In March 2002, five frames from a Pentagon surveillance camera (which we shall call Camera 1) were released. It showed a smoke trail but no apparent plane. Any plane would have had to be hidden behind a foreground obstruction, and it seemed intuitively implausible to many people that a 757 would fit behind that obstruction. This series of frames did much to launch theories of the Pentagon attack asserting no plane, or a small plane rather than a 757, or a missile. More frames from the same camera and a second series of frames from a nearby camera (which we shall call Camera 2) were released in 2006, but they did not get the attention they deserved. The Pentagon had become a contentious issue in the 9/11 Truth Movement by then and many of us were focusing our attention on the World Trade Center and seeing the Pentagon as a diversion.

Recently, while searching online for Pentagon images for his new film, Ken Jenkins discovered images of the plane in a frame from a higher quality version of the Camera 2 video. The plane had not previously been noticed by any of us. Ken did further testing to confirm the legitimacy of what was seen in that frame, and experimented with toggling the frames to simulate a blink comparator. (Blinking is a technique used in astronomy to emphasize subtle changes in pairs of astronomical photographs such as studying variable stars, identifying novas, and detecting the motion of asteroids.) I came on board with his project at that point and we created a number of blinking animated gif images. Given the clarity of what we were now seeing it was hard to understand why most people (ourselves included) had initially failed to see the plane. The reasons must be partly because of low contrast between the plane and the background, partly because of overestimation of the expected size of the plane, partly because of the degraded resolution of many of the copies of the video that have circulated on the Internet, and partly our erroneous early beliefs that the surveillance videos showed no plane.

911datasets.org has original files provided by the FBI through a FOIPA request that includes the surveillance videos from these two cameras in the native CCTV format. Working from the original files Nathan Flach was able to convert the video to a more user-friendly format and extract clear, good quality PNG images of the individual frames. Nate's videos and PNG images can be downloaded here: 911encyclopedia.com.

The trouble with GIF images is they have limited color resolution, which is undesirable given the low contrast of the plane and its background. So I created a set of JavaScript roll-over images to achieve the same effect with the lossless PNG images. When the mouse cursor hovers over the image, one image is shown. When the cursor is moved away, the other image is shown. The viewer can thus manually blink the images at any desired rate.

I have posted three zoomed-in blinked image pairs: the plane as seen from Camera 1, the plane as seen from Camera 2, and the images that show the plane alternating from Camera 2 to Camera 1, showing the motion of the plane over a fraction of a second. I also have blinked pairs of the un-zoomed frames showing the much smaller plane images in context.

It is hoped that this direct visual evidence for the presence of a large plane at the Pentagon will help resolve the long-standing dispute in the 9/11 Truth Movement on this question.

The blinked images can be seen here: http://911speakout.org/?page_id=821.