Note: This is part one of my series on the 9/11 terror attacks. The series will conclude this coming Friday, Sept. 11 with my study, “The 9/11 Terror Attacks as Alchemical Process: The Infernal Marriage of the Occult and Psychological Warfare.”
Prologue: The Game of Terror

There are two decks of cards in play in the inaugural spectacular gaming of the new century and millennium: the standard deck which is used in “21,” also known as BlackJack, and the Rider-Waite Tarot, a fixture in fortune telling.

The 21st century commenced on January 1, 2001. It was on that New Year’s Day when passersby encountered in a Seattle park a black monolith nine feet tall, replicating the mysterious alien “sentinel” which was the predominant iconic symbol in Stanley Kubrick’s film,“2001: A Space Odyssey,” where it was associated with a planetary “Star Gate” suggestive of a cosmic portal. It was explained that this highly symbolic object had been installed, complete with a concrete footing, by “pranksters.”
Some nine months after the installation of the 2001 monolith, the World Trade Center was destroyed and the Pentagon seriously damaged.
Searching the Tarot cards for a symbolic correspondence, we encounter one of the most searing archetypes in the deck, the number sixteen Tower card. It features flames pouring out of a tall building and the people within forced by the fire to jump. We further note that the number five is by definition intrinsic to a pentagon. Five added to sixteen equals twenty-one.
Someone seems to have wanted to ceremonially connect the New York and Washington terrorism to 21, which occurred in year 2 zero zero 1, in the 21st century. “21” is a “game of hazard” known as BlackJack. Who or what is “BlackJack”?
Blackjack is a circa 1890s synonym for the game of 21. It was coined by card-playing Klondike gold miners familiar with the mineral sphalerite, also called “zinc blende” (zinc sulfide).
In Dawson’s Game: Blackjack and the Klondike (2010), historian Thierry Depaulis suggests that miners assigned the 21 card game the moniker blackjack which for hundreds of years had been the traditional nickname for the dark-colored ore sphalerite.
The scientific name for this mineral, which was often mistaken for galena, is derived from the Greek sphaleros (σφαλερός) denoting “treacherous, deceptive, liable to make you slip.” The Hudson Institute of Mineralogy states that it was also called Ruby Jack.
How the Twin Towers Fell: “It Has to be Magic”
BlackJack is a phenomenon, a treacherous, deceptive conjured force.
Another “slip-up” awaits us around the epistemological corner, the theory of false solutions.
Over the next seven days and beyond we will witness the exposition of the Group Mind’s hive affirmation of false solutions to the many mysteries of 9/11.
Those “solutions” will be disseminated by corporate media, government and academia as inviolably sacred, infallible truth which only a sinister or sick individual would challenge or contradict. We have been taught that all decent people believe this about skeptics (“truthers”).
Spain’s Juan Tamariz was universally acclaimed as the West’s pre-eminent master of close-up magic performed with decks of cards.
Michael S. Rosenwald writes: Juan Tamariz’s “theory of false solutions’ was a way to engineer deception. Scientists who specialize in attention studied it.
“During the execution of the trick, Tamariz suggests in a very subtle way a possible explanation of how the trick is being performed, to eventually show at the very end that this explanation is in fact not possible,’ the neuroscientist Rodrigo Quian Quiroga wrote in the journal Current Biology. By forcing the spectators to pay attention to a particular method, he is at the same time forcing them to disregard many other possible ones” (end quote). (Cf. “Magic and Cognitive Neuroscience,” Current Biology no. 26, May 23, 2016).
Master magicians formulate how we think, leading to the occlusion of our powers of reason.
In Mr. Tamariz’s system a trick should leave spectators so amazed and bewildered that they “surrender” and accept that “It has to be magic.”
A kind of tacit agreement is reached: the audience consents to remain satisfied with being baffled, without becoming frustrated and demanding to know more.
By the magician focusing attention toward a series of false solutions, the spectators eventually stop looking for the real ones.
