Blue_Windows
Active member
Hey! My name is David. But you can call me by Blue_Windows if you like. Thought it sounded nice.
I'm a new user who joined LetsRollForums just today. But I've been following the work of forum member LoopDLoop for a long time, since around 2015 I believe.
I was first introduced to LoopDLoop's work through a guest on the Richie Allen show. I forget their name, but the title of the episode was "Crew of Flight 11 knew they were in a hijack drill on 9/11". Something to that effect.
I was skeptical of this idea at first. The idea that callers were partaking in a hijack drill was slightly outside of my comfort zone, although it made more sense to me than David Ray Griffin's voice morphing theory. Then, when I decided to glance over at LoopDLoop's "Fog, Fiction and the Flight 11 phone calls" thread, I was struck by how many primary and secondary sources he was referencing. FBI interviews, 9/11 Commission interviews, the Claircom records. He wasn't just padding his theories for length, either. There were so many contradictions that LoopDLoop discovered in these transcripts and interviews, and anomalies in general, that it required going through them with a fine-toothed comb. And, taken together, these anomalies pointed toward an idea – the idea that Flight 11 was basically an exercise of some sort.
I had never seen such a work on 9/11 with such explanatory power, such breadth, and such depth (the only work that comes close IMO, is Woody Box's and Pilots for 9/11 Truth on United Airlines' ACARS messages to their "hijacked" planes, overall). It made such an impression on me, that I spent a night copying all of his forum posts on that thread and combining into a WordPress post back in 2018 (linked above), as an easy reference. I also made archived copies of his original forum thread, as it was, and his part II thread.
LoopDLoop covered not only the manipulated tape of Betty Ong's call, but Amy Sweeney's calls, the role of AA head of security Larry Wansley and what he may have known about this "drill", the picocell, and Sara Low's phone card and her four unconnected calls from American 11, among other anomalies. On dealing with such a complex topic – especially on the frontier where I believe LoopDLoop was – he was bound to stumble along the way and err. Of note was his assumption in his first thread that Betty Ong was talking into a headset that was plugged into port #4 of the Claircom box, from the ground. Later, in Part II he corrects this, and understood that Wagner meant that a picocell was plugged into port #4 of the Claircom box. From this, cellphone calls could reliably reach the ground from the air, which means callers were airborne, not grounded.
I believe this is all correct. That is, the technical basis of Wagner's theory is sound, and the fundamental premise that a picocell was plugged into the plane's airphone back-end (for all four "hijacked" aircraft) is correct. Cellphone calls were transported through the airfone system, rather than the cellular network. That's why cellphone companies have no record of the calls, e.g. for Tom Burnett on United 93, according to 9/11 Commission:
9/11 Commission source – https://web.archive.org/web/20120314221608/http://media.nara.gov/9-11/MFR/t-0148-911MFR-00260.pdf
We know that Tom's wife received several cellphone calls, because she saw her husband's cellular number on caller ID several times:
FBI interview source – http://www.911myths.com/images/8/84/Team7_Box12_DOJ-Docs-Packet4.pdf#page=10
So, Deena Burnett saw her husband's cellphone number three times out of four, but those calls don't show up on his bill. This is where I'd like to address some mistakes I believe Wagner made, and also show that Wagner did not fully understand the implications of his own picocell theory, and overlooked other anomalies (!). The full implications are such: passengers were pre-briefed on procedures to make cellphone calls, as part of a live-fly hijack drill. I will touch on "coincidental" anomalies which Wagner overlooked. Secondly, GTE Airfone and the FBI have cleverly tried to hide pertinent clues that cellphones were used on United 93, in plain sight (aside from the two official cell phone calls). I've marked Wagner's mistakes as (A) and (B) below. In his Quora answer about picocells, commenting on the GTE airfone records from United 93, he says that:
(A) To save you time, the Burnett call Wagner is referring to that "originates from a seatback phone" is Burnett's second call at 9:37 EDT. This is because Deena was on the line with police advising them about her husband's first phone call. This is when Tom's second call to her, rang in on call waiting. Deena writes down this time as 6:34 a.m. Pacific (9:34 Eastern) in her transcript: http://www.tomburnettfoundation.org/transcript.html This is how we know that Deena's clock was three minutes out of sync with the (presumably more accurate) GTE clock.
Wagner clearly believes this was Tom's only airphone call. No blaming him, because this call didn't show up on caller ID. However, that might have been a problem with the call waiting feature on his wife's end. Deena was surely able to check her phone's call history and see that Tom indeed called from a cellphone at 9:34 her time (9:37 EDT according to the airfone records). This is why Deena maintains that Tom called her four times from a cellphone. However, Wagner misses that Tom's calls at 9:30 and 9:44 are also in the report. Here are the airfone records for United 93. I've marked Tom's three calls in red (ignore Britton and Wainio's marked calls for now):
(B) This follows from Wagner's first point. Wagner said that Tom's 3 cellphone calls to his wife are missing from the report. This is where my contribution comes in. I believe that Tom made five cellphone calls, and three of them show up in the report. The fourth call to his wife is deleted. The 3rd call at 9:44 EDT is to someone else, not his wife. If Tom's 3rd and 4th calls to his wife were included in the records, they'd be listed at 9:48 and 9:57-9:58, respectively. The hint that Tom made cellphone calls? The field marked "T" under "Manual Entry Ind" (which I've also marked). Let's have Elias Davidsson, author of Hijacking America's Mind on 9/11 – Counterfeiting Evidence, explain the significance:
(Hijacking America's Mind, pp. 263-264).
Mark Rugg's FBI interview can be found here (page 23): https://www.scribd.com/document/24392516/T7-B19-Key-302s-Fdr-Entire-Contents-FBI-302s
As Davidsson points out, the three callers whose relatives said used cellphones, also manually entered their credit card numbers for their calls. Everybody else simply swiped their card. Why? Why manually punch in your 16-digit credit card number, digit by digit (in Burnett's case, at least 3 different times)? Wouldn't that be risky? What if a hijacker saw you and thought you were trying to get some fighter jets tailing the plane (in the context of the official story)? What was stopping Tom Burnett, Marion Britton, and Honor Elizabeth Wainio from swiping their credit cards for their own airphone calls? Unless...
