case of car accident victims, the book Coping with Catastrophe by Peter E. Hodgkinson and Michael Stewart notes:
This is the kind of phenomena that made me speculate the other week about why some witnesses seemed to recall a NOC location of the plane. I noticed something curious about CIT's latest video: most of the "new witnesses" were themselves "north of the Citgo" at the time of the attack. Could their NOC placement of the plane be derivative of their own NOC location? I suspected that there could have been a connection: If the threatening object was perceived closer to themselves than it really was, then it may well have been perceived as NOC. A collorary to this is that many witnesses located SOC would similarly misplace the plane and put it further south of the "official path" and I think this can be observed from the witnesses in Pentagon City and I-395 who thought the plane was flying practically alongside I-395 (e.g. Dawn Vignola's sketch of the flight path, Dave Winslow's statement that it looked like the rear of the airplane was riding I-395, Michael Tinyk's perception that the plane flew right up I-395 to the Pentagon, Steve Patterson's comment that he thought the plane was going to land on I-395, Mitch Mitchell's placement of the plane as about 100 feet in front of him on I-395, and possibly David Ensor's wife Barbara who said that the plane was "coming down towards the side of the -- of 395. And when it came down, it just missed 395").
Anyway, I thought I'd write this up as it is a hypothesis I have suspected for some time with respect to the NOC witnesses who were themselves NOC.
CIT said:
Of course, they don't really expect memory to be fallible in the case of normal, innocent witnesses. If a "south side" witness puts the plane on the "official" flight path, he or she is automatically suspect for contradicting what the NOC witnesses claim -- they must be lying (this is the logic used by CIT to discredit Madelyn Zackem and Lloyd England, and Stephen McGraw is regarded as discredited for admittedly being unsure if he was recalling correctly one particular detail and for not noticing light poles on his side of the road). Moreover, CIT exempts details like the witness' exact location and the location of the plane as the kind of "details" that witnesses could be wrong or inaccurate about. In this case, CIT admits no possibility of error by witnesses who placed the plane on the north side of the Citgo.
Although the fallible and error-prone nature of human memory is no doubt a major factor in the general wide variability in terms of witness recollection (although there is no variability in terms of whether the plane hit the building or rather flew over it, as CIT maintains against 100% of their witness testimony), it is not the only factor. What I would like to talk about in this thread is something a little different: the possibility that the original perception itself may be distorted in the utterly shocking spectacle of seeing an airplane hurtle nearby at almost tree-top level. It follows that if perception of that sudden unexpected event was distorted, then memory of that perception will similarly be distorted. This is directly counter to CIT's claim in The PentaCon that witnesses at the Citgo or nearby should be expected to be reliable because of "the extreme magnitude of the event being something that is virtually impossible to forget" (source). It is precisely the "extreme magnitude" of the event that can cause a witness to have an altered perception of a traumatic event.
The trauma that people experienced was widely reported at the time. The Florida Times-Union of 9/15/2001 for instance mentions what one witness was going through in the days after the attack:
Florida Times-Union said:
Similarly, the Washington Post (10/14/2001) reported that La Verne Le Grand, 60, who was in a car on the Columbia Pike when she saw the plane crash into the Pentagon, "has been admitted twice to Washington Hospital Center for treatment of severe anxiety." For other people, what they saw amounted to disbelief and horror. James Robbins, who described watching the plane fly into the building, said: "At the time I did not immediately comprehend what I was witnessing." Dan Creed, who was in a car near the Navy Annex, said: "I can still see the plane. I can still see it right now. It's just the most frightening thing in the world, going full speed, going full throttle, its wheels up." Mary Ann Owens, stuck in traffic on Washington Boulevard, described what went through her mind when she saw the approaching plane: "The thought that I was about to die was immediate and certain. This plane was going to hit me along with all the other commuters trapped on Washington Boulevard." Aydan Kizildrgli on the highway related that "everybody was in shock. I turned around to the car behind me and yelled 'Did you see that?' Nobody could believe it" (USA Today, 9/11/01). James Mosley who was outside the Navy Annex watched "this big silver plane run into the side of the Pentagon...It almost knocked me off. I couldn't believe it." Madelyn Zackem, who saw the plane practically fly over her, also expressed disbelief and horror: "It was huge! It was silver. It was low-- unbelievable! I could see the cockpit. I fell to the ground, I was crying and scared." Ian Wyatt, almost close witness of the plane, said: "I was so scared I thought it was coming after me and just ducked for cover ... I could hear cars squealing all around and people were just stunned." Scott Perry at the Navy Annex said that "there was about five seconds of disbelief and the next thing I heard was, down the hallway, a friend of mine screaming." Similar statements from witnesses could easily be multiplied.
