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My name is Robert McCoy, I'm an architect

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I have a bachelor of architecture

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from the University of California in Berkeley in 1963.

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I've been licensed in California since about 1964.

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From about 1965 until about 1985 most of my experience

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has been in high rise, multi-story steel buildings.

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The first major high rise building that I was involved with

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was the headquarters for Pacific Gas and Electric Company in San Francisco.

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It's a 34 story building,

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about a 1.250,000 square feet in the high rise portion.

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At about the same that the World Trade Center was designed and built in New York.

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In fact we corresponded with Yamasaki's office at the time

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to discuss certain aspects of their building and ours.

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Both buildings were designed for instance

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to resist the impact of an airplane flying into them.

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While with that firm in San Francisco, Hirsch and Knowles,

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I also participated in the design of 575 Market Street,

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a building for Standard Oil, one of their headquarters buildings.

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It was 44 stories.

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100 Pine Street which is 34 stories.

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And following PG&E I finished up the final design, redesign and construction

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of the St. Mary's hospital and medical center in San Francisco.

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Following that stint I was in private practice for a a period

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when William Perrera acquired my firm to give him a presence in San Francisco.

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He had a couple of high rise buildings to do, one of which was One Sansum

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which was initially designed as a 54 story building,

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subsequently reduced to about 44 stories when Citicorp came into the project.

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As those buildings were under way I was needed in Los Angeles

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and relocated to southern California

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where I was the project director and chief operating officer for the joint venture

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for the design and construction of the Tom Bradley International Terminal

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at Los Angeles International Airport.

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That building is about a million square feet.

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It depends upon where you measure it,

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but it's a good, solid 5 story steel frame building.

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The footprint on the departure level for instance

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is in excess of 3 football fields side by side.

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It's a pretty good size open air steel framed building.

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Those buildings in New York have a very strong exterior skin.

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The columns are 3 foot 4 on center and they're about 14 inches wide.

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There's about a 42 inch spandrel at each floor of steel.

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The net opening where the window is,

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if you discount the fireproofing and the rest of it

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is forty or fifty percent of the exterior skin.

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When those planes hit those buildings,

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they were shredded the moment they started into the building.

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Most of the fuel, most of the plane was torn apart

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as it went through the outside skin.

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I've seen photographs since that show

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that the columns and some of the beams were severed in the North Tower.

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Which was I guess not surprising considering the force of the impact,

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the weight of the plane and the speed.

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But the diagrams that I've seen show that those planes were in the...

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That everyone else has concluded the same thing I had the planes were shredded.

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The fireball was on the outside.

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The impact shredding the plane would create enough heat to explode that fuel.

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And that fuel moving at 500, 550 miles an hour

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as whatever's left is going through the building

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or on the outside is seeking oxygen to explode and burn.

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It was gone in moments after it hit the building.

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So in rethinking it,

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I discovered that there were others who had had similar thoughts.

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That's when I came across Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth.

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Let's talk a little bit about the impact on the two towers.

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On the North Tower the plane took out about 60 columns or so.

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I read somewhere about 60% of the columns and some of the beams.

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But the building didn't deform and collapse.

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The nature of the steel frame for that exterior skin supporting the exterior wall

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of that of those buildings is a truss.

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It's a solid truss.

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They got columns at 3 foot 4 on center

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and you've got 48 inch deep spandrel beams at 12 foot on center

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and they're all welded together, they're put together in a group

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and erected in the building in tiers three floors high several bays wide.

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The buildings were solid.

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They lost columns, they lost beams but the buildings didn't collapse.

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On the South tower the building was hit pretty well towards a corner

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and it took out the columns along one wall.

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And the building began to cave in, as we saw in the videos.

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The top leaned over and began to twist before it started going down.

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Now we have the mass of that building from up above coming down.

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It's going to begin to impact the whole building

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as it comes as everyone has described.

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But it's going to come down in a pancake fashion,

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in a staccato kind of a way: bang, bang, bang, bang, bang as it comes.

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It's not going to come as a smooth fall.

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And you're going to see puffs of pulverizing concrete

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each time a series of floors hits another floor.

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I didn't see that, I saw billowing clouds of dust when I viewed the videos.

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Keep in mind the steel supporting this building in the middle is very strong.

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Those columns were probably 4 times as strong as they needed to be

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to support the dead weight above them.

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So now you have this building coming down in a staccato, pancaking effect,

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or that's what we're lead to believe

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and the columns below are just simply not there,

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not resisting it, not stopping it.

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And they came all the way to the ground.

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From what I understand, the buildings actually accelerated as they came down,

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meaning they were not getting resistance

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from these massive columns in the center of the core of this building.