Those "airfone" calls that Burnett, Britton and Wainio made were, in fact, cellphone calls.
Let's bring this back to Wagner's picocell theory. In all the time he devoted to this idea, Wagner never explained how callers would pay for those cellphone calls. Surely you wouldn't be able to make free calls to a billable number, simply because a picocell was plugged into the airfone system. So, how did passengers pay for their calls on those planes?
Recall that Wagner said that United Airlines' airphone system was still working on 9/11, though it was being phased out. This is important, because we can tell who made cellphone calls on United 175 and United 93, and who only made airphone calls, from this fact. American Airlines rolled out a deactivation of airphones on their Boeing 757s and 767s starting mid-2001. This is why there are only 10 successful calls between the two "hijacked" American flights, and 49-50 successful calls from the two United flights. In fact, as LoopDLoop pointed out in his first thread on the cellphone calls, there are zero passenger calls from American 11 during its hijack, even though it had the highest passenger count of the four hijacked planes, at 81. This is strong circumstantial evidence that airphones were deactivated on Flight 11 (which was a Boeing 767, not 757). Yet, United 93, with the lowest passenger count of the four planes at a measly 37, has the highest number of calls at (officially) 37.
Before moving on, let's quickly establish that Marion Britton and Elizabeth Wainio had reportedly used cellphones.
Marion Britton's call:
9/11 Commissioner John Raidt categorizes her call in the document here (a re-upload of a 9/11 Commission file on Elias Davidsson's website):
Reference – http://www.aldeilis.net/fake/2776.pdf#page=2
The record above shows that Marion Britton called her boyfriend with a borrowed cellphone. This is also acknowledged in internal FBI reports. Britton's boyfriend told the FBI that the caller ID he saw was not Britton's regular cellphone number.
Elizabeth Wainio's call:
In Jere Longman’s book, Among the Heroes, he devotes some space to Elizabeth Wainio’s call to her step-mother Esther Heymann, based on his interview
with Heymann. According to Heymann, Lauren Grandcolas had “handed her [cell] phone to [Elizabeth] and told her to call her family. Her stepmother said that Elizabeth had spoken calmly, but her breathing was shallow, as if she were hyperventilating.” (Longman, 236)
As seen in the excerpt above, Wainio's stepmother testifies that she had called from a cellphone. She most likely saw a number on caller ID.
Now that we've established that the above 3 passengers made cellphone calls, let's move on to the excellent question of how those cellphone calls would be paid for. This is also a good time to recall the airfone records from United 93 I posted above.
Note that five airfone calls are marked "T" under "Manual Entry Ind". As was shown, this means those passengers punched in their 16-digit credit card numbers to pay for those calls, rather than swipe their cards. In Tom Burnett's case, he did this at least 3 times (I believe two of his calls are hidden from the records). Note that row numbers are also recorded for these calls (e.g. 25 ABC). This seems perplexing, and we'll get to that soon. Take note of the two acknowledged cellphone calls from CeeCee Lyles and Edward Felt at the bottom also.
It's my theory that the manual entry of credit card numbers is highly correlated with the fact these 3 passengers are reported by their family members and friends, to have used cellphones for those same calls.
It is also my theory that these same "airfone" calls (as the GTE airfone records would present them) are, in fact, cellphone calls. In other words: The calls with manual credit card entry ("T" under Manual Entry Ind) are cellphone calls, the ones with "F" under "Manual Entry Ind" (meaning swiped card) are indeed real airfone calls, because United's airfone system was working on 9/11.
This is my theory for why those 3 passengers on United 93 (all reported to have used cellphones), manually entered their credit card numbers:
As explained by Robert Wagner, passengers' cellphone calls went thru the airfone network, not the cellphone network, due to the picocell that was plugged into the plane's airfone system. This means that the cell network could not charge them for those calls. That's why cellphone calls don't appear on the account's phone bill, as we saw with Burnett. Who billed those calls, then? The airfone network did, because the cellphone calls were transported through the airfone network.
An on-board picocell isolates handsets from the terrestrial cell network. In other words, mobile handsets connected to the picocell do not talk directly to ground stations. Ordinarily, on planes equipped with picocells, the handsets connect to the on-board network, and the picocell transfers those signals to a central server, which it is plugged into. The server passes the cell signals to a modem...which has a data link to a telecommunications satellite. Finally, the satellite beams those signals down to cell towers on the ground:
In the case of 9/11, the cell signals were beamed down to airfone ground stations, not cell towers, by the airplane's radio equipment. This means that any outgoing cellphone call from that aircraft goes thru the Verizon (or Claircom) air-to-ground server, due to the picocell's proximity and signal strength (your phone would automatically connect to it). In either case, there's no way for a mobile handset to talk directly to ground stations. I suspect the technology to transfer cell signals down to cell towers via satellite wasn't around yet in 2001. But on the "hijacked" planes with the picocell plugged into the airfone system, passengers couldn't place a cellphone call as they normally would on-contract, with their cell provider billing them later.
How did people pay for calls going thru the airfone network, back when planes had seatback phones? With a credit card. But in this case, you can't swipe your credit card to pay for a cellphone call. There's no slot on your cellphone. (Nor did cellphones in 2001 have NFC-enabled tap to pay). So you have to manually enter your credit card number via your cellphone's keypad. But this was recorded by the airfone back-end as if Burnett, Britton and Wainio used an airphone keypad.
This must've been a procedure that passengers were pre-briefed on, if they wished to make cellphone calls. Passengers wouldn't have known to dial in their card numbers to make cellphone calls. That explains why those 3 passengers manually entered their card numbers, and why their family testifies they used a cellphone. The only way you could place a cellphone call from that aircraft, with a picocell plugged into the airfone system, was by punching in your credit card number. This is indemnity.
