From LDS PATRIOT

My name is Robert Cronk and I have been infor­mal­ly inves­ti­gat­ing the evi­dence, tes­ti­mo­ny, and the­o­ries sur­round­ing 9/11 for a while now and I have been fas­ci­nat­ed by what I have expe­ri­enced. Hope­ful­ly I’ll be able to offer a dif­fer­ent point of view than the oth­er mul­ti­tudes of peo­ple out there talk­ing about 9/11.

You’ve seen them. Some of them are sell­ing a DVD or a book. Oth­ers seem to be doing it for pop­u­lar­i­ty. Some have actu­al­ly put their career or rep­u­ta­tion on the line. Still oth­ers seem to strug­gle with the pride of “being right” above all else — some­times I fall into that cat­e­go­ry too — oops.

In my esti­ma­tion, most of these peo­ple, myself includ­ed, believe that they’re on to some­thing that nobody else has found and they believe they are hon­est­ly just “seek­ing the truth.” In many cas­es, I have found that they have a vest­ed inter­est in their par­tic­u­lar the­o­ry being right and in my expe­ri­ence it seems that these vest­ed inter­ests get in the way of real­ly “seek­ing the truth” above all else. So I’ll throw out my point of view and let you be the judge.

First of all, I’m not an expert in physics, struc­tur­al engi­neer­ing, or real­ly any oth­er rel­e­vant field involv­ing 9/11. I am a soft­ware engi­neer — a com­put­er geek. You know — I’m one of those guys who sit in a dark cubi­cle some­where, eyes glazed over, eat­ing piz­za and writ­ing code to make com­put­ers do amaz­ing things like send email, bal­ance your check­book, or let you play soli­taire while your boss isn’t look­ing.

A large part of my career has dealt with accu­rate­ly com­pre­hend­ing and mod­el­ing real­i­ty in a com­put­er — that’s what most com­put­er geeks do. For exam­ple, if your busi­ness deals with mon­ey and goods, we would write a pro­gram that mod­els the move­ment of that mon­ey and those goods so that you can track it and report on it. This is usu­al­ly done by com­bin­ing my own research and evi­dence with infor­ma­tion gath­ered dur­ing inter­views with peo­ple who are experts in what­ev­er it is we’re try­ing to mod­el.

I then go through all of the infor­ma­tion, resolv­ing con­flicts between the evi­dence and people’s views of real­i­ty, and final­ly come up with (hope­ful­ly) an accu­rate mod­el of real­i­ty to pro­gram into the com­put­er. Any inac­cu­ra­cies in the mod­el end up caus­ing prob­lems for the cus­tomer and end up mak­ing a lot more work for me and so I try to get it right the first time and I try to be rig­or­ous as I build the mod­el — get­ting all the facts nailed down com­plete­ly before cod­ing any­thing up on the com­put­er.

As I have done this over the years, I have learned a lot about fig­ur­ing out what is true and what is false when I look at a set of infor­ma­tion. This is the expe­ri­ence that I use as I inves­ti­gate 9/11.

What’s that? You want me to be qui­et about all of this com­put­er stuff and get to the point? Ok, ok — Back in Octo­ber of 2005, a friend of mine intro­duced me to the work of one Pro­fes­sor Steven E. Jones — a pro­fes­sor at BYU. Since that time, I have stud­ied and researched the top­ics con­tained in his paper and pre­sen­ta­tions. I also attend­ed a pre­sen­ta­tion that he gave at UVSC as well as receiv­ing var­i­ous ver­sions of the Pow­er­Point slides used in those pre­sen­ta­tions.

I have also had con­tin­u­ing email cor­re­spon­dence with Pro­fes­sor Jones regard­ing the con­tent of his pre­sen­ta­tions and his paper enti­tled “Why Indeed Did the WTC Build­ings Col­lapse?” Through­out this exchange, I have found Pro­fes­sor Jones to be a very kind and civ­il per­son as I have inter­act­ed with him and I thank him for that.

In this series of arti­cles, I want to describe my inter­ac­tions with him as well as work­ing through his paper and pre­sen­ta­tion slides. I would like to tell the sto­ry of what I have found.

Why am I doing this? Don’t I have some­thing bet­ter to do? I could think of a few things I’d rather be doing, but my goal here is to pub­lish the truth and error that I have found through­out this process.

I believe that this coun­try is becom­ing more and more divid­ed over these issues and I have found that much of what is divid­ing us is root­ed in mis­lead­ing quotes, incom­plete infor­ma­tion, tes­ti­mo­ny tak­en out of con­text, assump­tions made in igno­rance, all com­bined with flawed the­o­ries that are based on the afore­men­tioned mess.

