Searching for answers
Local engineer to bring 9/11 questions to Toronto
By STEVE REILLY
STAFF WRITER

ENGLEWOOD — After the initial shock of the Sept. 11 destruction of the Twin Towers, after the dust settled on the official explanations of what caused the towers to fall, Jonathan Cole had questions and no real answers.
Cole is not given to wearing tin-foil hats or looking up into the dark sky over Roswell for aliens. He’s an engineer and believes in the fundamentals of science.
“For seven years, I bought the official explanations and didn’t question them,” said Cole, who is a civil engineer in Englewood. “But when I looked into the evidence, I said, ‘It’s not right, it’s not right.’”
Cole has been asked to share his research and the results of experiments at a conference in Toronto from Sept. 8 to Sept. 11 questioning the credibility of the official reports on the Sept. 11 attacks.
The International Hearings on Sept. 11, 2001 is sponsored by the International Center for 9/11 Studies and will be held at Toronto’s Ryerson University.
Since 2007, Cole reviewed videos of the Twin Towers and World Trade Center Building 7, which also collapsed but wasn’t struck by any aircraft.
What troubles Cole is that the collapse of the three buildings defies explanations given by he National Institute of Standards and Technology, known as NIST, and other official findings.
“(NIST experts) who did a 10,000-page report on this could only bring it to ‘collapse initiation.’ In other words, they studied all the details up to the point of collapse — but nothing for the next 12 or 15 seconds of the collapse,” Cole said.
Explanations violate or ignore Newton’s Law, thermodynamic and other basic laws of physics, according to Cole.
Cole was among the first 400 of more than 10,000 architects, professional engineers and others who signed a petition at www. ae911truth.org calling for Congress to enact a new and independent investigation of the destruction of the Twin Towers and Building 7.
A basic question for Cole is why the three Trade Center buildings, including building 7, which he calls the “Achilles Heel” of the standard explanations, fell exactly like buildings that had been prepared for controlled demolition.
He and others theorize that the evidence suggests some sort of explosives, including “nano-thermites,” a high-tech explosive, may have helped in an accelerated collapse of the buildings.
“If anyone is open minded to look at the evidence, they don’t have to be an architect and engineer; they will know what they see,” Cole said. “Buildings don’t fall straight down and they don’t fall in what’s called uniformed acceleration.
“The only way you can have a falling object always accelerating is having something removing the supports under it,” he said. “It’s the fundamental laws of physics.”
Cole conducted various experiments, some of which appear like “Mr. Wizard” experiments and can be found on YouTube.
People may disagree with him, but Cole said no one has yet refuted the scientific results of those experiments.
More information about the conference can be found at http://torontohearings.org.

Email: reilly@sun-herald.com  

SUN PHOTO BY STEVE REILLY, reilly@sun-herald.com