This article is updated from time to time to address further information discussed in the comments.

Directed Energy Weapon Theory

I was recently contacted by a fairly affable fellow who wanted to know my general thoughts on the world and events like 9/11. It’s common in the wider “truth movement” for people to have this desire to get everybody on the same page. They’ll give you a list of subjects (chemtrails, vaccines etc) and if you deviate from their dogma, then you might be a shill. In this case he wasn’t that extreme, but one sticking point was the 9/11 theory of Dr. Judy Wood.

Right out of the gate he told me “she is the only evidence based researcher that has all the data to fully back her facts.”

As much as the mainstream media, science and academia can be flawed, biased and agenda based to varying degrees, the idea that there is one overarching conspiracy to bury the truth about 9/11 simply does not ring true to me.

So if Judy Wood really did have a “smoking gun” backed with solid science that could be peer reviewed and demonstrable, I believe it would have gone further than it has. I’m not saying the US government would bring her to the White House and hold a press conference, but enough educated people with integrity would be supporting her that it would be clear she’s on to something.

Other than a computer science graduate from the UK (Andrew Johnson), former Minnesota governor turned conspiracy hunter Jesse Ventura in the states, and mostly just an internet community, nobody really takes her seriously. That doesn’t mean she’s wrong (science isn’t done by consensus and all that) but her work is literally a joke to almost any educated person that comes across it. Which is not what I’m claiming to be. But as a layman the conclusions of educated people have to count for something.

Of course at least one person who reads this is going to snipe at me and say “Judy Wood doesn’t have a theory, she just provides facts and evidence.” (oh look they did, check the comments).

Her followers spout this bizarre mantra as a way of isolating themselves and Wood from debate, but if saying the WTC buildings were brought down by a massive Directed Energy Weapon isn’t a theory, then some people have already fallen at the first hurdle.

Wood is not special, she has interpreted some data and explained it with a theory. She is not exempt or above regular terminology no matter what caveats she or her followers throw out there. Putting her on some untouchable pedestal is just cult-like behavior.

The Towers Went “Poof”

So what is Judy Wood’s premise, the starting point for her argument and the basis of which all of her energy weapon claims follow? Let’s take it from the presentation above, and from the title of her book: “Where Did The Towers Go?”

… “Once upon a time there were buildings, and then they went away.”

She says they “Turned in to dust in mid air,” which she describes as “dustification” a new word coined for her theory. She claims there was a “lack of debris” during the collapse and in the aftermath.

She points to images and says things like “notice how large pieces of steel are turning to dust in mid-air.”

Lack of First-hand Data

There are two giant flaws I see in these claims right away. First they are based on second hand imagery. These being photos and videos of the collapse and aftermath. She has a wide collection of this imagery, but by no means is it an all-encompassing account of the event. Showing a few photos in a presentation and making inferences about them is not conclusive. Just because X photo may appear to show a lack of debris, does not prove there was a lack of overall debris. She certainly wasn’t at ground zero documenting the debris, gathering samples and conducting research with it. She is operating only with the evidence that was easily available to her, from a position of ignorance.

There is also a question of interpretation. She shows images of the collapse and says things like “there’s no debris,” or “that it didn’t hit the ground,” or “the dust was opaque and blocked out all of the sun.”



Plenty of falling debris here

Nothing about these observations are scientific. There is some debris because we can see it falling in many photos and videos. We can also see it in the aftermath. A wide variety of sources have documented and reported on the clean-up effort and recovery of the steel. In fact The Telegraph notes how 250 tons of steel was allegedly stolen by the Mafia. 500 tons went back to where it was created in Pennsylvania according to the New York Post. It’s been used in the building of ships, memorials have been erected and some of it was even sold to China.

The people who were at “ground zero” for months filling trucks full of debris every day and getting sick from the air weren’t just pretending.

Now we could say a large portion of the photos and reporting about the debris and steel being removed are just lies. However since she herself has no first hand data or experience at ground zero, how do we determine where the lies begin and end?

It’s immediately clear that she has a terribly flawed premise, is cherry-picking at best, and at worst is just making things up – seeing things that aren’t there, and drawing conclusions where none can be made.

The Spire

Many of Wood’s followers will regurgitate a clip from one of her presentations of a steel “spire” allegedly turning to dust before our eyes. See below:

I personally don’t think a poor quality clip of one portion of steel is proof that the whole tower went poof, yet several people have already discovered the spire falling from a different angle anyway. Far from turning to dust, it actually just collapses. It’s the dusty and smoky atmosphere that created the illusion. Jump to 58 seconds below, you can see the spire the whole time it drops. You also have to question the mechanism of action in this theory. If the whole building had just been turned to dust, why is this small bit of steel so special? Why is its “dustification” delayed?