They must've been pre-briefed by some authority or insider as part of a live-fly hijack drill. Pre-briefed by someone who was familiar with the internals of the airfone system and knew what modifications were necessary to form a proper "bridge" between handsets at altitude and the airfone back-end.
This next part is also important, because now we're left with the row numbers for those cellphone calls. How would a seatback row be recorded, if a cellphone was used? Good question. Let's answer it.
A briefing to the 9/11 Commission on phone calls from United 175, which mirrors the information given by Mark Rugg, tells us that flight attendants could bypass the credit card swipe by entering a special code on the airfone keypad:
https://web.archive.org/web/20120320170614/http://media.nara.gov/9-11/MFR/t-0148-911MFR-00216.pdf
Obviously, this is a back-end operation, because the normal routine is for the system to prompt you to enter your card number – either via swipe or dial. This special code tells the back-end to skip that step.
Is it possible there was a code you could enter into the airfone keypad, that told the back-end to open a cellular connection, via the picocell that was plugged into it?
This would explain why a row number was recorded (e.g. 25 ABC) for those calls marked "T" under "Manual Entry Ind", even though a cellphone was used. United Airlines' airfone system was working on 9/11, and would've kept the port closed ordinarily, I assume so there wasn't interference with legitimate airfone calls.
Please note that this was a separate, prior step to manually punching in your credit card number on your cellphone's keypad. Again, passengers wouldn't have known how to do this off-hand. They were pre-briefed.
My thinking goes like this:
1. Open up back-end cellular connection via a special code punched into the airfone keypad
2. Pull out cellphone, it connects to picocell
3. When prompted, enter a credit card number on the cellphone keypad
4. Any outgoing cellphone call is billed against this card as it's transported thru the airfone network
5. Call data is recorded on the airfone back-end, and presented later as if it were an airfone call.
This is also why CeeCee Lyles' cellphone call at the bottom of United 93's airphone records has a "duration connect" of 2 seconds – how would GTE airfone have that info? I think this was a slip-up by whoever was converting the raw data into a more human readable format (The raw data is very hard to interpret and keep track of, so I can see this as a mistake). This is evidence that United Airlines knew there was a picocell plugged into the aircraft dispatched as United 93.
Commenting on Renee May's call to her parents from Flight 77, forum member "Ruby Gray" mused that credit cards could've been required to place cellphone calls. I think they were onto something, and this is how it was done. The special code would not have been a routine in the Claircom or Verizon server's programming. Covert modifications must've been made in the days or weeks prior to 9/11 to the airphone back-ends of these aircraft.
It's also interesting to note that the blanked out fields for "Destination Number" and "Last Dialed Number" extend to Cee Cee Lyle's cellphone call. Why? Was this just an aesthetic choice, or did UAL have cellphone call data on their airphone system for these fields? Would GTE really call up Verizon or Sprint and ask them for passenger records of those two calls? If so, why doesn't Edward Felt's call also have a connect duration? The cell carrier could give that value for CeeCee Lyles' cellphone call, but not Felt's? That doesn't really make sense – all phone calls have a duration value where the network or operator connects them to the dialed number.
I’d like to make a few predictions:
– The cellphone calls would appear on the passengers’ credit card statement, not their phone bills, because they were billed as airfone calls.
– Tom Burnett made 5 cellphone calls from United 93, not 3. He made four calls to his wife, and one call to another person. You can prove this logically, by comparing his wife's timeline of calls with the GTE records’ timeline of his calls. Deena's clock was ~3 minutes out of sync with GTE's clock. If his two missing calls were included, they would be listed at 9:48 and 9:57-9:58, respectively. There's no need for either timeline to be false. The FBI and/or GTE only need to withhold pertinent information.
– This is why the FBI said in their interview with his wife (referenced earlier) that she received “3 to 5” cellphone calls. They concluded he made 5 calls, but weren’t sure if she received all of those 5. The lower bound of 3 is based off the fact that only 3 of Burnett's calls appear on the airfone records. Deena herself said she received four calls.
– Burnett's two other calls are deleted, in order to discredit his wife's testimony about receiving cellphone calls. If Tom only made 3 calls from United 93, all to his wife, then she is wrong about the number of calls she received, and the time (because the 9:44 call is 1 minute out of sync with Deena's clock, not 3 minutes). This means, by transitive property, she is wrong about the types of calls she received. The potential erasure of Tom Burnett's call to another person also potentially erases independent confirmation that Tom used a cellphone, because a credit card number was manually entered to pay for the call which took place at 9:44. For this, it suffices to redact the dialed number and claim it's to Burnett's residence, when it's not. Few people would be able to check. If there was another person Burnett called during the "hijack", the FBI apparently didn't interview this person.
– CeeCee Lyles & Edward Felt (the only cellphone calls made on 9/11 according to the FBI) also manually entered their credit card numbers for their cellphone calls. This information is hidden from the report. But somebody slipped up with the connect duration of 2 seconds for CeeCee Lyles’ cellphone call. This means the story of Edward Felt calling from the bathroom (no airfone) is a falsehood.
– Renee May on American 77 used a cellphone to call her parents (according to them), and further, she used a credit card (according to the Claircom records). p. 12 of the Claircom records says “customer swiped their card”. However, I think Renee manually entered her credit card, too. Seat-back phone systems apparently would say a card was “swiped” to pay for a call, even if the card number was manually entered.
The briefing on United 175 airfone calls states that “‘Swiped Card’ [refers to] the credit card number”. This would apply even for Burnett's calls, etc. where the card number was manually entered. Yes, GTE airfone is a different system from Claircom (which was on American planes), but...could there be the same shorthand classification of call metadata happening here?
If so, this means Renee May also manually entered her credit card in order to pay for her "airfone" call. This applies to anyone else who used cellphones from the “hijacked” planes. It's here where I'd like to make a slight correction to Wagner's thesis, again. Airphone call billing was not turned off on American Airlines Boeing 757s and 767s. This is proven by page 12 of the Claircom records, which states that Renee May "swiped" her card. Yes, the front-end airphones where you'd swipe your card were turned off. However, the billing system was still turned on. I imagine that's why Amy Sweeney could've even used a calling card.
