In September 2006, under heavy criticism in the media and by several colleagues, the university placed Jones on paid administrative leave and his paper was removed from the BYU database.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology, which investigated the WTC tower collapses, maintains there was no recovered evidence of explosive materials. An electronic FAQ to the government's theory
is available online.
"We get a lot of calls from people who have heard these theories,"
NIST spokesman Michael Newman told Newsday. "But we conducted what was probably the most complex investigation of a building collapse in history."
"We based our conclusion on the talents of the world's best engineers and scientists, state of the art computer models and 236 pieces of steel recovered from the site," reads the NIST FAQ.
"The collapse of the WTC towers was not caused either by a conventional building fire or even solely by the concurrent multi-floor fires that day," NIST says. "Instead, NIST concluded that the WTC towers collapsed because: (1) the impact of the planes severed and damaged support columns, dislodged fireproofing insulation coating the steel floor trusses and steel columns, and widely dispersed jet fuel over multiple floors; and (2) the subsequent unusually large, jet-fuel ignited multi-floor fires weakened the now susceptible structural steel."
"No building in the United States has ever been subjected to the massive structural damage and concurrent multi-floor fires that the towers experienced on Sept. 11, 2001," the agency claims.
