“9-11” - It Isn’t About Horse Thieves, You Know - Not even UFOs, Sasquatch, or the Loch Ness Monster.

I begin here anew my commentary concerning the “9-11” controversy with the reminder that it was I who within minutes of learning what had happened that day lost two good friends – they still call me “traitor” - with the statement, “The dog didn’t bark!” For years (literally) thereafter, my Website homepage featured that remark, together with a photo of the burning WTC towers and the passage from the Sherlock Holmes story “the Adventure of the Silver Blaze” explaining the reference. I believe, in short, that persons within the U.S. Government knew what Mohammed Atta and his cohort were planning, and that they let it happen.

Note that I did not simply say “government” – because that is illogically typical of the viewpoint and persons I discuss in this essay and others that preceded it.

Last during the most recent Democrat Party “debate,” Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich was asked if he had seen a UFO. Moderator Tim Russert said it was a serious question, even though the "serious" question was purportedly prompted by actress Shirley MacLaine's new book.

Shirley, we’ll all remember, lives in a special world. In her book – I have to take the media’s word on this; I don’t read books by Shirley MacLaine - she writes that Kucinich spotted a UFO over her home in Washington State and "found the encounter extremely moving.” Shirley also is supposed to say in the book that Kucinich "felt a connection'' in his heart and "heard direction'' in his mind.

And some wonder why I seem so paranoid – packing a pistol, training still at seventy-one in judo, and all. Folks, put a tent over this country, and you have the biggest booby-hatch, rubber room, and whorehouse in human history even remotely conceivable.

Well, I don’t read books by Shirley MacLaine, but I’ve seen probably seventy-five or a hundred Unidentified Flying Objects. Hell, I’ve seen even more unidentified NON-flying objects. I live in the real world, not the climate-controlled, pick-up-the-phone-and-CALL-somebody, “what’s-a-callus,” “I-get-my-exercise-in-a-gym-and my-meat-in-the-supermarket” one where “work” is eight hours at a computer, television and Hollywood provide reality, and life goes on in a virtual hot-house for pansies. I can – still, at seventy-one – do hard labor all day; “hump” a sixty pound backpack twenty five miles in a day, do three hundred sit-ups, one hundred pushups, and fifteen pull-ups. I’ve been in gunfights, more street fights than I care to remember, and battled the government’s goons both in court and in the streets for more than nine years. I’ve been, effectively, in college for fifty years, more actual class-room study than whole university departments; and, as “been everywhere, done everything” as I am, there’s a hell of a lot of things I can’t identify. And the Bible , Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the I Ching, the Dhammapada, and scriptures generally don’t really help much. The real world is like that.

But if you are typical of “Americans” (who, you may notice, are not even capable of truth where what they call their country is concerned) – meaning, of course, that your experience and first-hand knowledge is limited mostly – ninety-five percent – to your television and your home or workplace computer, you know better than I. You simply turn on the TV or “look it up” on Wikipedia. My god – that’s ridiculous! And you don’t even know it (sorry, but the shear asininity of it all is infuriating, sometimes).

Note, please, and by the way, that I did NOT say “UFO” up there. A UFO is an unidentified flying object that tens of thousands of UFO-ologists (it’s a new logos) somehow can identify. And they “identify” the object as a vehicle from outer space. All from not knowing what it is. Jesus!

Just so we’re sure we understand one another – and at the risk of redundancy - they can identify an unidentified flying object (and they call it that, too). It has little green men in it.

You, if you are typical, live in point of rather easily demonstrable fact in a world of stultifying and stupefying myth and lies, in the society and nation that is – again as a matter of statistically verifiable fact – the biggest, most determined liar in human history. Worse – again a point of statistical and study-demonstrated fact – you lie to yourself continually, even to the extent of anesthetizing yourself against day-to-day reality.

And then, when something like global warming, the war in Iraq, the World Trade Center – or an issue like that of UFO existence – arises, you proceed to foist your knowledge and “expertise” upon your fellows. It’s your right. Sure it is.

Now let me hear your expert dissertation on your responsibility.

I wonder if I should note here that “debate” (while we’re talking about peculiar identifications – how’s that for an example?) moderator Russert reminded Kucinich that polls indicate only fourteen percent of Americans say they have seen UFOs. I guess that was supposed to mean something about Kucinich’s mental state or competency – huh? Earlier in the day, you see, Congressman Kucinich had told the editors of the Philadelphia Inquirer that President Bush's comments about a World War III call Mr. Bush’s mental health into question.

