In the 18 years since the 9/11 attacks, the kinds of conspiracy theories that swirled around the World Trade Center attacks in Manhattan have touch the crash of Flight 93, to0. Here, in PM's debunking originally published in 2005, we take on the myths about the flight.
Cockpit recordings indicate the passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 teamed up to attack their hijackers, forcing down the plane near Shanksville, in southwestern Pennsylvania. But conspiracy theorists assert Flight 93 was destroyed by a heat-seeking missile from an F-16 or a mysterious white plane. Some theorists add far-fetched elaborations: No terrorists were aboard, or the passengers were drugged. The wildest is the "bumble planes" theory, which holds that passengers from Flights 11, 175 and 77 were loaded onto Flight 93 so the U.S. government could kill them.