Furthermore this notion of “dustification” completely negates the fact that in the collapse of a giant concrete skyscraper, said concrete is going to create a heck of a lot of dust as each floor is destroyed. There’s nothing particularly odd about that.

Were the towers turned wholly to dust? Objectively NO, so how much dust was there? And at what point does the dust to debris ratio invalidate collapse? Wood doesn’t attempt to answer such questions. She just wants you to look at a couple of images and have an emotional response.

The Collapses and Seismic Data

Wood uses seismic data recorded by Columbia University during the collapses and compares it to seismic data recorded during the demolition of the Seattle Kingdome in 2000, to claim that the Twin Towers did not have the seismic impact that they should have done. Therefore … energy weapons.

The Seattle Kingdome was demolished on March 26, 2000. Built of reinforced concrete, it had a 720-foot outer diameter, a footprint of 407,000 square feet, stood 250 feet tall and weighed an estimated 130,000 tons. The implosion “created the equivalent of a magnitude 2.3 earthquake, with no vibration damage to adjacent structures. Each twin tower, by contrast, had 43,000 square feet, just over a tenth of the Kingdome footprint, and weighed an estimated 500,000 tons, or nearly 4x the Kingdome. Both the footprint and the weight of the twin towers were an order of magnitude different from the Kingdome, yet the Lamont-Dougherty station at Columbia University only reported a peak of 2.3 Richter scale reading for WTC 1 and 2.1 for WTC 2, about the same as the Kingdome … The apparent fact that the Richter reading peaked at 2.3 and the disturbance lasted only 8 seconds indicates an extraordinary high-energy weapon was used top-down to preserve the bathtub and surrounding structures.

Ignoring the fact that the Richter scale is for measuring earthquakes not collapsing buildings and assuming that Columbia University and the measuring of the Kingdome demolition adhered to the same rules (which they probably didn’t), Wood actually spells out the fundamental flaw in her own argument without realizing. The Twin Towers were two high-rise skyscrapers, not a sports stadium. The towers are said to have collapsed from the top down, not from the supports being simultaneously taken out by demolition.

When a building collapses from the top down everything underneath provides a level of resistance. The Kingdome had its proverbial legs (resistance) pulled from under it. A crude analogy would be to compare the impact of going from a standing position to sitting on the floor (the towers), to literally having your legs swept and landing with a thud (the Kingdome). The reason the lighter Kingdome had such an impact is because it had less resistance. They are just not the same thing in terms of structure or collapse. Therefore her comparison has little value – apples and oranges.

Furthermore Wood’s claim that the seismic readings of the towers lasted only 8 and 10 seconds is incorrect. The 8 and 10 seconds is the peak of the activity, but there is actually significant seismic activity for at least 30 seconds overall.

South Tower



North Tower



These readings are fairly easy to interpret. A few seconds in and the towers begin to collapse from the top, they build to a crescendo when the bulk of the debris hits the floor, and then the reading fizzles out as the ground settles.

Although there is no 100% accurate way of knowing how long it took for the buildings to collapse, the seismic data and the numerous videos of the collapses put each at around 14-15 seconds.

Hutchison Effect

Judy Wood also makes numerous observations (which again are open to interpretation) that vehicles and debris photographed from ground zero display the “Hutchison Effect.”

This is a broad term used to describe a number of alleged phenomena, though she specifically cites things like “toasted” cars and metal, bent beams, “jellification” of metal (another made up word), rust, upside down cars, holes in metal and glass and other alleged anomalies.

Whether these are truly anomalies or not are debatable, and I would suggest the energy and heat created by any kind of collapse this big could accomplish all of them. There’s nothing particularly striking about burned, bent and melted objects.

The key point however is that her explanation that these are examples of the “Hutchison Effect” is extremely dubious, not least because no such “effect” is recognised by the scientific community and John Hutchison’s experiments have not been replicated.

While attempting to recreate the experiments of engineer Nikola Tesla in the late 1970s, Hutchison claims to have discovered many new phenomena, primarily manifesting in metals. The effects of his experiments supposedly included metal objects floating to the ceiling, shattering, becoming warm, fusing with other objects and other interesting manifestations. These disparate manifestations are all lumped together under the name “Hutchison Effect.” Explanations of the effect rely heavily on technobabble, especially referencing zero point energy and the Casimir effect. No attempt to replicate Hutchison’s experiments by a third party has so far been successful. Many agencies, including NASA, have attempted to recreate Hutchison’s Effect. After extensive testing, Marc Millis, NASA’s head of finding new propulsion methods for spacecraft, wrote: “This ‘Hutchison Effect’ has been claimed for years, without any independent verification — ever. In fact, its originator can’t even replicate it on demand. This has been investigated more than once, been part of documentaries on The Discovery Channel, but still never seems to pass critical muster. This is in the category of folklore. In general, the “American Antigravity” web site caters to such folklore and its enthusiasts.” — Marc G. Millis – http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/John_Hutchison

Wood might have a point if she just said “some of this debris looks odd, we need to explore this”, but she needlessly links it to a discredited concept (Hutchison Effect) while simultaneously trying to convince us that a humongous weapon was able to pinpoint the buildings and turn them to dust.