Ong's phone call to AA Reservations was a 'free' call, so it was not billed. Also, as Elizabeth Woodworth notes in her article on the Claircom records, "Dial & Dial" was used to bypass credit card billing. It's not that billing was disabled, but that it would've been tedious to bill your credit card (because you'd have to punch in your card number). Instead, the few people who did call from the American Airlines planes opted to skip this step, and either:
a) placed calls to 1-800 (toll-free) numbers,
b) dialed "0" for an Operator-assisted call, or
c) used calling cards, which would've involved the same amount of number punching.
To use a calling card, you'd have to dial the number of the calling card, then dial a 4-digit passcode, and then dial the number you wanted to call. Using calling cards would've increased plausible deniability for the conspirators, because it's a record they can truthfully present to the public without much hassle. I imagine passengers on the American Airlines planes who placed calls to billable numbers, were encouraged to use calling cards for this reason. Imagine if Burnett used a calling card to phone his wife. The manual entry of the card number maybe wouldn't have looked so strange, then.
There you have it. Evidence that 9/11 was a false flag. That three passengers who manually entered credit card numbers for their calls, are also said to have used cellphones, is beyond coincidence. The manual entry of credit card numbers was part of a procedure that passengers were pre-briefed on. The picocell isn't just evidence of foreknowledge, it's action-based foreknowledge, because passengers were going to place phone calls to the ground, as part of a drill. This is especially true for the American flights, because American Airlines rolled out a deactivation of airphones on their Boeing 757's and 767's starting mid-2001. That's why there are only 5 identified callers from the two American flights. That's why AAL head of security Larry Wansley assumed that Betty Ong had called AA Reservations from a cellphone. United's airfone system was still working (though it was being phased out), so United planes, especially United 93, have the most calls.
Elias Davidsson opined that the manual entry of credit card numbers were a clue to a grand deception. He's right. The conspirators' grand deception fooled even Robert Wagner, the telecom guru whose picocell theory served as the inspiration for LoopDLoop's thread on the phone calls. The conspirators, as we saw above, cleverly disguised Tom Burnett's, Britton's and Wainio's cellphone calls as airphone calls. They did this for the Claircom records on the American flights too, but Wagner saw through that ruse – he noted that
As the old saying goes, what is obvious is sometimes hidden in plain sight. I hope you enjoyed the read, and I welcome any comments, questions or feedback.
Bonus Section:
I've been struck by Fred Fiumano's FBI interview, documented by Elias Davidsson in Hijacking America's Mind. Fiumano said that when he tried to call back the number Marion Britton gave him, he received a message to the effect that "the number was out of service". I thought this was very curious. Firstly, why would Marion give a number that wasn't working? It's possible she was stressed and gave a similar, but wrong number. I think it was the number of another passenger whose phone she intended to borrow.
Could this apparent 'out of service' be a side-effect of the picocell? An on-board picocell 'isolates' connected handsets from the terrestrial cell network. That is, the cellphones will only 'talk' to the ground indirectly, and their signal is carried down to ground stations thru an intermediary.
When you dial a number, the service provider will "ring" as its looking for the handset with that number. The phone itself is not ringing yet. This is so callers stay on the line and don't try to re-dial.
In the case of the 9/11 aircraft, if the passenger's cellphones are only broadcasting thru the airfone network, the cellphone providers may not "see" their handsets, and might falsely believe that those numbers are out of service. Or it could be a generic response after failing to connect.
Here's Christian Science Monitor interviewing expert Jeff Kagan on the apparent ringing of MH370 passenger's phones:
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technolog...ysia-Airlines-passengers-phones-still-ringing
Here's History Commons (citing mainstream sources) on Deena Burnett's attempts to call her husband:
http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a910deenaunable#a910deenaunable
Tom's cellphone could've been turned off, and it's plausible that handsets on aircraft would be hard to reach from the ground. But if his cellphone were powered on, it's possible "he didn't answer" (read: the service provider kept ringing) because the service provider couldn't "see" his handset. Perhaps if she stayed on the phone longer, she may have gotten a message that the number was out of service, or the call could've disconnected.
I'm a new user who joined LetsRollForums just today. But I've been following the work of forum member LoopDLoop for a long time, since around 2015 I believe.
I was first introduced to LoopDLoop's work through a guest on the Richie Allen show. I forget their name, but the title of the episode was "Crew of Flight 11 knew they were in a hijack drill on 9/11". Something to that effect.
I was skeptical of this idea at first. The idea that callers were partaking in a hijack drill was slightly outside of my comfort zone, although it made more sense to me than David Ray Griffin's voice morphing theory. Then, when I decided to glance over at LoopDLoop's "Fog, Fiction and the Flight 11 phone calls" thread, I was struck by how many primary and secondary sources he was referencing. FBI interviews, 9/11 Commission interviews, the Claircom records. He wasn't just padding his theories for length, either. There were so many contradictions that LoopDLoop discovered in these transcripts and interviews, and anomalies in general, that it required going through them with a fine-toothed comb. And, taken together, these anomalies pointed toward an idea – the idea that Flight 11 was basically an exercise of some sort.
I had never seen such a work on 9/11 with such explanatory power, such breadth, and such depth (the only work that comes close IMO, is Woody Box's and Pilots for 9/11 Truth on United Airlines' ACARS messages to their "hijacked" planes, overall). It made such an impression on me, that I spent a night copying all of his forum posts on that thread and combining into a WordPress post back in 2018 (linked above), as an easy reference. I also made archived copies of his original forum thread, as it was, and his part II thread.
LoopDLoop covered not only the manipulated tape of Betty Ong's call, but Amy Sweeney's calls, the role of AA head of security Larry Wansley and what he may have known about this "drill", the picocell, and Sara Low's phone card and her four unconnected calls from American 11, among other anomalies. On dealing with such a complex topic – especially on the frontier where I believe LoopDLoop was – he was bound to stumble along the way and err. Of note was his assumption in his first thread that Betty Ong was talking into a headset that was plugged into port #4 of the Claircom box, from the ground. Later, in Part II he corrects this, and understood that Wagner meant that a picocell was plugged into port #4 of the Claircom box. From this, cellphone calls could reliably reach the ground from the air, which means callers were airborne, not grounded.