Dear reader, if you need a zoologist to identify an eighty hundred pound gorilla in the room like that one - if you don’t by now recognize George W. Bush as a nut case, in other words - everything will be an unidentified object. That’s flying or otherwise, fact in general.

Mention of the UFOs and all the people who have formed a cult around their insistence that their government is harboring little green men reminded me immediately – and, I think, logically - about the subject of the World Trade Center, and all the people who now choose to believe their government blew up the buildings. Obeying my penchant for such things, I have over the years checked story after story of supposed UFO sightings. I hasten to state, though, that with the most recent spate of “sightings,” that of the lights over Mexico City, and that of a “sighting” by one of our states’ governors, I didn’t bother.

Oh, yeah – I’m about to pick a fight with another “conspiracy theory” group. Well, the truth is, I’m at odds with about fifty religions, at least that many more ideologies, ESP, and fairy tales; I don’t believe in Santa Claus, or the Easter Bunny. But it’s not my fault – I was brought up wrong. First, I spent a lot of my formative years away from people, their ideologies, religions, and indoctrinations in it all – with the terrible result that the only way I had to know the right thing to do was think. Damn – did that ever make people mad! In the sod hut by a river back in Iowa, where I put myself through high school, that’s just how it was. When I had a problem, I solved it myself – no “faith,” no “this is the way to do it” instruction, no “everybody knows” – none of that societal and cultural... -”wisdom.”

And, as I said, it kept me in continual trouble, even then. I was the “wait a minute” kid. “Wait a minute – that doesn’t make sense.” Not a good thing to say a lot when you’re a kid in a Catholic high school. “You have this terrible LUST for the truth,” a teacher nun once told me. “They’ll hang you someday.”

Yeah, they might yet. I can’t help it – the rules of logic, forensics, and knowledge (epistemology) have been settled by man and his science for a couple of hundred years – in the instance of logic a hell of a lot longer than that. We know how to determine when something is known and we know how to determine when it isn’t. We know what is consistent, decidable, and complete where any theory is concerned (“consistent” means that statements – “axioms” – within the theory are not contradictory; “complete” means that every true statement can be deduced from the axioms; and “decidable” means there is an algorithm – a formula – for deciding whether any (given) statement in the theory is a theorem or a contradiction; consistent and decidable theory is complete, but a consistent, complete theory is not necessarily decidable).

We know how to know when we have a fact, and we know when we don’t. Which means, for one thing, that objects can’t be both identified and unidentified. It also means not only that one cannot prove anything with the absence of information, it means the absence of information means nothing. Anyone who says that because it can’t be proved something doesn’t exist he knows something does exist is a liar or a fool, and one who says the absence of proof of something means something might be is not only a liar or a fool, he is a trivial liar or a fool.

And, there, I have summed up the UFO and WTC controversies. Trying to learn concerning UFO sightings was a learning process, all right – but not about what the “unidentified flying objects” were. What I learned is psychology, that of a mind desirous of believing something. I couldn’t, for instance (cynic that I had become), help noticing that UFO sightings occurred in places in direct numerical proportion to how much money could be made there from the “objects” and the cults having sprung up around them. I also came to know with certainty that each person I interviewed concerning a “sighting” would not have material proof, only the anecdotal proof provided him by his fellow. Persons outside the cult who saw something they couldn’t identify simply said they didn’t know what they’d seen; persons part of the true-believers not only saw the object, but knew it was extraterrestrial.

In fact, everything that proved it couldn’t be what the true-believer thought it was proved to him that it was. Each time one of these folks insisted that material proof existed, I learned – just like that having to do with 9-11 – that it had somehow vanished or become otherwise inaccessible. More, I could not only identify as to membership or non-membership in the UFO cult the person I was interviewing, I knew ninety percent or more of what he was going to say – i.e., just what the last cult member said.

And, as Costello says in the famous “who’s on first? - “FIRST BASE!”

No part of the World Trade Center fantasy and commercial hype so resembles that of the UFO craze than the aspect of the former having to do with Building Seven. Yesterday, when I mentioned the certainty that teachers of forensic and related science will use 9-11 as a paradigm of what not to do in making an investigation, I could not have found a better example than the WTC building which was not struck by an airplane.