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The core of this building was very heavy.

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True, it was a lot of holes, mostly holes, mostly voids,

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but it had beams in all directions and it had columns on a fairly regular spacing.

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Something on the order of magnitude of 33, 35 feet on center,

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some of them closer together than that.

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So it's accelerating as it's coming down.

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There's not meeting resistance from all of the columns,

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these massive columns inside the building.

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And when you get to the bottom of the building, they're huge columns.

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Where were those columns?

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Why weren't they resisting

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and punching through the mass of the building coming down from above?

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Where were they?

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Let's go back again to the top of the building.

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Remember I mentioned that the top began to buckle over and twist.

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If this building were truly severely damaged

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at the floors where the plane went through

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and came down as an intact block above that,

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I would've expected the twisting and the tipping to have continued.

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I really would've expected the top section to have continued to veer off

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in the direction it was headed.

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It would've gone over the edge and started down top first.

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That didn't happen.

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So when we return to Building 1

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the first notice of failure appears to be the television antenna on top

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coming down into the building.

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It's coming down in the middle of the building

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where the building is mostly holes for elevators, duct shafts, pipe shafts,

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and that sort of thing.

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There's nothing in the middle of the building to burn.

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How did that steel soften enough to allow the television mast

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to sink almost straight down into the building

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and then the building began to collapse?

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Next when we talk about Building 7;

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that building wasn't hit by a plane.

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We were told that there were fuel tanks to run emergency generators.

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The fuel, according to the NIST study,

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wasn't a contributing factor to the collapse.

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Their theory is office furnishings.

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The photos don't seem to show that the building was burning all over.

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The photo's I've seen seem to indicate

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that there were isolated fires scattered around the building

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and not the whole building burning.

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NIST would have us to believe that these were typical office fires,

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scattered office fires if you will, brought this building down.

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Burned for a period of 6 hours or so.

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Typical office furnishing,

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isolated office furnishings would burn for 20, 30 minutes or so

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and spread over time, burn out in one area,

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begin to burn more in another area as the fire spread.

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In a building like this, to have burned 6 hours

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it would've had to burn through quite a number of floors.

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It would've been visible on the outside as the fire leapt up from floor to floor

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going up as it has been in other buildings like the First Interstate Tower

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when it burned in Los Angeles.

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That doesn't seem to be the case with Building 7.

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It appears from watching the videos

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that there were isolated fires on several floors

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but they weren't leaping up the outside of the building.

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Once this building begins to break,

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and then it begins to fall with the acceleration of gravity.

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The building is accelerating as it comes down.

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There's no resistance until the building gets down maybe half way and

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and finally is beginning to encounter maybe some of its own debris,

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lower down in the building.

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But it still comes to the ground in a very short order.

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And when it's all finished, the outside walls from the lower floors

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are piled one on top of another right in the middle of the building.

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Just like a house of cards if it were coming down.

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I find that a little hard to believe.

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If this building were to have collapsed due to fire,

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I would have expected it to behave much more like a fire in your fireplace.

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If you build a fire in your fireplace and you light it

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as it burns and the heat begins to build,

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you'll get a localized failure here and then a localized failure there

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and the logs will shift a little and shift around

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and over time all of the logs will become fully engulfed in flame.

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It'll get hot in the middle and they'll slowly burn themselves away

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until ultimately you get a total collapse.

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But the fire is fully engulfing and involving

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all of the wood that's left in the fireplace.

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Keep this in mind, that's wood burning in a fireplace.

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Or wood burning in a wood-framed building.

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It's not steel which doesn't burn.

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Especially steel that is covered in fireproofing.

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There's no indication that I've seen

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that the fireproofing was removed from Building 7.

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Further, since the mid 60's I've tried to follow high rise fires

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because they're something we worry a lot about as we design these buildings.

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And I'm not aware of any high rise building

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that has come down as a result of fires.

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Even though some of these fires have been much hotter, much longer lasting.

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The First Interstate fire was very hot in Los Angeles,

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as a high rise fire goes.

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I can't remember even a partial collapse in any of these buildings

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that I've watched over the years.

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I started in San Francisco doing high rise buildings

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because that was a special interest of mine.

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I paid close attention to them for the last 40, 45 years

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and I think that's probably why I'm still interested

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in what happened at the World Trade Center.

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Something about the way those buildings came down

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doesn't add up in my mind.

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There was a lot of good work that I've seen in what few things I've seen in NIST.

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But when you look at the whole is when it begins to fall apart.

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How can those massive steel columns

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that are supporting the weight of that building virtually disappear?

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Why aren't they poking up straight out of that rubble

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at the bottom of the building?