In the face of the evidence that the Twin Towers and World Trade Center Building 7 collapsed due to controlled demolition, brainwashed Americans can’t allow themselves to concur. Sensing that the official story of fuel from the burning airliners caused the massive towers to fall is false— since no other steel-framed skyscraper in history has ever suffered a total collapse from fire—they subconsciously resolve the cognitive dissonance by telling themselves, “It had to be magic.”
In The Magic Way: The Theory of False Solutions, Tamariz outlines his method: plant ersatz solutions in the spectator’s mind—sometimes only a hint, sometimes an obvious “sucker” clue.
In the next step, he shows those seemingly definitive solutions to be impossible—the top hat contains nothing; the sleeve is empty.
Psychologists of misdirection know that false solutions demoralize the percipient to the extent that he or she halts their search for the real one. This is the mental state of the majority of Americans.
The mind not captured by this process is the truth-seeking mind which consistently entertains possibilities contrary to that which has been propagated, whether by a magician on a theatrical stage, or by the magicians who operate from the theater of television and newspapers (no accusation of wrong-doing is leveled at the legacy of Mr. Tamariz, whose Revelation-of-the-Method appears to be from pure motives).
Certain Anomalies Which Tend to Show that the 9/11 Story as Hyped by the Establishment is Riddled with Fraud
Today I am bringing to your attention a microcosm of the fraud by which the false solutions to 9/11 are maintained. I leave to my neighbor Richard Gage and other intrepid scientists and engineers the heavy lifting necessary to convey the truth that the World Trade Center was demolished by thermite detonation.
Next week in part two this writer will endeavor to unfold the macrocosm — the fulfillment of the alchemical realization of the processing of humanity through psychological warfare embedded in the September 11 psychodrama.
As we approach the 25th anniversary, it will be excruciating to sit through the legacy media’s newscasts and “retrospectives” which will recycle the same phantasmagoria and disinformation that many of us know to be untrue. For example, World Trade Center Building Number Seven, which was not struck by a plane, went down and burned in what was patently a controlled demolition—contrary to the Establishment’s disinformation. The late Prof. David Ray Griffin wrote the best study thus far: The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7: Why the Final Official Report About 9/11 is Unscientific and False.
Black Boxes on Three of the Airliners Either Never Found or “Too Badly Damaged”
As you know, four airliners were said to be involved that day: the jets that struck the Twin Towers: American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175; the airliner that is said to have struck the Pentagon (American Flight 77), and United Airlines 93 which supposedly dived to the ground in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. (For what it’s worth, one of the definitions of the word shank is of a makeshift knife fashioned by prisoners for stabbing guards, police or fellow inmates).
The black boxes on board the jets that struck the Twin Towers were said to have never been found. The black boxes on the airliner that is alleged to have crashed into the Pentagon were recovered but are said to have been too badly damaged to yield any data.
With regard to Flight 93, the boxes were reported as recovered. The persons who have allegedly listened to the putative contents are the FBI and other government personnel, family members of Flight 93 victims, and the jury in the 2006 trial of Zacharias Moussaoui. Court personnel, lawyers, family members, reporters and other spectators in the courtroom also listened. The audio is otherwise sealed from public release due to the fact that the FBI claims it is “part of an ongoing investigation.”
The accounts of the listeners generally concur that it contains sounds of a chaotic and violent struggle, with English-speaking individuals attempting to reach “the cockpit,” and Arabic-speakers reacting to their approach, followed by the “crash.”
Found on 9/11: A Hijacker’s Passport
A hijacker’s passport is said to have drifted from the sky and was found on the ground in Manhattan.
Conflicting accounts from law enforcement and the media state that 1. It was found on or near the rubble of the Twin Towers. 2. It was handed to a detective by an anonymous man.
The passport supposedly belonged to Satam al-Suqami, officially identified as “one of the hijackers aboard American Airlines Flight 11.”
The 9/11 Commission’s account has it that after Flight 11 struck the North Tower at 8:46 a.m., according to New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik the passport was found by a passerby, who handed it to an NYPD detective on a street several blocks from the World Trade Center. This occurred before either tower collapsed.
An FBI chronology records that the passport was recovered on the street by a “civilian” and states that it was soaked in jet fuel.
