MY EARLIER POST ON FLIGHT 93 CONSPIRACY THEORIES generated a lot of mail. There were several points made:

1. The seismic evidence I referred to only demonstrates that the aircraft hit the ground more or less in one piece, not that it wasn’t shot down.

This is true. And the Korean Air Lines 747 that was shot down by the Soviets did stay in one piece. BUT — it was a 747, a much bigger plane with four engines.

2. The government acts like it’s hiding something.

There’s some truth to this. However, the government often acts that way when it has nothing to hide. It’s been refusing to release the final minutes of the voice recordings from the Challenger and I know what’s in them. Nothing especially incriminating.

3. People saw a military plane.

I’ve seen reports of that, but most accounts suggest it was a business plane in the neighborhood that air controllers asked to take a look.

4. There was a story about a passenger who reported an explosion and white smoke via his cellphone just before the crash.

Yes, there was. I linked it here on September 11, as well as here earlier this week. I emailed Dennis Roddy, the reporter who originally filed that story, and here’s what he said in response:

Never cleared that one up, except that he heard some kind of noise and saw a puff of smoke, but the phone went dead just then and by that point the plane was upsidedown, which could have meant any number of things, including smoke, and noise.

Interestingly, depending on the nature of the roll, you can actually turn a plane upside down and not lose gravity. We dug and dug all we could and the best we could verify was:

1. There was an order to shoot the plane down.

2. Pilots got within 14 minutes of the point at which they were ready to take them down.

3. The government adamantly denies any shootdown and nobody has come forth with any eyewitnesses who saw it being shot or burning, and this includes many witnesses who watched it roar up Route 30 before veering off, tipping and disappearing behind the treeline before it hit the ground.

This seems to me to put the shootdown/coverup conspiracy theory as thoroughly to bed as such things can be put to bed.

What’s missing from the analysis is, in my mind, any motivation. Assume the worst: that the passengers had gotten control of the plane, but that it had been shot down anyway because the fighter pilot(s) didn’t get the word in time. Is that really something to cover up?

Now I can spin a better conspiracy theory than that, because I’m an imaginative guy: it was shot down by an experimental military plane that happened to be in the area and that looked like a business jet, and that used some sort of laser or EMF weapon that left the plane intact but out of commission and crashing. And the government’s covering it up because they don’t want to reveal the existence of the weapon.

Great conspiracy theory, except for the total lack of evidence supporting it. (Hey, maybe they used one of Dennis Kucinich’s space-based mind control beams!). Occam’s razor suggests that we might as well stick with the simpler, and far more likely to be true, likelihood that the plane crashed as a result of the struggle.

A couple of readers said they were surprised to see me abandon my usual skepticism. I haven’t. It’s just that I’m skeptical of conspiracy theories, too. You want to convince me? Show me some evidence.

UPDATE: John Hawkins posts a photo I hadn’t seen before.