The effects of trauma on perception are well-known and there are many articles and studies on this subject. One article by Don Beere, professor of psychology at Central Michigan University, lists various dissociative symptoms of trauma victims. Derealization is one common symptom and the unprecedented spectacle of seeing a commercial airliner flying very low to the ground to then disappear into the Pentagon would certainly impart to many viewers a sense of unreality -- a "I can't believe what I'm seeing" feeling widely reported by witnesses. Skarlet, who posted a blog at the time, related her experience of unreality: "Buildings don't eat planes. That plane, it just vanished." So when she called her boss, she told him that she thought a helicopter must have hit the building: "I knew that wasn't true, but I heard myself say it. I heard myself believe it, if only for a minute." Another common symptom is detemporalization -- the sense of time stopping or slowing down under the influence of adrenaline. This similarly can be found attested in Pentagon witness accounts. Penny Elgas reported: "In that split second, my brain flooded with adrenaline and I watched everything play out in ultra slow motion, I saw the plane coming in slow motion toward my car and then it banked in the slightest turn in front of me, toward the heliport." The account of Steve Storti is summarized in an article for the Providence Journal (9/12/2002) along similar lines: "Time seemed to slip into slow motion as he watched the plane cross over Route 395, tip its left wing as it passed the Navy annex, veer sharply and then slice into the Pentagon." I believe this distortion in time perception may also account for all those accounts that estimated a much slower speed for the plane than is known from the flight data recorder.
Another very common distortion in perception is an acute narrowing of the senses, i.e. tunnel vision. Penny Elgas gives a good description of what this was like for her: "At the second that I saw the plane, my visual senses took over completely and I did not hear or feel anything -- not the roar of the plane, or wind force, or impact sounds". This would explain why some witnesses described the plane as quiet or silent. But in such a situation the visual field narrows down so much that the threatening object takes all the person's attention (as opposed to background objects which in that moment may not be noticed at all). Depth perception becomes flattened and distance becomes much harder to estimate, and threatening objects commonly become perceived as much closer to the person than they really are. One article on post-traumatic stress experienced by combat soldiers describes this situation well:
Bruce Siddle said:
The paper by Don Beere also mentions the tendency to see objects closer than they really are as a symptom of trauma-induced dissociation. What is also interesting about this phenomenon is that it can also impact long-term memory, such that revisualizations of the event may misplace the position of the threatening objects and even result in misplaced positions of similar objects in future events. In the case of car accident victims, the book Coping with Catastrophe by Peter E. Hodgkinson and Michael Stewart notes:
Peter E. Hodgkinson & Michael Stewart said:
This is the kind of phenomena that made me speculate the other week about why some witnesses seemed to recall a NOC location of the plane. I noticed something curious about CIT's latest video: most of the "new witnesses" were themselves "north of the Citgo" at the time of the attack. Could their NOC placement of the plane be derivative of their own NOC location? I suspected that there could have been a connection: If the threatening object was perceived closer to themselves than it really was, then it may well have been perceived as NOC. A collorary to this is that many witnesses located SOC would similarly misplace the plane and put it further south of the "official path" and I think this can be observed from the witnesses in Pentagon City and I-395 who thought the plane was flying practically alongside I-395 (e.g. Dawn Vignola's sketch of the flight path, Dave Winslow's statement that it looked like the rear of the airplane was riding I-395, Michael Tinyk's perception that the plane flew right up I-395 to the Pentagon, Steve Patterson's comment that he thought the plane was going to land on I-395, Mitch Mitchell's placement of the plane as about 100 feet in front of him on I-395, and possibly David Ensor's wife Barbara who said that the plane was "coming down towards the side of the -- of 395. And when it came down, it just missed 395").
Anyway, I thought I'd write this up as it is a hypothesis I have suspected for some time with respect to the NOC witnesses who were themselves NOC.
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