I believe this is all correct. That is, the technical basis of Wagner's theory is sound, and the fundamental premise that a picocell was plugged into the plane's airphone back-end (for all four "hijacked" aircraft) is correct. Cellphone calls were transported through the airfone system, rather than the cellular network. That's why cellphone companies have no record of the calls, e.g. for Tom Burnett on United 93, according to 9/11 Commission:
The call Burnett made from the cell phone did not show up on the cell phone bill, neither [sic] did the one he placed to his secretary before take-off.
9/11 Commission source – https://web.archive.org/web/20120314221608/http://media.nara.gov/9-11/MFR/t-0148-911MFR-00260.pdf
We know that Tom's wife received several cellphone calls, because she saw her husband's cellular number on caller ID several times:
Approximately five minutes later she received another cell phone call from her husband. BURNETT was able to determine that her husband was using his own cellular telephone because the caller identification showed his number, (925) 980-3360. Only one of the calls did not show on the caller identification as she was on the line with another call.
FBI interview source – http://www.911myths.com/images/8/84/Team7_Box12_DOJ-Docs-Packet4.pdf#page=10
So, Deena Burnett saw her husband's cellphone number three times out of four, but those calls don't show up on his bill. This is where I'd like to address some mistakes I believe Wagner made, and also show that Wagner did not fully understand the implications of his own picocell theory, and overlooked other anomalies (!). The full implications are such: passengers were pre-briefed on procedures to make cellphone calls, as part of a live-fly hijack drill. I will touch on "coincidental" anomalies which Wagner overlooked. Secondly, GTE Airfone and the FBI have cleverly tried to hide pertinent clues that cellphones were used on United 93, in plain sight (aside from the two official cell phone calls). I've marked Wagner's mistakes as (A) and (B) below. In his Quora answer about picocells, commenting on the GTE airfone records from United 93, he says that:
This report is incomplete, it is missing cell phone calls. We can tell because Thomas Burnett's wife received four calls. Three showed Thomas' cell phone number on her Caller ID. (A) The call that did not is shown above as originating from a seatback phone. (B) The three that originated from Thomas' cell phone and went through the Airphone system, the only way they could have gotten to the ground, are missing from the report.
(A) To save you time, the Burnett call Wagner is referring to that "originates from a seatback phone" is Burnett's second call at 9:37 EDT. This is because Deena was on the line with police advising them about her husband's first phone call. This is when Tom's second call to her, rang in on call waiting. Deena writes down this time as 6:34 a.m. Pacific (9:34 Eastern) in her transcript: http://www.tomburnettfoundation.org/transcript.html This is how we know that Deena's clock was three minutes out of sync with the (presumably more accurate) GTE clock.
Wagner clearly believes this was Tom's only airphone call. No blaming him, because this call didn't show up on caller ID. However, that might have been a problem with the call waiting feature on his wife's end. Deena was surely able to check her phone's call history and see that Tom indeed called from a cellphone at 9:34 her time (9:37 EDT according to the airfone records). This is why Deena maintains that Tom called her four times from a cellphone. However, Wagner misses that Tom's calls at 9:30 and 9:44 are also in the report. Here are the airfone records for United 93. I've marked Tom's three calls in red (ignore Britton and Wainio's marked calls for now):
(B) This follows from Wagner's first point. Wagner said that Tom's 3 cellphone calls to his wife are missing from the report. This is where my contribution comes in. I believe that Tom made five cellphone calls, and three of them show up in the report. The fourth call to his wife is deleted. The 3rd call at 9:44 EDT is to someone else, not his wife. If Tom's 3rd and 4th calls to his wife were included in the records, they'd be listed at 9:48 and 9:57-9:58, respectively. The hint that Tom made cellphone calls? The field marked "T" under "Manual Entry Ind" (which I've also marked). Let's have Elias Davidsson, author of Hijacking America's Mind on 9/11 – Counterfeiting Evidence, explain the significance:
An examination of the list of UA93 phone calls released by the FBI to the 9/11 Commission reveals, however, an exception precisely regarding the calls of Burnett, Britton and Wainio. One column on this list is entitled Manual Entry Ind. Mark Rugg, Manager of Network Operations, GTE Airfone Inc. provided to the FBI on July 1, 2002, a spreadsheet detailing the GTE Airfone records from flight UA93. Rugg was asked to revisit those records and provide an understanding of the various fields that were depicted in the spreadsheet. He explained that Manual Entry Ind is a “true or false field identifying whether a patron manually entered a credit card number.” Significantly, only the phone calls of the three individuals who, according to their next-of-kin had made cell phone calls on 9/11, were marked T (for True), whereas all other Airfone calls were marked F (for False). This raises the question why precisely Burnett, Britton and Wainio reportedly entered their credit card numbers manually, whereas all other Airfone users simply swept their credit card. Was this a clue to a grand deception?
(Hijacking America's Mind, pp. 263-264).
Mark Rugg's FBI interview can be found here (page 23): https://www.scribd.com/document/24392516/T7-B19-Key-302s-Fdr-Entire-Contents-FBI-302s
As Davidsson points out, the three callers whose relatives said used cellphones, also manually entered their credit card numbers for their calls. Everybody else simply swiped their card. Why? Why manually punch in your 16-digit credit card number, digit by digit (in Burnett's case, at least 3 different times)? Wouldn't that be risky? What if a hijacker saw you and thought you were trying to get some fighter jets tailing the plane (in the context of the official story)? What was stopping Tom Burnett, Marion Britton, and Honor Elizabeth Wainio from swiping their credit cards for their own airphone calls? Unless...
Those "airfone" calls that Burnett, Britton and Wainio made were, in fact, cellphone calls.