It’s not even a case of debunking Hutchison, he’s provided nothing to even debunk. And despite being an ardent proponent, Wood herself has not conducted any experiments to justify he support of Hutchison.

It’s one of the key tenets of the scientific method. If you’re going to allege that a phenomenon exists and claim to know how it occurs, then you better be prepared to demonstrate it. She has not.

Toasted Cars

One of Wood’s favourite bits of “evidence” from this realm are photos of “toasted cars,” which she says have odd patterns of burning among other anomalies:

These vehicles had peculiar patterns of damage and some were as far away as FDR Drive (about 7 blocks from the WTC, along the East River). Vehicles had missing door handles for example, windows blown out, window frames deformed, melted engine blocks, steel-belted tires with only the steel belts left, and vehicle front ends destroyed with little or no effect on the back end of the vehicles. What could have caused such extraordinary damage? Portions of cars burned while paper nearby did not. – http://drjudywood.com/articles/DEW/StarWarsBeam5.html

Again we have the problem of Wood hypothesizing from photos. Without at least some physical evidence it’s hard to make any firm conclusion. But are the patterns of burning really that odd? Or do they simply reflect different types of materials reacting to the heat and elements from the dust clouds in different ways? Vehicles aren’t made of a single material.

Her whole theory is predicated on “directed” energy, but wouldn’t this suggest something more erratic?

She also seems to ignore the possibility of debris hitting the vehicles and mangling them in different ways.

A simple Google of “burnt out car” will provide all sorts of images that replicate the so called anomalies on her page. Look, everything on this car was destroyed but that front panel is perfectly fine. Did an energy weapon do this?

Or this?

Furthermore the claim that vehicles were found damaged and “toasted” some 7 blocks away and the spooky inference that something “dragged” them there, ignores testimony that some vehicles were simply moved from the WTC vicinity for logistics. Something did drag them there, lorries and tow trucks!

Take for example police vehicle 2723 which Wood shows at FDR drive, but was originally outside the Millennium Hilton Hotel.

Hurricane Erin

Wood’s right hand man Andrew Johnson – whose free ebook (which he’ll implore you to read) is mostly just a mind-numbing “he said she said” account of petty 9/11 truth infighting – brought to my attention “the peculiar coincidental movements of Hurricane Erin.”

Only there’s nothing peculiar about the movements of a hurricane that posed no threat during NYC’s Hurricane season and not one atmospheric scientist has said otherwise.

In a press release from Wood’s site she makes a pretty ridiculous comparison to Hurricane Katrina:

The development of Erin is considered, and a comparison made to Hurricane Katrina, for the reason that Katrina and Erin were of comparable size (Erin was bigger, by most measures). It is noted that the media reported very little about the potential risk Erin posed around the time of 9/11, compared to what was reported regarding Katrina – even before Katrina made landfall.

Erin was not bigger than Katrina at all. Katrina was the seventh most intense Atlantic hurricane ever recorded, Erin was not even the biggest of its season. Katrina had peak winds of 175mph, while Erin peaked at 120mph. Most importantly reporting was lacklustre about Erin because its direction posed no threat, and on 9/11 the news media were preoccupied with the attacks rather than a mundane hurricane off the coast that was doing nothing more than making the waters choppy.

Here’s Erin’s trajectory:

Here’s 2001’s entire hurricane season:

Erin was not particularly special.

Though “no firm conclusions are drawn” from Wood’s page about Erin, she names drops everything from weather modification and HAARP, to Tesla, to chemtrails. Her point is not particularly clear.

The Smoking Gun

The true “smoking gun” of Wood’s theory is the one that renders it completely implausible. The fact that there is zero evidence that a Directed Energy Weapon on the scale required to do this much damage even exists.

Firstly you have to ask where the hell was this weapon when the attacks were carried out? It’s going to be big right, so how did nobody in the whole of New York City see it? And if it was in the sky or space how did it get there and how did nobody notice?