The bloviating and babbling has reached such proportions that no single theory concerning it can be identified – that word, again – with certainty, but members of the new UFO conspiracy cult maintain that the collapse of this building could not have occurred unless it had already been prepared for demolition. The conspiracy theorists assume – they must, since none of them was ever in the building, and have no material evidence whatever - that damage sustained during the airliners’ attack was not sufficient to trigger building collapse.

If the reader recognizes in that the reasoning of the UFO folks, there are at least two of us.

Theorists insist that “fires were observed in Building Seven prior to its collapse, but they were isolated in small parts of the building, and were puny by comparison to other building fires.” No one offers any reason for any reasonable person to accept the theorists’ assessment of the fires. Time and again, they refer to photos and videos as proof; neither does anyone offer a written, recorded, or video-taped statement from a witness affirming any such thing. Neither is there any such evidence concerning any other facet of the matter.

On the other hand several reports on the record – none mentioned or shown on any of the theorists’ Websites, publications, or the rest – are like that of Firemen Richard Banaciski, Dan Marine, and others. “We were told to go to Greenwich and Vesey and see what’s going on,” Banaciski said. “So we go there and on the north and east side of Seven it didn’t look like there was any damage at all, but then you looked on the south side of Seven there had to be a hole 20 stories tall in the building, with fire on several floors.”

Another first responder adds that there were “tremendous, tremendous fires going on.”

As usual, in UFO-like controversies, we have evidence both in the form of material fact and witness testimony against presumption, supposition, and – of course, suspicion. There is much evidence that fire raged in the Building Seven, but conspiracy theorists don’t want – refuse – to see it. Missing evidence is to these people far more motive and powerful than existing evidence.

And the conspiracy theorists suspicions, we should note, are fed by commercial interests making stacks of money from their interest. Cui bono WTC? Not those with facts. In fact, even “not enough” facts have come to mean proof of what the suspicious have already concluded. The unidentified flying object, in other words, is once more identified because it is unidentified.

Records – and they are voluminous – say that emergency response workers at Ground Zero came to realize that extensive damage to the lower south section of WTC Seven would cause collapse as early as three P.M., something, moreover, the news media reported at the time. More, there is video footage – again, conspicuous by its absence on the 9-11 cultists’ Websites and other publications - of the Building Seven collapse. The videos show the building’s south wall giving way first, that being the side of the building having suffered most structural damage. The pile of debris resulting from the collapse measured at just under a hundred fifty yards across and twelve or thirteen stories high.

While I can’t imagine anyone using controlled demolitions to destroy the building would care, that would make a pretty sloppy job of such. (One cult Website, however – “Loose Change” - has it that the building fell in a “convenient pile”).

And then, there’s the “pull.” So far, I’ve come across that word fifty–seven times in the missives I’ve received from WTC cultists. For some of those who opine that Building Seven was blasted by federal conspirators, the most powerful “evidence” comes from WTC leaseholder Larry Silverstein’s alleged “confession” that he authorized the tower’s destruction. In a phone conversation with a fire department officer, Silverstein said, “ . . . maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it.”

The key word seems to be “pull.” More, it’s indicative of the mindset of the cultists. What might “pull” mean? I trust no one would expect to hook a truck to the place and “pull” it away, so it means something else – and the spectrum of possible meaning is a short one. Of course, we might ask Silverstein, but the cultists are far beyond willingness to accept anything that doesn’t support their allegations, making that a waste of time.

To conspiracy theorists like one Alex Jones at prisonplanet.com, “pull” is “industry jargon for taking a building down with explosives.” I’ve been associated with demolitions – from boyhood as an interest and hobby, and as a professional for twenty years – and never once heard the word “pull” mean set off charges. No dictionary of word origins or etymology lists it, either. Can anybody imagine “pull” a building meaning blow it up? Really?

What was it Silverstein said he meant, again? Get the firemen out of the building? That’s what “Pull your guys out to the building” meant, maybe? That sure sounds reasonable to me.

But, of course, I’m not biased – no axe to grind. In fact, I’d love to see this one hung on the government. But then, I have one hell of an addiction to the truth. It’s a narcotic I can’t imagine having to live without. In fact, a world where there’s no certain truth sounds like a damned nightmare to me – I keep imagining myself in the place of the government here on some issue. Sheesh!