I want to reveal these things in an objec­tive way to give the casu­al researcher of 9/11 events anoth­er point of view. I will do my best to keep my own feel­ings and the­o­ries out of this dis­cus­sion. That’s hard to do and I’ll prob­a­bly fail at times but I’m sure you’ll for­give me.

Cur­rent­ly I do not sup­port any spe­cif­ic the­o­ry. I am there­fore open to any the­o­ry, though I must admit that my research so far has me lean­ing toward some the­o­ries and away from oth­ers. Let’s get to it, shall we?

On Tue 18 Oct 2005, I received an email from a friend of mine con­cern­ing one Pro­fes­sor Jones from BYU who was inves­ti­gat­ing the events of 9/11. It had a Pow­er­Point pre­sen­ta­tion attached to it. I had been look­ing into the events of 9/11 for a while at that point and so I was inter­est­ed in tak­ing a look at it.

The email was a for­ward­ed email from Jones to my friend and then to me. In the part that Pro­fes­sor Jones wrote, he said, “…if any of you spot errors or weak argu­ments in the enclosed pre­sen­ta­tion, please let me know.”

I opened up the pre­sen­ta­tion slides and noticed sev­er­al things that caught my atten­tion. And when I say “caught my atten­tion”, I mean “errors or weak argu­ments”. I want­ed to dis­cuss these things with Pro­fes­sor Jones direct­ly and so I emailed him the next day.

Before I get to the first email, I would like to explain my approach. It is based on my dis­cus­sions of sev­er­al top­ics with peo­ple over the years rang­ing from whether or not the moon land­ing hap­pened to what hap­pened on 9/11.

My approach has been influ­enced by all of my inter­ac­tions with con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists in the past. One thing I try to avoid is what I have called the “con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry pat­tern”. It goes like this: First, I find some evi­dence that refutes one of the theory’s sup­port­ing facts, next, the defend­er of the the­o­ry essen­tial­ly avoids the evi­dence I pre­sent­ed and then brings up sev­er­al (usu­al­ly more than five) oth­er facts that sup­pos­ed­ly also sup­port the the­o­ry.

This has the effect of keep­ing the over­all the­o­ry pro­tect­ed since the issue in ques­tion doesn’t get resolved — rather, the the­o­ry seems to get even stronger as all of these oth­er sup­port­ing (but thus far not proven) “facts” are brought up.

In my expe­ri­ence, it turns out that those oth­er “facts” usu­al­ly end up being a large pile of debunk­able (is that a word?) “maybes”. It’s as though pro­tect­ing the the­o­ry is more impor­tant than uncov­er­ing the truth — as if they have such a strong­ly held belief that their the­o­ry is true that they refuse to let any of the sup­port­ing “facts” be debunked because any debunked “fact” threat­ens what­ev­er vest­ed inter­est they may have in the the­o­ry being true.

They might also twist a fact into a pret­zel shape so that it can fit into their the­o­ry. Of course I have found that this hap­pens to most peo­ple defend­ing their the­o­ries and so this behav­ior is not nec­es­sar­i­ly proof of any­thing, it’s just some­thing to keep in mind as we go through this. My idea is that once all of the facts are proven true or false indi­vid­u­al­ly, then and only then can the true ones be gath­ered togeth­er to form a the­o­ry.

I didn’t know if Pro­fes­sor Jones would behave this way or not and so I ini­tial­ly tried to avoid the “con­spir­a­cy pat­tern” by ask­ing him not to address mul­ti­ple items at once. I should have been clear­er, as you’ll soon see. I also want­ed to address the fact that Pro­fes­sor Jones is a physics pro­fes­sor (i.e. not a struc­tur­al engi­neer) and so I
was con­fused as to why he was gloss­ing over, dis­miss­ing, and assert­ing his opin­ion on so many struc­tur­al engi­neer­ing issues that were out­side of his area of exper­tise. He seemed to do this with his var­i­ous polit­i­cal asser­tions too — as we’ll see lat­er.

I’ll only cov­er the first cou­ple of emails and then I’ll switch from this detailed mode to a sum­ma­ry mode where I’ll sum­ma­rize what we talked about and bring up unre­solved issues from his paper and pre­sen­ta­tion. Pro­fes­sor Jones and I are com­mu­ni­cat­ing about these issues via email to this day though there was a peri­od where we had no inter­ac­tion. This first email will serve as an intro­duc­tion.