Now I’m not suggesting DEWs don’t exist at all, they do, but they are not capable of producing mass destruction. One application which was being experimented with during the Irish troubles and again in more recent years is to disable vehicles and electronic devices. As noted by The Telegraph:

An energy beam that can be fired to disable vehicles and electronic devices has been developed by Nato scientists. The device uses an intense pulse of electromagnetic energy that can be directed at a moving vehicle to interfere with the electronics on board … The device has also been tested to disable electronic devices such as mobile phones that may be used to remotely trigger a bomb … The device has been compared to the satellite weapon that features in the James Bond movie Golden Eye. In this an electromagnetic beam is fired from a satellite in orbit to disable electronic equipment … While the latest device cannot work on the same scale, it has the potential to disable almost any electronic device.

Other applications – be it Electromagnetic, Particle Beam, Microwave or Sonic – have not reached anywhere near the scale of what Wood is implying.

In 2007 Dr. Greg Jenkins interviewed Dr. Wood about her theory, and asked her if she “could give an overview of the proposed types of weapons that could be used.”

Wood’s reply was extremely revealing. “Errrm we haven’t really got in to listing them yet … just energy weapons,” she shrugged.

When prompted to explain what form these weapons would take, Wood responded: “I don’t think we even need to define it.”

On her website she makes vague references to the “Star Wars” space defense program, microwave ovens, and some advances in warfare, but of course “Most of this technology is classified information,” and therefore is as good as hearsay.

“JUST ENERGY WEAPONS”

There you have it folks, just energy weapons brought down the towers. There’s no need to define what kind of weapons. There’s no need to prove that these weapons exist, the mechanism by which they work, or replicate their effects in any form in a lab.

Wood and a chap named Morgan Reynolds even had the gall to file a lawsuit based on the theory, which was easily dismissed. When they accused the defendants of supplying false claims, statements etc (i.e. that they didn’t say it was mythical energy weapons) she “failed to specify the time, place, speaker, and the content of the alleged misrepresentation,” showing she either had very poor legal advice or ignored that advice. I cannot agree more with the dismissal summary:

Their lawsuits simply rely upon their own theoretical examination of information already within the public domain. Plaintiffs’ attempted analysis of that information constitutes pure speculation that the NIST participants were involved in a cover-up to conceal the true cause for the towers’ collapse. They merely disagree with NIST’s investigative findings, and specifically wish to reject the basic factual premise … Plaintiffs, understandably, offer nothing more than conjecture and supposition to support their claim that the towers were struck by high powered energy beams. Their personal hypothesis about what should be concluded from publicly disclosed information does not qualify either of them as an original source of information in order to sustain an individual FCA claim on behalf of the Government.

I Don’t Know What Happened

There’s nothing remotely convincing about Judy Wood’s theory – it’s based on a flawed premise that the towers “went away”, with poorly interpreted data, which she claims was caused by a weapon she cannot cite, nor explain or replicate on a smaller scale.

We’re now in the 13th year since the 9/11 attacks happened, and in many ways I am as confused now as I was as an 11 year old kid. I now know enough about history and the geopolitics of the time to realise there are some major problems with the story adhered to by the US government, but I’m also objective enough to recognise that the so called 9/11 truth movement and associated terms like “9/11 was an inside job” are too simplistic and have not had a great deal of success in either “waking people up” or realising a “reinvestigation.”

Over the years I’ve skirted around the different 9/11 truth camps online, mostly the Architects and Engineers (AE) crowd whose theories at least seem the most plausible – that secondary thermetic explosives aided the collapse of the the Twin Towers and Building 7, because the impacts themselves would unlikely have brought the buildings down alone (especially in the way that they did come down), though their evidence for this could possibly just be paint. I’ve also observed other theories that allege the planes were holograms and other such nonsense.

Now, after years of reading books, watching documentaries, producing my own content and immersing myself in alternative media, I am perfectly content with telling the world that I don’t know what happened on 9/11, and I think claiming you do is an extremely arrogant and careless position to take.

Of course there’s some clear shenanigans – what with all the prior warnings, the CIA visa program in Saudi Arabia that got the hijackers in to the country, the pre-planned war with Afghanistan and the Bin Laden media circus, the CIA’s connection to Al Qaeda in the years prior, the refusal to follow the Saudi link, the refusal to follow the Israeli link (trucks, Dancing Israelis et al) … there’s an endless list of real verifiable anomalies.

However it is my position that we simply are not privy to enough information to wrap the case up in a bow and move on. The fact that people are still obsessed with the event is a testament to this.

I also think the lack of a true smoking gun is why so many people focus on theories about the building collapses, because if you can prove that they came down by some other mechanism than just the plane impacts, then you’ve proven there’s a wider conspiracy.

The trouble is from “Architects & Engineers” to empty buildings and holograms, to Energy Weapons, to simply letting it happen on purpose – nothing has been proven beyond reasonable doubt or plausible deniability.

“We didn’t see it coming,” “agencies weren’t sharing information,” “we didn’t interpret the information we did have.”

Plausible deniability, a lack of data, and confusion is what make black ops so successful.