After coming back home to Canada, David Long started to question the official story.

9-11 and its conspiracies
By Kris Sims , September 9, Parliamentary Bureau

OTTAWA - Millions watched the events of 9/11 on television - David Long felt it in his bones and saw it with his own eyes.

"There was a really loud sound, it went through the ground and through the building, it felt like an earthquake," said Long, a 39-year-old IT specialist, who was working across the street from the World Trade Center at Merryl Lynch that day.

"As I am standing there, all the glass blows out from the second tower, from 80 storeys up, it looks like something out of Die Hard, there's flame going across the sky, I could feel the heat,"

When the first tower started to collapse, he heard something he will never forget.

"It was the entire south end of Manhattan, there must have been a million people there watching, and you can hear them all at once saying 'NO!'"

After coming back home to Canada, Long started to question the official story.

"It's implausible to me that the air force weren't able to intercept the aircraft," Long said. "The molten metal has never been explained, the explosions."

Long is part of the group Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth. They believe there is evidence of an explosive-controlled demolition of both the Twin Towers and Tower Seven of the World Trade Center. They have more than 1,200 signatures on a petition and will march to Parliament Hill, asking the Canadian government to investigate "state-sponsored terrorism."

No MP has agreed to present it in the House of Commons.

Controlled demolition at the WTC is just the tip of the "Truther" iceberg. Some believe the planes were remote-controlled drones, the passengers were kidnapped by government agents, or that a missile hit the Pentagon and that United 93 was shot down, rather than crashed by heroic passengers struggling with terrorists.

Experts say it's understandable why some people believe these things: reality is worse.

"It's existentially disturbing to accept that big bad events can occur out of the blue," said Dr. Greg Dubord, who teaches at the department of psychiatry at the University of Toronto. "Many of us would rather tell ourselves lies than accept tough existential facts."

The insistence that the U.S. military should have been able to intercept the planes and stop the attacks is often called the "myth of hyper-competence."

"The human mind, for millennia, has been wrestling with the fundamental, existential question of 'why bad things happen to good people' and religion answers that," said Jonathan Kay, author of the conspiracy theory book, Among the Truthers. "Conspiracy theories appeal to the same psychological hunger, they don't supply a God, but they do supply a devil."

kris.sims@sunmedia.ca

David Long of OttawaTruthSeekers says over 1200 signatures were collected from Canadians coast to coast calling on the Canadian Government to conduct a public investigation of 9/11.
OttawaTruthSeekers - LINK
Edmonton Participated Canada Petition Drive Reports - LINK