Let's bring this back to Wagner's picocell theory. In all the time he devoted to this idea, Wagner never explained how callers would pay for those cellphone calls. Surely you wouldn't be able to make free calls to a billable number, simply because a picocell was plugged into the airfone system. So, how did passengers pay for their calls on those planes?
Recall that Wagner said that United Airlines' airphone system was still working on 9/11, though it was being phased out. This is important, because we can tell who made cellphone calls on United 175 and United 93, and who only made airphone calls, from this fact. American Airlines rolled out a deactivation of airphones on their Boeing 757s and 767s starting mid-2001. This is why there are only 10 successful calls between the two "hijacked" American flights, and 49-50 successful calls from the two United flights. In fact, as LoopDLoop pointed out in his first thread on the cellphone calls, there are zero passenger calls from American 11 during its hijack, even though it had the highest passenger count of the four hijacked planes, at 81. This is strong circumstantial evidence that airphones were deactivated on Flight 11 (which was a Boeing 767, not 757). Yet, United 93, with the lowest passenger count of the four planes at a measly 37, has the highest number of calls at (officially) 37.
Before moving on, let's quickly establish that Marion Britton and Elizabeth Wainio had reportedly used cellphones.
Marion Britton's call:
9/11 Commissioner John Raidt categorizes her call in the document here (a re-upload of a 9/11 Commission file on Elias Davidsson's website):
H) NOTES: CONFIRM TIME AND DURATION OF CALL WITH CELL PHONE
RECORD
3. A) Passenger Marion Britton called her boyfriend Fred Fiumano
B) Borrowed Cell Phone 718-805-0388
C) Conversation
D) Time: Between 9:30 – 9:45
E) According to Fiumano, Britton told him that "her plane was hijacked...the
hijackers had cut two passengers throats...she knew that two planes had crashed into the WTC."
F) No tape mentioned in 302
G) 265A-NY-280350-302-25306
Reference – http://www.aldeilis.net/fake/2776.pdf#page=2
The record above shows that Marion Britton called her boyfriend with a borrowed cellphone. This is also acknowledged in internal FBI reports. Britton's boyfriend told the FBI that the caller ID he saw was not Britton's regular cellphone number.
Elizabeth Wainio's call:
In Jere Longman’s book, Among the Heroes, he devotes some space to Elizabeth Wainio’s call to her step-mother Esther Heymann, based on his interview
with Heymann. According to Heymann, Lauren Grandcolas had “handed her [cell] phone to [Elizabeth] and told her to call her family. Her stepmother said that Elizabeth had spoken calmly, but her breathing was shallow, as if she were hyperventilating.” (Longman, 236)
As seen in the excerpt above, Wainio's stepmother testifies that she had called from a cellphone. She most likely saw a number on caller ID.
Now that we've established that the above 3 passengers made cellphone calls, let's move on to the excellent question of how those cellphone calls would be paid for. This is also a good time to recall the airfone records from United 93 I posted above.
Note that five airfone calls are marked "T" under "Manual Entry Ind". As was shown, this means those passengers punched in their 16-digit credit card numbers to pay for those calls, rather than swipe their cards. In Tom Burnett's case, he did this at least 3 times (I believe two of his calls are hidden from the records). Note that row numbers are also recorded for these calls (e.g. 25 ABC). This seems perplexing, and we'll get to that soon. Take note of the two acknowledged cellphone calls from CeeCee Lyles and Edward Felt at the bottom also.
It's my theory that the manual entry of credit card numbers is highly correlated with the fact these 3 passengers are reported by their family members and friends, to have used cellphones for those same calls.
It is also my theory that these same "airfone" calls (as the GTE airfone records would present them) are, in fact, cellphone calls. In other words: The calls with manual credit card entry ("T" under Manual Entry Ind) are cellphone calls, the ones with "F" under "Manual Entry Ind" (meaning swiped card) are indeed real airfone calls, because United's airfone system was working on 9/11.
This is my theory for why those 3 passengers on United 93 (all reported to have used cellphones), manually entered their credit card numbers:
As explained by Robert Wagner, passengers' cellphone calls went thru the airfone network, not the cellphone network, due to the picocell that was plugged into the plane's airfone system. This means that the cell network could not charge them for those calls. That's why cellphone calls don't appear on the account's phone bill, as we saw with Burnett. Who billed those calls, then? The airfone network did, because the cellphone calls were transported through the airfone network.
An on-board picocell isolates handsets from the terrestrial cell network. In other words, mobile handsets connected to the picocell do not talk directly to ground stations. Ordinarily, on planes equipped with picocells, the handsets connect to the on-board network, and the picocell transfers those signals to a central server, which it is plugged into. The server passes the cell signals to a modem...which has a data link to a telecommunications satellite. Finally, the satellite beams those signals down to cell towers on the ground:
In the case of 9/11, the cell signals were beamed down to airfone ground stations, not cell towers, by the airplane's radio equipment. This means that any outgoing cellphone call from that aircraft goes thru the Verizon (or Claircom) air-to-ground server, due to the picocell's proximity and signal strength (your phone would automatically connect to it). In either case, there's no way for a mobile handset to talk directly to ground stations. I suspect the technology to transfer cell signals down to cell towers via satellite wasn't around yet in 2001. But on the "hijacked" planes with the picocell plugged into the airfone system, passengers couldn't place a cellphone call as they normally would on-contract, with their cell provider billing them later.
How did people pay for calls going thru the airfone network, back when planes had seatback phones? With a credit card. But in this case, you can't swipe your credit card to pay for a cellphone call. There's no slot on your cellphone. (Nor did cellphones in 2001 have NFC-enabled tap to pay). So you have to manually enter your credit card number via your cellphone's keypad. But this was recorded by the airfone back-end as if Burnett, Britton and Wainio used an airphone keypad.
This must've been a procedure that passengers were pre-briefed on, if they wished to make cellphone calls. Passengers wouldn't have known to dial in their card numbers to make cellphone calls. That explains why those 3 passengers manually entered their card numbers, and why their family testifies they used a cellphone. The only way you could place a cellphone call from that aircraft, with a picocell plugged into the airfone system, was by punching in your credit card number. This is indemnity.
