Analysis of the Evan Fairbanks Video


In the famous Fairbanks footage there is a reflection of the plane in the wall behind the man who looks up. The Web Fairy comments on this, but not beyond pointing out that it is there. She calls it a shadow, but it is obviously meant to be a reflection, not a shadow. Parts of it are white, for instance, and shadows are not white.
      First I checked to be sure it was perfectly synchronized with the plane above, which it is, close enough. Then I noticed that it was reversed, with the whiter wing below (whereas in the image above, the whiter wing is above). At first I thought this was confirmation, until I thought about it some more.
      Finally I realized that there is no way for a reflection to be there at all. There is no way for a reflection of the plane to appear on that surface. That surface is nearer to us, the viewer, than the WTC Tower behind it. The airplane is crashing into the WTC and is therefore in the same optical plane as the tower. You cannot create a reflection in a mirror that is nearer to you, of an object that is farther away from you than the mirror.

Just consider how the light would travel from the plane to the camera. There is no possible angle that it can reflect from that surface. Whoever decided to manipulate this film treats that surface as if it were just behind the WTC, in which case it might reflect a same-size image like this. As it is, it can't reflect any size image since the image cannot bounce from that surface and reach our eye, or the camera.

And even if the wall had been slightly behind the WTC, this still would not have caused the reflection to reverse. In that case we would see an unreversed image. The mirrored wall would have to slope back at some angle (about 45 degrees, in this case), in order to send any image of the plane to the camera, but the image would not be reversed. It would be just like the primary image, only squashed vertically a bit.

The only way you would get a reversed image is if the airplane were being reflected in a pool directly below the tower. But in order to see that reversed image, you would have to be looking at both the plane and its reflection from some height above the ground. You cannot see a reflection in a pool from ground level, unless you are right at the edge of the pool.

But that is not all. By carefully measuring the plane in the video (not the reflection but the main image) I found that the wingspan of the plane is greater than its length. A big surprise, since not many planes have this. If the plane is at an angle to the eye, then the wingspan can look smaller than it is, but never larger than it is. The plane in the video is is at no angle that would change the appearance of its length. These two facts taken together mean that the plane in the video must have a wingspan greater than its length, even accounting for all possible angular distortion. The most likely candidate for this is the 777-200LR, which is a similar but slightly larger boeing twin engine plane. The 767 is not a candidate, since in all models the length exceeds the wingspan. The film fakers have apparently used footage of a 777, thinking no one would notice. But it is easy for anyone to do the measurements right on the screen. That plane is not a 767 and therefore it cannot be flight 175. If it is not a 767 and is not flight 175, then it is most likely a faked image. That would corroborate all these claims that the plane entry looks wrong.
      But the reflection is clearly faked. Why would anyone fake a reflection of a real plane? We don't need further confirmation in this footage that the plane is there, since we can supposedly see it. The only answer is that the fakers got too cute.