Thunder on the Mountain- A Look At the Pennsylvania Town Thrust onto World Stage on September 11, 2001

Plume of smoke from Flight 93 crash in rural Somerset County, PA on September 11, 2001. Housewife Val McClatchey caught the image with a new digital camera just moments after impact.

Even before the September 11th terrorist attacks, cities like Washington DC and New York were in the crosshairs of terrorist and dangerous extremists. However, on America's darkest day an unassuming town of just over 200 people became etched in history as the final resting place for the first Americans to fight back against Al Qaeda.

For those of you unfamiliar with United Flight 93, the Newark to San Francisco flight took off on time that morning with four hijackers on board. At 9:28 AM- nearly 45 minutes after the first hijacked airliner slammed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center- Air Traffic Control in Cleveland, OH received a Mayday call from Flight 93 amidst what sounded like a struggle in the background. When Cleveland attempted to reach the flight crew by radio, they received no reply. The widow of Captain Jason Dahl believes that her husband took measures to interfere with the hijackers such as redirecting the planes radio frequency so that the hijacker's orders to the crew and passengers were instead transmitted to Air Traffic Controllers before he was stabbed.

Within five minutes of the hijacking, passengers were using in-flight phones or their own cellphones to contact family members or the authorities. By that point, the wife of passenger Tom Burnett had told him about watching the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon from their California home. Burnett- a medical device company executive from San Ramon, CA told his wife Deena "Don't worry, we're going to do something". Marketing executive Jeremy Glick told his wife in West Milford, NJ that the passengers had voted to try and storm the cockpit and re-take the plane.

Todd Beamer, an executive with Oracle Inc from Highstown, NJ attempted to call his wife from one of the in-flight GTE phones. However, his call was instead rerouted to a GTE supervisor named Lisa Jefferson. Beamer became apprehensive at one point as the plane changed direction, but he and his fellow passengers had decided they were going to overpower their hijackers and try to take back the plane. Beamer told Jefferson that one of the hijackers claimed to have a bomb, but at this juncture the passengers figured it was a ruse to get them to comply with their orders before they realized they were going to be killed anyway. Jefferson and Beamer also recited the 23rd Psalm before the passengers and crew reportedly counterattacked with scalding water, a drink cart and their bare hands. The line was left open after Beamer was done talking to Jefferson and he was heard in the background urging on fellow passengers with "Let's roll!".

Audio from the black box recorded the sounds of a struggle between the hijackers and passengers in the cockpit before the plane crashed into a field outside of Shanksville, PA at 10:03 AM. Flight 93 was no more than 20 minutes away from Washington DC at the time of the crash. Subsequent Al Qaeda documents seized in Afghanistan and Pakistan seem to indicate that the US Capitol Building was the most likely target, although the White House was seriously considered as well.

Within minutes, firefighters and Pennsylvania State Troopers arrived at the Flight 93 crash site. Unlike the attacks on the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan and the Pentagon in northern Virginia, there was considerably less debris to sift through in the Shanksville meadow and a number of documents and evidence could be recovered by investigators- including remnants of the hijackers' passports.

A monument to Flight 93 passengers and crew erected by Newark-based flight attendants adjacent to a chapel south of Shanksville, PA.

In the ensuing weeks, investigators and media descended on the rural community. Flight 93 was carrying an estimated 5000 lbs of mail, and NTSB officials had recovered undamaged pieces of mail, in-flight magazines, a bible and even a business card from one of the hijackers identifying other accomplices in the attacks. The planes black boxes were reportedly recovered from a 15-25 foot deep crater in the ground.

Close-up of the monument

The immediate aftermath of the crash was caught by a Shanksville housewife named Val McClatchey who was watching the horror unfold in lower Manhattan and northern Virginia on TV when she heard a loud roaring overhead followed by what she described as a ground shaking boom. The image shows an ominous plume of smoke rising over a hill with a bucolic farmhouse and red barn in the foreground.

Thunder on the Mountain- the Flight 93 Memorial Chapel south of Shanksville, PA.