The Commission’s later terrorist-travel monograph added the details omitted from the hearing: the New York City detective was Yuk H. Chin; the passerby was approximately 30 years old. He was wearing a business suit and disappeared without being identified.
Mr. Chin did not choose to question or detain this individual even though he possessed vital evidence linked to the terror attack, with no explanation concerning how he had obtained it. The mystery man walked up to a Manhattan detective, handed him a terrorist’s passport and was allowed to peremptorily walk away.
Detective Chin allegedly gave the passport to the FBI on September 11. The person who supposedly made the crucial initial discovery of the passport of Satam vanished from the evidentiary chain without his identity being disclosed or his contact information recorded.
The next day, September 12, ABC News reported that the passport of Satam had been recovered. The report did not state that Detective Chin had obtained it.
On September 15 the Associated Press gave a radically different account: “The passport of a suspected hijacker was found Saturday near the ruins of the World Trade Center…”
The AP story quoted FBI Assistant Director Barry Mawn. This account gave the impression that the passport had been discovered during the Ground Zero search of the World Trade Center rubble on Saturday, September 15.
The Mysterious Stranger
The tale that a police detective was summarily handed a vital piece of evidence connected to the worst terror attack on the homeland in American history by a mysterious stranger, without bothering to identify this person or hold him for questioning, strains credulity to the point where it enters the realm of the performative.
I surmise it is not intended that we believe it. The account signals to our subconscious a sense of theater, not police work.
In his novel The Mysterious Stranger, Mark Twain mocks mob psychology, the kind we have seen at work as Boobus Americanus swallows whole the official government and media line on 9/11.
In Twain’s story Satan repeatedly points out that human beings are extraordinarily susceptible to consensus opinion. An intrepid truth-teller may resist a mob temporarily, but most people eventually succumb to the approved hypnotic belief conveyed to them by the “authorities.”
I can’t help thinking that those who scripted the mysterious-stranger-who-passed-the-passport-of-Satam-to-the-detective, grinned at the prospect of the American people swallowing it whole.
Folklore supplies the characters, symbols, and narrative structure through which psychological warfare is theatrically imparted. During periods of intense psychological stress, people are led to interpret contemporary events through the lens of archetypal lore. They assign starring roles—victim, villain, traitor, savior, scapegoat—turning folklore into drama. I will have more to say about this in part two.
Air Traffic Control Evidence Erased
After the attacks, at about 11:40 a.m. on September 11, six air traffic controllers at the Federal Aviation Administration’s New York Air Route Traffic Control Center were assembled in a conference room known as “the Bat Cave.” They made an approximately hour-long recording in which each controller gave a first-person account of what he or she had experienced that morning.
These controllers had communicated with and tracked the jets which had struck the towers: American Flight 11 and United Flight 175. Their recollections were recorded only a few hours after the tragedy. Their information was invaluable to the investigation.
Michael McCormick, the manager of the FAA’s New York Air Route Traffic Control Center in Ronkonkoma, Long Island organized the meeting. Kevin Delaney, the center’s “quality-assurance manager” recorded it on a single cassette tape.
Whatever the contents of the cassette, someone in the FAA may have been sufficiently spooked by it to suppress its existence by keeping it secret.
This point is key: the tape’s existence was not reported to higher FAA levels or investigators. No one outside the FAA’s regional New York Center knew of the tape’s existence until the 9/11 Commission made inquiries in 2003, which uncovered references to it in an evidence log. The FBI did not endeavor to examine the FAA regional evidence log in 2001 or 2002.
On September 14, 2001 the FAA’s New York Center received an e-mail, directing it to retain all data and records for September 11. FAA regulations instruct that evidence like the cassette tape—an original record—must be retained for five years, in line with the agency’s retention requirements.
According to the Department of Transportation Inspector General’s investigation, an FAA quality-assurance manager destroyed the cassette sometime between December 2001 and February 2002, without authorization and without anyone outside the center having listened, transcribed, or copied it.
When one of the air traffic controllers wanted to listen to her own recorded account while preparing her written statement, she was refused access.
The FAA official who physically destroyed the tape was the Quality Assurance Manager at the FAA’s New York Air Route Traffic Control Center in Long Island. Contemporary reporting on the Inspector General’s findings describes him crushing the cassette, then cutting the magnetic tape into tiny pieces and distributing the pieces among several trash cans throughout the center. The Inspector General observed that this official had gone to considerable lengths to ensure that the tape would never leave the facility intact.
The Department of Transportation’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) referred the details of its investigation of the destruction of the recording to the US Attorney’s office in the Eastern District of New York to determine whether any criminal statutes had been violated. The US Attorney declined to pursue prosecution due to what it termed a lack of criminal intent. The only punishment the official who destroyed the invaluable recording received was a 20-day suspension without pay.
Why Record it and then Destroy It?
Afterward, the manager of the FAA’s New York Air Route Traffic Control Center is reported to have said that he ordered the recording of the air traffic controllers to create a contemporaneous record, out of concern that distressed controllers might take leave and be unavailable for timely written statements and law-enforcement interviews.
I submit for your consideration the following inquiry: whether the motive for making a recording of the account of the air traffic controllers very soon after the attacks was undertaken in order to determine how much they knew or suspected about the conspiracy, and that whatever was on the tape dangerously undercut the story that was being shaped for public consumption.
One bright spot to this cover-up may be that the erasure of their firsthand recollections spared the lives of the controllers, given that numerous witnesses to the conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy turned up on autopsy tables from unnatural causes, or from causes of death made to look natural, with a frequency that belies life insurance actuarial tables.
On the 25th anniversary of the inside job that was 9/11 the International Center for 9/11 Justice is debuting a documentary film, The Responders: Breaking the Silence (view the trailer), consisting of new evidence in the form of testimony by first responders who were on the scene on September 11 who believe the Twin Towers were brought down by explosives. These are uncensored accounts from those who risked their lives that day, and who have since answered the call to speak truth to power, whatever the cost.
Fact: the Twin Towers were destroyed by waves of thermite explosions which pulverized nearly all of the concrete, ejected multi-ton steel up to 600 feet in all directions, and fragmented human bodies so extremely that more than 40% of the victims have not been identified.
Next week: The 9/11 Terror Attacks as Alchemical Process.
For the Advancement of Knowledge Contra Cancel Culture
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Michael Hoffman is a former reporter for the New York bureau of the Associated Press and a former paid consultant to the news department of the New York Times. Three of his ten books have been published in translation in Japan and France.
FOR FURTHER RESEARCH
C-Span Interview with Richard Gage of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth
Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe (April, 2009), Department of Chemistry, University Copenhagen, Denmark. By Niels H. Harrit , Jeffrey Farrer , Steven E. Jones , Kevin R. Ryan , Frank M. Legge, Daniel Farnsworth, Gregg Roberts, James R. Gourley and Bradley R. Larsen
A Structural Reevaluation of the Collapse of World Trade Center 7 (March, 2020). J. Leroy Hulsey, Prof. of Structural Engineering, University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) Institute of Northern Engineering. Co-authors: Feng Xiao, PhD. and Zhili Quan, PhD.
Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Collapse? By Steven E. Jones, Department of Physics, Brigham Young University







Thank you Mr. Hoffman for making this a free article. I'm very grateful.
As someone that's spent 100's of hours studying this topic I had no idea about the tape recordings of the ATC's.
I will say this. Part of the show is the constant misdirection. To encourage the conspiracy minded by leaving bread crumbs in various directions some of which may hold threads of truth but ultimately lead down blind alleys and, of course, infighting among fellow truth seekers.
“Fact: the Twin Towers were destroyed by waves of thermite explosions which pulverized nearly all of the concrete, ejected multi-ton steel up to 600 feet in all directions, and fragmented human bodies so extremely that more than 40% of the victims have not been identified.”
I’m going on this ride with you but you have to physically explain how 90% of the steel in the buildings was turned to dust by thermite if you want to hold this ground.
I’m not saying you have to explain WHAT turned the steel to dust, mind you.