Backers hail 9/11 theorist's speech, yet . . .

Professor Steven E. Jones, 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.

Speaking in Denver recently reported in DenverPost.com - Backers hail 9/11 theorist's speech: "A national poll by the Scripps Survey Center at Ohio University conducted in the summer found that more than a third of people questioned believed the government either planned the attacks or could have stopped them but didn't.

That has worried government officials enough that the State Department recently published a report titled 'The Top Sept. 11 Conspiracy Theories,' an effort to debunk many of them. Separately, the National Institute of Standards and Technology - the government arm that investigated why the towers collapsed - published a seven-page document in September that attempted to answer some of the skeptics.

'We've watched it gain momentum,' said Brent Blanchard, director of field operations for New Jersey-based Protec Documentation Services, which studies and monitors building demolitions.

'It's really been fascinating in a way,' he said. 'We've been able to watch the birth of the completely out-of-control allegations that could not be true for so many reasons.'

Among the most basic of those, Blanchard said, is that there's a consensus that the collapse of the towers began at or near the point where the planes entered the buildings, rather than at the base, where traditional demolition occurs. That means that the explosives would have had to survive the initial crash and superheated fires until they were detonated - for nearly an hour in the case of one tower, 102 minutes in the case of the other.

'That's absolutely impossible,' Blanchard said.

Beyond that, he said, planting the explosives in secret would have been an incredible logistical undertaking.

But to the growing Sept. 11 conspiracy movement, Jones provides what even advocates concede they had been lacking: a scientific approach backed up with meticulous data analysis and carefully devised experimental testing."