Whitehall Building seen from Battery Park

Above is a picture from Battery Park of the Whitehall Bld. featured in this Video:

Impossible Camera Angles, Impossible Motion

The picture above is the viewpoint from here as shown by the black "x." The Whitehall Building is the large brick-colored and dirty-beige checked one, with brown stripes, at the very left front in the picture above.

The view, is actually looking over the top of the fort. In the top image you can see the fort Clinton, which is a low brick structure at the left. In the picture directly above that's the circular building in the foreground.



Here is the same exact photo from at top cropped and zoomed to imitate the view in the "Ghostplane" rendition as seen in the video.


















Here is a still taken from that video.

Here is an overlay of the two pictures above, done by "brianv" see his
"No Planes 9/11 - The Holy Grail"

Click on the pictures to see the larger versions.

Below are the approximate locations "x"-ed out: of the viewer, the Whitehall Building and the South World Trade Tower.






Red "X"-es here:

Brobdinag proportions

Here is a Google Earth screen shot where I have "x"-ed in the three players. It shows the relationship between the viewer, the top of the Whitehall Bld. and the World Trade Tower South. The height of the Whitehall Bld. is represented by the two "x"-s, one on top of the other. The height of the Trade Tower is the vertical line to the right. It's all roughly to scale. If you want it larger, click on the picture.

These are the measures I made. From the front of Whitehall Bld. to observer, 1000 ft. From observer to foot of World Trade Tower South, 3300 ft. Height of Whitehall Tower, 424ft. Height of Trade Tower, 1727 ft. When these figures are mapped out, the line of sight of the viewer, from where I stood in the Park, captures the appropriate top section of the Trade Tower as shown in the above clip, altered in any case. The buildings between the Trade Tower and the Whitehall Bld. are too short to interfere with this sight line. The ones to the right when you're facing it, could very well be covered with trees. It's not uncommon to have the leaves on the trees here in September.

The model is approximate and rough but illustrates some reasons behind the optical illusion many people experience in viewing one of the government-sponsored video clip, "Ghostplane."

When I made my triangles of the correct proportions and drew a sight line - only the top portion of the South Tower was visible - exactly how the scene was rendered in the government released clip.

The Towers appear too short above the Whitehall Bld. This is due to a few things: Please notice the shortening of the perceived distance between the observer and the WB in the "close-up" shot. This comes about through the use of zooming and cropping so the perceived distance is shortened. One has no idea how high up one is looking or how far away. However, the Whitehall Bld is over 400 ft. tall.

Appreciate the scale clearly by looking at the first picture above which shows the Whitehall Bld. in the context of the Battery Park setting. The distances: both between the observer and the building and between the top of the Whitehall building and the ground are clear in the unaltered perspective.

The difficulty in processing the scale here is due to another factor: the unnatural height of the Tower and its obscure distance from the viewer. (The South Tower is over 1/2 a mile away from the observer in Battery Park and is itself 1/4 of a mile tall.)

Much as the gigantic moon, though very far away, will appear larger when it is near the horizon. In this case we only feel the building should be larger.

The larger-Moon-near-the-horizon effect is an optical illusion since the moon's objective size doesn't change. It's so far away its apparent size won't change no matter where it moves.

When you plot the distances out between the observer, the top of the Whitehall Bld. and the top of the South Trade Tower, the top of the South Trade Tower is right where it should be and where it is depicted in the screen shot of the video. The World Trade Tower South is so much more huge than we can process and therefore subconsciously "assume" the proportion is wrong. We can't see it as being distant. From what it looks like in the cropped rendition we assume that it must be closer and the size of a regular skyscraper. This is also partly because we are deceived, from the photograph since the Whitehall Building appears there much smaller than it actually is. Most of the building is cropped away in the "Ghostplane" video clip.

Click on picture below for full size image:







If you click on the pictures you can see the larger versions.