A. K. Dewdney at the 9/11 Denier Evening (Part 1)

If you're reading this blog, the name A. K. Dewdney (Alexander K. Dewdney, "Kee" Dewdney to his friends) is probably well-known to you. Dewdney was for many years the editor of the mathematical recreations column in Scientific American, taking over from Martin Gardner and Douglas Hofstadter. He is also the author of various books on mathematics and computing, including The Planiverse, The Tinkertoy Computer, and others in my personal library. I always regarded his columns and books with affection, because he is a good writer and his interests closely intersected with mine, and I was pleased when he briefly became a member of my own Department of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo.

Unfortunately, I can no longer read his work with the same unalloyed pleasure, because Dewdney has turned into a 9/11 denier.

His views on 9/11 are, to put it politely, outlandish and completely divorced from reality. This is particularly ironic, since in 1998 he published Yes, We Have No Neutrons: An Eye-Opening Tour through the Twists and Turns of Bad Science, in which he took on Freud, the Biosphere project, cold fusion, and other episodes of bad science. If only Dewdney applied that same kind of skepticism to his own views on 9/11.

Dewdney presented at the 9/11 Denier Event held at the University of Waterloo on March 19. His presentation, I regret to say, was laced with falsehoods.

Dewdney started by discussing the cell phone calls made from the hijacked jetliners. His thesis is the following: it is impossible, or nearly so, to have made cell phone calls from the doomed planes. Therefore the "official account" of 9/11 is false, and a more plausible explanation is that the cell phone calls were faked by the government, who had access to the passenger lists before take-off. With wiretaps, the government could have listened to the passengers ahead of time and made tapes of their speech. Then, using a voice modulator, the government could imitate their speech with "trained operators". With this technology, the government would manage to fool all of the relatives and friends that were called on 9/11.

No, I am not kidding. This is really his thesis, and he finds it more plausible than the generally-accepted account.

In the past, Dewdney has provided accounts that are even more outlandish. Here you can read the original "Ghost Riders in the Sky" scenario, where Dewdney suggests that the hijacked planes were actually taken over remotely from the ground and flown into the targets (presumably by the government). He also suggests that Israel was involved in the attacks. A later version of "Ghost Riders" was published in The Revisionist, an online journal that proclaims itself "The World's largest website for Historical Revisionism!" and features on its front page "The Holocaust Controversy: A Case for open Debate". (The vast majority of the content of this "journal" is devoted to Holocaust denial and other anti-Semitic content, with articles by known Holocaust deniers such as Ingrid Rimland, Germar Rudolf, and Bradley Smith. I have asked Prof. Dewdney how his work came to published in such an unsavory place, and he has not given any satisfactory response.) (Update: in private e-mail to me, Dewdney states that he was unaware that his article was published in this journal.) In this later version, Dewdney describes his experiments attempting to complete cell phone calls at various altitudes, and concluded that "cell phone calls from passenger aircraft are physically impossible above 8000 feet above ground and statistically unlikely below it." He also suggests that the pilots and passengers of the hijacked planes were actually all killed with Sarin nerve gas, as the planes were taken over remotely from the ground. Another proposed scenario is that the hijackers were fooled into becoming trained pilots for another reason, and that, again, Mossad was involved. I have asked Dewdney if he still stands by the scenarios in the various versions of Ghost Riders, but he has not answered this query.

This gives some background to Dewdney's presentation on March 19. He started by stating that his expertise is in cell phone calls, and that he has learned a lot about them since he began his investigations. (Dewdney, it appears, has no formal training in cellular communication. The theme of people speaking beyond their trained expertise is one that would repeat itself during the evening.) He claimed that there were 10 cell phone calls from UAL 93, 2 from AA 175, and 1 from UAL 77, as well as 2 Airfone calls from UAL 93.

This was the first falsehood of his presentation. According to the 9/11 Commission report, at least 22 Airfone calls were made from UAL 93 (not 2, as Dewdney claimed). His other numbers are also out of line with the 9/11 Commission Report.

As far as I can tell, no one disputes the technical feasibility of completing Airfone calls from the hijacked planes. In fact, it is from the Airfone calls that we have the most detailed picture of what took place on UAL 93. The existence of these Airfone calls casts very strong doubt on the relevance of the claimed inability to make cell phone calls from the planes. Indeed, what would be the purpose of faking cell phone calls, when Airfone was accessible? Dewdney conjures up a picture of a vast government conspiracy competent enough to fool relatives into thinking their loved ones were on the other end of the line, yet not competent enough to realize that cell phone calls were not feasible from the air. The kind of mental contortions one has to go through to find Dewdney's scenario plausible boggles the mind.

Dewdney claimed that his experiments show that a cell phone has only a 9% chance of successfully completing a call at 8000 feet; a 30% chance at 6000 feet; a 44% chance at 4000 feet, and an 89% chance at 2000 feet. But in the case of UAL 93, the two cell phone calls were made when the plane was approximately 2500 feet above the ground. (The plane was flying at about 5000 feet of altitude, but the terrain below was mountainous and hence the 2500-foot figure.) According to Dewdney's own figures, there would have been an excellent chance to complete such calls.

Dewdney sneered at the account of Mark Bingham's phone call to his mother, because Bingham reportedly said, "Mom, this is Mark Bingham." Again, the implication is that the government is smart enough to fake a call that could fool Bingham's mother, but not smart enough to realize that a son would be unlikely to tell his mother his last name. (The largely sympathetic audience chuckled.) What Dewdney and the ghouls in the audience fail to realize is that, under pressure, people do silly things. When distracted, I have picked up the phone at home and said, "Shallit", something I usually only do at work. I have also signed a Christmas card to my mother with my full name, by mistake. Anyone who has read reports of the 9/11 phone calls realizes they depict passengers under great stress, and it is foolish to read anything sinister into Bingham's faux pas. But then, this is standard fare for deniers, to examine transcripts with a magnifying glass for anything that could remotely be said to support their claims, while ignoring the big picture. Update: as a commenter has pointed out, Mark Bingham's mother says that this was an inside joke. See here for more details.

Arthur C. Clarke, who died this week, once made the following trenchant observation: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." Keep this in mind when considering Dewdney's claims about the impossibility of cell phone calls from airplanes.

More later.