Incidentally, the fire department commander did order his men from the building – there were a number working there at the time Silverstein made his “pull” remark - before it collapsed, and no lives were lost there. There, by damn – that proves they knew the building was coming down!

But as Mark Twain observed, a lie can go around the world before the truth gets out of bed. Lease-holder Silverstein is supposed to have destroyed WTC Building Seven in order to claim a huge insurance payoff.

Think about that. If that were so, Lucy, ‘splain why would the guy would tell the world of his plot on a PBS special? ‘Splain, too, what relationship would Silverstein have with the United States Government who supposedly destroyed the other WTC buildings. And if that were so, why would anyone – even our pratfalling, power-mad government - wait until all of the tenants were evacuated from? Why kill three thousand people in the towers, then allow during an entire afternoon the tenants of Building Seven to evacuate? Yeah, “’Splain dat one, Lucy!”

And, of course, we have my objection to the whole affair again, the wherewithal of preparing still another building for demolition – all that wiring, switches, cutting, hauling, and the like – without literally thousands having noticed. A building intended for controlled demolition is always abandoned for considerable time, having been partially gutted in order to place the high explosives necessary. With all of the WTC buildings occupied right up to 9/11, how did the government manage to wire three building for complete demolition without anyone noticing? Come on, people – THINK! Try to imagine sneaking all those wires, switches explosives and fifty things more into buildings while thousands . . .

Oh, never mind – we’ve been through that before!

I’ve said little here about the claims of 9-11 cultists concerning Flight 93, the airliner whose passengers fought the men high-jacking their plane. The principal argument of the 9-11 conspiracy theorists has to do with what they say is the “impossibility” of cell phone calls from the aircraft, and comes as close to anything rational in all their allegations. In fact, they are right – something easily provable (and, at this writing, several have done just that). More, some people who reported receiving cell phone calls from relatives and others on the high-jacked airliner were obviously lying.

Having said that, what has been proven? This, I remind you, is the Land of the Lie, the home of the most mendacious people in all of history. Asking an "American" to tell the truth is like asking a pig to fly - inverted. Have we proven that everyone on the ground lied? Have we proven that there were NO phone calls from the airliners? How about calls from Flight 93? Have we proven that the government fabricated the whole story of the phone calls? Have we proven, even if the government faked ALL the phone calls, that everything the 9-11 conspiracy theorists claim is true – that the U.S. Government both destroyed the World Trade Center by controlled demolition and faked the plane crashes?

No, we haven’t – not even remotely. Certainly not in the minds of any normally rational person, and the few successes I have had in attempting to dissuade WTC theorists have resulted from my having asked the questions above.

The “cell-phone” issue, incidentally, is probably the lynch-pin for all the rest of the smorgasbord of supercilious suspicion silliness that is the “9-11” controversy, something almost certainly due the fact that most people who have studied and engaged in actual scientific forensic investigation, or have done experiments and research into the behavioral aspects of the way untrained people observe and reason, have learned. That’s that the untrained investigator or observer will almost invariably build the wall of his conclusion and opinion upon a single discovery brick in the manner of a jury who, discovering a single inconsistency in a witness’ testimony, discards it all, thereby “throwing out the baby with the bathwater.”

In any Olympics including a “jump to conclusion” event, the amateur WTC, UFO, or Loch Ness Monster investigator will be the gold medalist every time. Meanwhile, that the government “dog didn’t bark” cannot be disputed; neither can it be disputed that persons within the government knew something – even what – was going to happen. That persons within the government knew doesn’t, however, mean that the GOVERNMENT knew – any more than the fact that I knew it was going to happen (said so in writing decades before) meant the country knew. Neither the U.S. Government – nor any government - works that way – nor does the country work that way. The only way for an individual to get his governments attention - well, let’s not get into that.

Finally, the question everyone would really like to answer is that having to do with whether the government or persons within in deliberately let 9-11 happen. Inasmuch as intent – being a figment of the mind - is never with certainty provable, we aren’t ever going to know that. Neither do we need to know that. What we do need to know is that a dog that doesn’t bark while on guard duty is useless. We need a new dog.

This isn’t about preventing horse thieves.