Alyssa Grenning

Confession: Sometimes, late at night, I like to go online and argue with truthers. Or I used to. It would go like this:

Somebody posts a photo on a message board with a title like "Image of the Pentagon Impact area on 9/11. How the hell can anyone with a brain think this was caused by a Boeing 757?" I click. It's a low-resolution ground-level shot of the smoking Pentagon. Using Photoshop, or MS Paint maybe, somebody has drawn a pair of circles — one around some flames on the left and another around a damaged piece of wall on the right. I go to the comments.

Ah, yes, there it is: the single missile theory.

The SMT is pretty simple: What if it wasn't Flight 77 that hit the Pentagon, but a cruise missile (or, as per the most extreme iterations, a missile cloaked in a hologram to make it look like a plane)? No matter how wildly it swerves from most eyewitness accounts, not to mention the official account described in the 9/11 Commission Report, the SMT has likely persisted because (A) that hole in the wall looks kinda small and (B) unlike the attacks on the World Trade Center, no clear footage of the attack on the Pentagon has been released.

All we have is five frames from a parking lot security camera that seem to show the plane crossing the Pentagon lawn and exploding on the western wall. Other footage, from traffic cams and such, was supposedly confiscated by federal investigators soon after the attack and has not yet seen the light of day.

The SMT really bugs me. By the time the Pentagon was attacked, the perpetrators had already proven they could hijack planes and fly them into buildings. Why would they need a missile an hour later? I wrote something to that effect on the message board. Most people said they didn't know. One person said this:

"I don't think there were any planes. There is a video out there that compiles footage from all news broadcasts around the planet and surmises they were all off of one feed. Seriously, if there is no plane at the Pentagon or the field, then why would there be one at the WTC? It's too easy, the people that were called in as 'witnesses' all worked for the networks and therefore are inherently biased based on the BS we are being fed."

That's one of the nagging little problems with the 9/11 Truth Movement. Just when you think you've found a starting point to discuss the issues, the rabbit hole goes even deeper. The answer is often a larger conspiracy.

The bigger problem with the 9/11 Truth Movement is that there's no such thing as a unified, coherent 9/11 Truth Movement.

Alyssa Grenning

On Jan. 31, 2011, Jon Gold drove from his home in Plymouth Meeting to Washington, D.C., and handcuffed himself to the White House fence. He had a big, professionally made sign that read, "We were LIED to about 9/11." Even though he'd hyped the stunt on his website for a month beforehand, his friend with a video camera was the only other activist to show up and support him. Police, park police and maybe even Secret Service did stop by at various times. He was eventually freed with bolt-cutters and arrested.

Gold is the kind of guy journalists like to call "a man without a country." He believes his actual country has covered up the true nature of its biggest tragedy. And the people you'd think would be his people, the truthers, he wants nothing to do with.

One of the 260-plus videos Gold has uploaded onto his YouTube channel illustrates his feelings about most of his "fellow" activists. Circus music. A title card that says, "The following crap hurts the cause of 9/11 Justice." Then a laundry list of the stuff that often gets his peers labeled as crackpots: missiles, holograms, CGI, mini-nukes, laser beams from space, chemtrails (more on those later), man-made earthquakes, UFOs, the Illuminati, the Jews, plane-swaps, hijackers who didn't die, and about a dozen other things.

"It's sad. There are people on the fringe, the authors, who constantly write books, who promote crappy information, and people who mean well pick up on this and they start pushing it." This is Gold, when he and I meet up for coffee near South Street. "There was a time back in 2006 when we were very, I don't know if you would say powerful, but we had a lot of members and the media started to focus on us. But who did they focus on? They focused on people like Kevin Barrett, who [says] Israel's responsible for everything, you know? They focused on Webster Tarpley [a promoter of the "9/11 was an inside job" idea], who's just a charlatan. They focused on the fringe."

Gold laughs when I ask whether he ever finds himself arguing with that fringe.

"All the time. I call them out as often as possible because I want there to be clear evidence that I am not associated with those people."

After Sept. 11, Gold got swept up in the "patriotic binge" — waving the flag, supporting the war. Some of that started to erode as he watched the news. He remembers CNN reporting Jan. 29, 2002, that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney each separately asked Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle to limit the scope of the post-9/11 investigation. Says Gold: "And I thought, why would the vice president and the president, of all people, not want to know exactly how and why this happened so as to make sure it could never happen again?"

Then there was the infamous Aug. 6, 2001, President's Daily Brief, eventually made public, titled "Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S." "After that came out and I saw that we were being lied to, and then I saw how they were using the 9/11 attacks, I just — I was furious, and it was off to the races."

He's been at it for nearly a decade. "I'm very old-school 9/11 Truth, which means I support the families and I support the responders," he says. That's something you don't hear in most truther rhetoric: mentions of the 2,977 who died, and their families, and the first responders, and their quest for health care. Gold helped fund the 2006 documentary 9/11: Press for Truth, in which the families of victims, like the Jersey Girls, express their frustration in getting answers from the government about who knew what ahead of time, which warnings we ignored, and why more wasn't done that day. Gold also tends to cite mainstream sources, like FBI documents and news reports, on his website and at public appearances. He espouses no theory.

"I know more about 9/11 than probably most people on the planet, and I don't know what happened that day, I don't know who was ultimately responsible. But I look at 9/11 as a crime as opposed to an act of war, and as with every crime, there are suspects for that crime, and along with Osama bin Laden, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 19 hijackers, elements within our government and other governments had more than earned the title of suspect for the crime. More than earned."

I'm on the second floor of an unmarked building in Northern Liberties watching a cartoon about the evils of the Federal Reserve Bank. There are about 20 of us, maybe fewer, sitting on couches. The plot revolves around a cool dude telling his clueless friend about how the Fed — depicted as a monstrous, black tentacled beast — is a privately owned and utterly unregulated money-sucker. The movie's kinda funny and mostly pretty straightforward. There's a lot of Google-able stuff about the gold standard. But it does take a dubious detour to explain how JFK got assassinated not long after announcing his intentions to end the Fed. During the quieter parts, we can hear the jubilant outbursts of a yoga class through the walls.

Not 9/11-related, as far as I know. Why am I here? Well, this is a public meeting by a group currently called Truth, Freedom, Prosperity, but they used to call themselves Philly 9/11 Truth, and they still list that as one of their concerns, along with financial and economic freedom, alternative energy technologies, "legalization of nature," etc.

After the movie, organizer Michael Salvi, a friendly guy in a mock-Phillies T-shirt ("Liberty" in the team's script on the front, "Ron Paul" on the back), leads an open forum discussion. A couple people discredit the JFK thing, there's talk about what the average person can do about the Fed, somebody asks if he should buy gold for "when the whole thing comes crashing down."