9/11 conspiracy theories don’t seem to be going away anytime soon. Not because the conspiracy theorists have a case, of course, but because such is the nature of confirmation bias. Indeed, as predicted, they are going more extreme. Since the evidence against them is pretty clear (there is a good resource here), the evidence must be explained away as well. Now, there is no lack of creativity in this respect among 9/11 truthers, but there is, to put it diplomatically, a certain failure of connect between the proposed explanations and reality.
Even though a rather large amount of photos, videos, and eyewitnesses documented airliners crashing into the towers, for instance, there was apparently not really any airplanes. You see, the government – in their cleverness – cleverly did something to disguise what really happened, and the “Hologram Theory” of 9/11 proposes that no planes hit the WTC; rather the World Trade Center was hit by “Cruise” type Missiles which appeared to the naked eye to be airliners through the use of sophisticated hologram technology. Meet Rosalee Grable, one the the theory’s leading proponents. When one eyewitness described the ‘airplane’ he saw thusly: “It just disappeared. It disappeared like a, like a, bad special effect. Disappeared right into the building,” Grable has the explanation ready, and it is detailed here.
One could only wish the government were as effective and competent as this purported explanation requires. “This is well within reach of the military technology and the rabidly insane intentions of the Bush-Clinton idiocracy,” says the Hologram-theorists, but their diagnosis may be somewhat misplaced. Of course, some proponents of the hologram theory also think the missiles were really UFOs, since that’s a nice way to combine two strands of crackpottery into a single unified strand of loon.
Even other 9/11 truthers (e.g. Eric Salter) think the idea is silly, but don’t really have anything better themselves.
Other “no-planers” include the notoriously unhinged NicoHaupt, a dissident among truthers who – in line with an idea he may or may not have acquired from this South Park episode – accuses the other 9/11 conspiracy theorists to be in a conspiracy against him.
Diagnosis: Ultimate proof that if you can dream up a silly hypothesis, you can be sure that there are already people who believe it. Even central 9/11 truthers (e.g. Steven Jones) think these guys are nuts.