They must've been pre-briefed by some authority or insider as part of a live-fly hijack drill. Pre-briefed by someone who was familiar with the internals of the airfone system and knew what modifications were necessary to form a proper "bridge" between handsets at altitude and the airfone back-end.
This next part is also important, because now we're left with the row numbers for those cellphone calls. How would a seatback row be recorded, if a cellphone was used? Good question. Let's answer it.
A briefing to the 9/11 Commission on phone calls from United 175, which mirrors the information given by Mark Rugg, tells us that flight attendants could bypass the credit card swipe by entering a special code on the airfone keypad:
"Manual Entry Indexing" indicates whether the number was entered manually, in which case T (for "True") is entered, or not where F (for "False") is listed. In all the cases on [United Flight] 175 an F is entered because the calls were made by either swiping a credit card (for all passenger calls) or entering a special code (for the flight attendant calls).
https://web.archive.org/web/20120320170614/http://media.nara.gov/9-11/MFR/t-0148-911MFR-00216.pdf
Obviously, this is a back-end operation, because the normal routine is for the system to prompt you to enter your card number – either via swipe or dial. This special code tells the back-end to skip that step.
Is it possible there was a code you could enter into the airfone keypad, that told the back-end to open a cellular connection, via the picocell that was plugged into it?
This would explain why a row number was recorded (e.g. 25 ABC) for those calls marked "T" under "Manual Entry Ind", even though a cellphone was used. United Airlines' airfone system was working on 9/11, and would've kept the port closed ordinarily, I assume so there wasn't interference with legitimate airfone calls.
Please note that this was a separate, prior step to manually punching in your credit card number on your cellphone's keypad. Again, passengers wouldn't have known how to do this off-hand. They were pre-briefed.
My thinking goes like this:
1. Open up back-end cellular connection via a special code punched into the airfone keypad
2. Pull out cellphone, it connects to picocell
3. When prompted, enter a credit card number on the cellphone keypad
4. Any outgoing cellphone call is billed against this card as it's transported thru the airfone network
5. Call data is recorded on the airfone back-end, and presented later as if it were an airfone call.
This is also why CeeCee Lyles' cellphone call at the bottom of United 93's airphone records has a "duration connect" of 2 seconds – how would GTE airfone have that info? I think this was a slip-up by whoever was converting the raw data into a more human readable format (The raw data is very hard to interpret and keep track of, so I can see this as a mistake). This is evidence that United Airlines knew there was a picocell plugged into the aircraft dispatched as United 93.
Commenting on Renee May's call to her parents from Flight 77, forum member "Ruby Gray" mused that credit cards could've been required to place cellphone calls. I think they were onto something, and this is how it was done. The special code would not have been a routine in the Claircom or Verizon server's programming. Covert modifications must've been made in the days or weeks prior to 9/11 to the airphone back-ends of these aircraft.
It's also interesting to note that the blanked out fields for "Destination Number" and "Last Dialed Number" extend to Cee Cee Lyle's cellphone call. Why? Was this just an aesthetic choice, or did UAL have cellphone call data on their airphone system for these fields? Would GTE really call up Verizon or Sprint and ask them for passenger records of those two calls? If so, why doesn't Edward Felt's call also have a connect duration? The cell carrier could give that value for CeeCee Lyles' cellphone call, but not Felt's? That doesn't really make sense – all phone calls have a duration value where the network or operator connects them to the dialed number.
I’d like to make a few predictions:
– The cellphone calls would appear on the passengers’ credit card statement, not their phone bills, because they were billed as airfone calls.
– Tom Burnett made 5 cellphone calls from United 93, not 3. He made four calls to his wife, and one call to another person. You can prove this logically, by comparing his wife's timeline of calls with the GTE records’ timeline of his calls. Deena's clock was ~3 minutes out of sync with GTE's clock. If his two missing calls were included, they would be listed at 9:48 and 9:57-9:58, respectively. There's no need for either timeline to be false. The FBI and/or GTE only need to withhold pertinent information.
– This is why the FBI said in their interview with his wife (referenced earlier) that she received “3 to 5” cellphone calls. They concluded he made 5 calls, but weren’t sure if she received all of those 5. The lower bound of 3 is based off the fact that only 3 of Burnett's calls appear on the airfone records. Deena herself said she received four calls.
– Burnett's two other calls are deleted, in order to discredit his wife's testimony about receiving cellphone calls. If Tom only made 3 calls from United 93, all to his wife, then she is wrong about the number of calls she received, and the time (because the 9:44 call is 1 minute out of sync with Deena's clock, not 3 minutes). This means, by transitive property, she is wrong about the types of calls she received. The potential erasure of Tom Burnett's call to another person also potentially erases independent confirmation that Tom used a cellphone, because a credit card number was manually entered to pay for the call which took place at 9:44. For this, it suffices to redact the dialed number and claim it's to Burnett's residence, when it's not. Few people would be able to check. If there was another person Burnett called during the "hijack", the FBI apparently didn't interview this person.
– CeeCee Lyles & Edward Felt (the only cellphone calls made on 9/11 according to the FBI) also manually entered their credit card numbers for their cellphone calls. This information is hidden from the report. But somebody slipped up with the connect duration of 2 seconds for CeeCee Lyles’ cellphone call. This means the story of Edward Felt calling from the bathroom (no airfone) is a falsehood.
– Renee May on American 77 used a cellphone to call her parents (according to them), and further, she used a credit card (according to the Claircom records). p. 12 of the Claircom records says “customer swiped their card”. However, I think Renee manually entered her credit card, too. Seat-back phone systems apparently would say a card was “swiped” to pay for a call, even if the card number was manually entered.
The briefing on United 175 airfone calls states that “‘Swiped Card’ [refers to] the credit card number”. This would apply even for Burnett's calls, etc. where the card number was manually entered. Yes, GTE airfone is a different system from Claircom (which was on American planes), but...could there be the same shorthand classification of call metadata happening here?
