Open Letter to the Denver Post

To Mr. Dan Haley October 8, 2009
Denver Post Editorial Page Editor

Since we have not heard back from you after sending this letter, and after several phone calls to which you have not responded, we have chosen to publish our letter as an open letter.

You are the person who chooses which editorials are printed in the Denver Post, thus we write with the following observation, complaint, and request for a face-to-face discussion:

The Denver Post gave a fair shake to Steve Jones' recent talk. Instead of calling him a "conspiracy theorist", the Post called him a "9/11 Theorist". The Post also covered both sides of the controlled demolition question.

"The standing ovation has finally died down, and Steven E. Jones, a soft-spoken physics professor, finds himself pinned against the stage by some of the enthusiastic fans who packed a University of Denver auditorium over the weekend to see him.

A man with a "Got truth?" T-shirt offers Jones a careful explanation for why the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center were operated by remote control. Another quizzes him about the size of the footprint of the Pentagon crash - too small, he says, for the Boeing 757 that "officially" smashed into it on Sept. 11, 2001.

"Can I just shake your hand?" a woman in a baggy red sweater asks Jones. "You're doing such important work."

If anything, Jones appears embarrassed by all the attention. Quiet and self-effacing, he's an unlikely hero for 9/11 conspiracy theorists of every stripe, but that's exactly what he's become.

A physicist whose background includes work on nuclear fusion, Jones was put on leave by Brigham Young University in September after publishing a paper saying that the twin towers couldn't have collapsed solely as a result of the planes that rammed the upper floors on Sept. 11. The paper theorizes that explosives planted inside the building must have been involved and that the buildings' collapse was essentially a controlled demolition.