Missing Bodies
Questions About the Remains of Commandeered Flight Victims
Given the lack of public information about the four flights involved in the September 11th attack, the silence of air controllers, the alleged unreadability of the flight data and voice data black boxes, and oddities of the phone calls; reports about the identification of the victims' bodies are perhaps the most substantial evidence of what became of the flights.
The fate of Flight 93 victims is perhaps the least mysterious, although their identification took inordinately long for a jetliner that crashed into the ground. Somerset County Coroner Wallace Miller said that the identification was originally expected to take six months. On October 26, the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology DNA lab in Rockville, Maryland, which was tasked with identifying the victims using DNA testing, confirmed that 34 of the 44 people alleged to have been on Flight 93 had been identified. 1
The account of the fate of Flight 77 has been the most questioned by skeptics of the official story. The official investigation ended on November 16, 2001, declaring that 184 of 189 of those killed in the Pentagon attack had been identified. 2 Officials claimed that the remains of all but one of the people on Flight 77 were identified. Human remains were shipped to the mortuary at Dover Air Force Base and to the DNA Identification Laboratory in Rockville, Maryland for identification by forensic pathologists and anthropologists. Two of the forensic scientists who were enlisted in the effort were Drs. Douglas Owsley and Douglas Ubelaker, both of whom were also involved in the identifying the mutilated remains of the victims of the Waco Massacre. 3
Few among even the skeptics of the official story doubt that Flights 11 and 175 struck the North and South Towers, despite the vigorously promoted theories that the towers were hit by something other than the jetliners. 4 New York City's chief medical examiner, Dr. Charles Hirsch, reported about a year after the attack that 33 victims from Flight 11 and 12 victims from Flight 175 had been identified. 5 Dr. Hirsch, who was himself injured in the attack, would appear to be a credible authority.
References
2. Experts ID 184 Pentagon Fatalities, 1/11/02 [cached]
3. Skeleton Keys, WashingtonPost.com, 5/31/02 [cached]
4. The Phantom Planes Meme, 911review.com,
5. More than half of victims IDd, nydailynews.com, 9/11/02 [cached]