If so, this means Renee May also manually entered her credit card in order to pay for her "airfone" call. This applies to anyone else who used cellphones from the “hijacked” planes. It's here where I'd like to make a slight correction to Wagner's thesis, again. Airphone call billing was not turned off on American Airlines Boeing 757s and 767s. This is proven by page 12 of the Claircom records, which states that Renee May "swiped" her card. Yes, the front-end airphones where you'd swipe your card were turned off. However, the billing system was still turned on. I imagine that's why Amy Sweeney could've even used a calling card.
Ong's phone call to AA Reservations was a 'free' call, so it was not billed. Also, as Elizabeth Woodworth notes in her article on the Claircom records, "Dial & Dial" was used to bypass credit card billing. It's not that billing was disabled, but that it would've been tedious to bill your credit card (because you'd have to punch in your card number). Instead, the few people who did call from the American Airlines planes opted to skip this step, and either:
a) placed calls to 1-800 (toll-free) numbers,
b) dialed "0" for an Operator-assisted call, or
c) used calling cards, which would've involved the same amount of number punching.
To use a calling card, you'd have to dial the number of the calling card, then dial a 4-digit passcode, and then dial the number you wanted to call. Using calling cards would've increased plausible deniability for the conspirators, because it's a record they can truthfully present to the public without much hassle. I imagine passengers on the American Airlines planes who placed calls to billable numbers, were encouraged to use calling cards for this reason. Imagine if Burnett used a calling card to phone his wife. The manual entry of the card number maybe wouldn't have looked so strange, then.
There you have it. Evidence that 9/11 was a false flag. That three passengers who manually entered credit card numbers for their calls, are also said to have used cellphones, is beyond coincidence. The manual entry of credit card numbers was part of a procedure that passengers were pre-briefed on. The picocell isn't just evidence of foreknowledge, it's action-based foreknowledge, because passengers were going to place phone calls to the ground, as part of a drill. This is especially true for the American flights, because American Airlines rolled out a deactivation of airphones on their Boeing 757's and 767's starting mid-2001. That's why there are only 5 identified callers from the two American flights. That's why AAL head of security Larry Wansley assumed that Betty Ong had called AA Reservations from a cellphone. United's airfone system was still working (though it was being phased out), so United planes, especially United 93, have the most calls.
Elias Davidsson opined that the manual entry of credit card numbers were a clue to a grand deception. He's right. The conspirators' grand deception fooled even Robert Wagner, the telecom guru whose picocell theory served as the inspiration for LoopDLoop's thread on the phone calls. The conspirators, as we saw above, cleverly disguised Tom Burnett's, Britton's and Wainio's cellphone calls as airphone calls. They did this for the Claircom records on the American flights too, but Wagner saw through that ruse – he noted that
handset ID = ffff
means the calls didn't originate from seatback handsets. Why? ffff
is signed 16-bit hexadecimal for -1
, which is an error code meaning "Record Not Found", as per standards. The Claircom system in question likely would've been using signed integers.As the old saying goes, what is obvious is sometimes hidden in plain sight. I hope you enjoyed the read, and I welcome any comments, questions or feedback.
Bonus Section:
I've been struck by Fred Fiumano's FBI interview, documented by Elias Davidsson in Hijacking America's Mind. Fiumano said that when he tried to call back the number Marion Britton gave him, he received a message to the effect that "the number was out of service". I thought this was very curious. Firstly, why would Marion give a number that wasn't working? It's possible she was stressed and gave a similar, but wrong number. I think it was the number of another passenger whose phone she intended to borrow.
Could this apparent 'out of service' be a side-effect of the picocell? An on-board picocell 'isolates' connected handsets from the terrestrial cell network. That is, the cellphones will only 'talk' to the ground indirectly, and their signal is carried down to ground stations thru an intermediary.
When you dial a number, the service provider will "ring" as its looking for the handset with that number. The phone itself is not ringing yet. This is so callers stay on the line and don't try to re-dial.
In the case of the 9/11 aircraft, if the passenger's cellphones are only broadcasting thru the airfone network, the cellphone providers may not "see" their handsets, and might falsely believe that those numbers are out of service. Or it could be a generic response after failing to connect.
Here's Christian Science Monitor interviewing expert Jeff Kagan on the apparent ringing of MH370 passenger's phones:
“When you place a call it takes a few moments for the call to be completed, so phone companies typically start the ringing tone so you know it is ringing,” he says. “[That way] you know it is being connected so you won’t hang up and try again.”
There are several steps to the connection process, [industry analyst Jeff Kagan] says. When you make a call to a mobile device, the carrier finds the closest cell tower to where the recipient of the call last was registered. If the recipient isn’t in the range of that tower, it continues expanding out to larger areas to try to find the network the recipient is on. If it can’t find the recipient, the call disconnects, goes to voice mail, or gives an error message. Phone calls can end up disconnected because the network is over capacity or if a caller has repeatedly called too many times, he says.
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technolog...ysia-Airlines-passengers-phones-still-ringing
Here's History Commons (citing mainstream sources) on Deena Burnett's attempts to call her husband:
Deena is expecting Tom to head home some time later this morning, but, concerned in case he finished his business early and took an earlier flight, she tries calling his cell phone. He does not answer. She later recalls, “This was not cause for immediate concern, because if he was on a flight already, use of cell phones was forbidden.” [BURNETT AND GIOMBETTI, 2006, PP. 60-61] Minutes later, though, he makes the first in a series of calls to her from Flight 93, apparently using his cell phone (see 9:27 a.m. September 11, 2001). [FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION, 9/11/2001 pdf file]
http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a910deenaunable#a910deenaunable
Tom's cellphone could've been turned off, and it's plausible that handsets on aircraft would be hard to reach from the ground. But if his cellphone were powered on, it's possible "he didn't answer" (read: the service provider kept ringing) because the service provider couldn't "see" his handset. Perhaps if she stayed on the phone longer, she may have gotten a message that the number was out of service, or the call could've disconnected.
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