An honest person would admit that this is a mighty strange "Boeing 757 crash" scene--

"After calling for backup from several area fire companies, King and the other firefighters, who had never responded to an airplane crash, surveyed the scene. None of them was prepared for what they saw. King recalls the paper strewn in the trees and clothing and shoes scattered on the ground. There were no bodies, he says. Just body parts. 'That's when the sheer destruction of the crash really hit home,' he says."

King is also the Assistant Fire Chief of the Shanksville Volunteer Fire Department. He was one of the first emergency workers at the scene of the crash.

The morning of the crash, King was watching the events of Sept. 11th unfold on television in disbelief. King called his sister, and as they were talking, she paused and told him that she could hear a low flying jet flying near her house. King knew all planes were ordered out of the sky, but kept in mind that some of the planes were reported missing. Seconds later, the plane hit, the impact shaking the town. King ran to the firehall, jumped into the fire truck with 4 other firefighters and raced off to the crash site.

"I felt it was too coincidental not to be related to what was going on. I didn't think that Shanksville was a target of terrorists attacks, I just didn't know what was going on,' said King. He was not sure what scene to expect at the crash site. When King and his crew arrived, they saw what smoking pieces remained of the plane. “There were small pieces everywhere and small signs of human remains. It was total destruction.”

Excerpts from "Courage After the Crash: Flight 93" by Glenn J. Kashurba. SAJ Publishing, 2002.

King: "We stopped and I opened the door. The smell of jet fuel was overpowering. I will never forget that smell; it is really burnt into my mind. ...I walked down the power line and got my first glimpse of human remains. Then I walked a little further and saw more."

Shanksville VFD firefighter Keith Curtis: "I walked up to where the tire was on fire, probably a hundred feet past the crater. It was a big tire. I was thinking that this is a big jet. I hit it good with the hose and put it out. I stopped and 'poof,' it just started on fire again."

Firefighter Mike Sube: "We made our way to a small pond. That's where I observed the largest piece of wreckage that I saw, a portion of the landing gear and fuselage. One of the tires was still intact with the bracket, and probably about three to five windows of the fuselage were actually in one piece lying there. ...There were enough fires that our brush truck was down there numerous times. ...I saw small pieces of human remains and occasionally some larger pieces. That was disturbing, but what was most disturbing was seeing personal effects."

Lieutenant Roger Bailey, Somerset Volunteer Fire Department: "We started down through the debris field. I saw pieces of fiberglass, pieces of airplane, pop rivets, and mail...Mail was scattered everywhere. ...the one guy who was with us almost stepped on a piece of human remains. I grabbed him, and he got about half woozy over it."

Reporter Jon Meyer, WJAC-TV, Johnstown: "There was a spot at the end where the emergency crews were gathering. I could see that it was smoking and burning a little bit. So I ran as fast as I could towards that spot. I ran right up to the crater. I was standing a few feet away, looking down into it. I was overwhelmed by the crater's depth and size, but there was nothing that I could identify as having been an airplane, except that there was this incredibly strong smell of jet fuel."

Gerry Parry, Berlin Volunteer Fire Department: "I stopped and talked to the custodian, Don Stutzman. He and a teacher, Mike Sheeler, and I were standing in the corner of the parking lot when we felt and heard the explosion. If I had been turned the other direction, I might have seen it go down. We saw the smoke immediately. ...It felt too large to be a strip mine explosion, and usually, we have some idea when they are going to happen."

Bill Baker, Somerset County Emergency Management Agency: "There was debris everywhere. You couldn't step without walking on a piece of plane part, fabric, or some kind of debris. When they said it was a 757, I looked out across the debris field. I said, "There is no way there is a 757 scattered here. At that time, we didn't know that it was in the hole. The jet fuel smell was really strong...There were plane parts hanging in the trees."

When former firefighter Dave Fox arrived at the scene, "He saw a wiring harness, and a piston. None of the other pieces was bigger than a TV remote. He saw three chunks of torn human tissue. He swallowed hard. 'You knew there were people there, but you couldn't see them,' he says." Source


Local FBI agent Wells Morrison told author Glenn Kashurba what he saw when he arrived at the crash site: "We arrived in the immediate area and walked up to the crater and the burning woods. My first thought was, 'Where is the plane?' Because most of what I saw was this honeycomb looking stuff, which I believe is insulation or something like that. I was not seeing anything that was distinguishable either as human remains or aircraft debris." (Glenn Kashurba, Courage After the Crash, 2002, p. 110)


Faye Hahn, an EMT, responded to the first reports of the crash. She says: "Several trees were burned badly and there were papers everywhere. We searched. ... I was told that there were 224 passengers, but later found out that there were actually forty. I was stunned. There was nothing there." (David McCall, From Tragedy to Triumph, 2002, pp. 31-32)

Here's the best possible match of a Boeing 757 with the Shanksvile crater, given the official trajectory of inverted impact, with the plane traveling in the basic direction of the top of the photo: