#2423: Judy Wood

Judy Wood being her usual silly self

Judy Wood is a materials scientist and former assistant professor of mechanical engineering, as well as one of the leading figures in the 9/11 truther movement. Since 2006 she has been an independent researcher and author.

 

Wood believes the World Trade Center towers were destroyed by a directed energy weapon from space, which ostensibly hit said towers at the same time the planes did. She also coined the term “dustification”, a central term to her theory, as laid out in detail for instance on Coast to Coast AM (notably, even George Noory seemed skeptical) and in her essentially self-published 544-page book Where Did the Towers Go? Evidence of Directed Free-energy Technology on 9/11 (yes, there are free energy conspiracies in the mix, too. And HAARP). Her theories have been thoroughly rebutted – there is a detailed rebuttal here, and another review of her book here (follow-ups here and here) – even by other truthers. Her writings are notable for making elementary mistakes on issues related to materials science and mechanical engineering, her own putative fields of expertise. Some other pieces of insanity from her book are discussed here.

 

According to Wood, dustification involves molecular dissociation and transmutation, and the term is introduced mostly because according to Wood, the debris pile on 9/11 was nowhere near tall enough to account for the aggregate mass of the towers and their contents (when confronted with the fact that it took a year to haul away the debris, which included more than a million tons of steel and concrete, Wood claims that “they were hauling in dirt, dumping it, then hauling it out again” because otherwise the observation would falsify her theory and using observations and facts to falsify her theory would be offensive). There is a decent criticism of her dustification idea here and the lengths she goes to in order to disregard obvious empirical data here. Anyways, the only available alternative is thus, as Wood sees it, that the towers were pulverized in mid-air and simply blew away on the breeze. The current go-to site for her ideas is her website Where Did the Towers Go – down isn’t good enough for Wood: “the majority of the material went up rather than down”, says Wood. The idiocy of the idea is worth a moment’s reflection.

 

As for the space beam, Wood consistently declines to speculate about its exact nature, where it was situated or who operated it. Apparently this is because he considers herself a scientist and trying to account for the claims in her idea that are supposed to do the explanatory work – notably: the whole point of scientific investigations by way of hypothesis forming and testing – would be to engage in political questions.

 

Wood has also instigated a number of legal actions and petition, including a 2007 qui tam petition to The United States District Court, Southern District of New York, ostensibly on behalf of the United States of America, where she named a number of scientists she claimed acted fraudulently in giving advice to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) during their investigation of the destruction of the World Trade Center towers. The petition was dismissed, of course, as was her 2009 petition for a writ of a certiorari. It is worth noting that Wood would have stood to cash in a lot of money had the petitions succeeded.

 

Diagnosis: Dingbat nutter. Her ideas are so ridiculously nonsensical that even most truthers want nothing to do with her. Probably more of a liability to the truther conspiracy theory movement than anything else.