However, McClatchey's photo was also viewed by 9/11 'Truthers' [basically, unhinged conspiracy theorists who insist that the 9/11 attacks were singlehandedly orchestrated by the US government, Jews or the illuminati NANESB!] as an open invitation to harass and stalk the Pennsylvania housewife and real-estate agent.

The real estate agent has recently become a target of bloggers calling themselves "9-11 researchers," who are seeking to prove that the U.S. government was complicit in the attacks that brought down the Twin Towers, pierced the Pentagon and crashed United Airlines Flight 93. "The End of Serenity" has turned out to be their smoking gun.

They have visited Mrs. McClatchey's office and called her at home, posting satellite maps of her property and accusing her of digitally altering her photo to insert a fake smoke plume. The bloggers have picked apart her story, highlighting inconsistencies in different news accounts and questioning her motives. Others have described her as "surly," "hostile," "irate" and "defensive." People have called her at home, accusing her of being anti-American and of "holding the photo hostage."

[Gosh- only somebody with something to hide would be upset at random unhinged loons showing up on their doorstep out of the blue and accusing them of treason and complicity in a shadowy plot to murder thousands Americans- NANESB!]

A look at the recently-opened Flight 93 Memorial at the crash site north of Shanksville, run by the National Parks Service.

The field that Flight 93 crashed into had actually been reclaimed from a strip coal mining operation. Almost immediately after 9/11, people began leaving flowers and mementos at a chain link fence at a temporary memorial near the crash site.

Within a year, Congress had approved funding for a permanent memorial at the Shanksville crash site. The early design of the memorial was fraught with controversy when one of the finalists- Crescent of Embrace- was revealed and critics and relatives of those killed on Flight 93 thought it too closely resembled the crescent moon symbol popular with numerous Islamic groups. The Crescent was later modified into a semicircle bisected by the flight's path.

Marble panels engraved with the name of the 40 passengers and crew members of Flight 93 at the permanent memorial in Somerset County, PA

Stage one of the permanent memorial opened to the public on September 10th, 2011 and is operated under the National Parks Service. Currently, a gently sloping black wall accompanies a walkway and benches that stretch out to a memorial plaza where the names of the passengers and crew are inscribed on a marble wall. There are no plans for a memorial garden of any kind- National Park officials said that the Memorial would be better served by allowing the native wildflower species to bloom in the areas surrounding the plaza. Earlier this year, crews were planting trees along the road leading into the Flight 93 Memorial from US Highway 30 to the north

Even before the National Flight 93 Memoral opened up, the field had seen as many as 150,000 visitors per year. USA Today's Travel Section has even gone so far to reccommend including the recently opened memorial as part of an itinerary for visiting Southwestern Pennsylvania along with Pittsburgh (about 80 miles away), Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water (about 50 miles away) as well as the Rolling Rock Brewery in Latrobe and Horsehoe Curve in Altoona [OK- I just threw the last two in there- NANESB!]. Signs were recently posted on the Pennsylvania Turnpike and US Route 219 to direct people to the memorial.

Future plans for the Memorial call for additional structures to house permanent exhibits and artifacts from passengers and their families to be completed sometime in 2013- currently there is just the one structure before the Memorial plaza where visitors can sign in. Plans also call for a tower with 40 seperate wind chimes to be built near the Memorial entrance- one for each passenger and crew member. Since the meadow is near high mountain peaks, there's a near constant wind or breeze blowing through the site.

Through a series of odd coincidences, a wind turbine farm overlooking the entrance to the Flight 93 Memorial opened up a little over a month after the 9/11 attacks. The executive who made the Somerset County wind turbines possible- Nicholas Humber- was killed in the 9/11 attacks. Humber was a passenger on American Airlines Flight 11 when it slammed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

The US Navy has also christened the USS Somerset- a San Antonio class amphibious transport dock named after Somerset County where Flight 93 went down. A bucket from a nearby power shovel that had been used in coal mining was melted down in 2008 to form the bow stem for the Somerset and she was christened in July of this year in Avondale, LA. Sister ships USS New York and USS Arlington had incorporated steel from the World Trade Center site and Pentagon respectively.