Dave vonKleist of the Power Hour radio show and producer of "911 In Plane Sight"

WARRENSBURG, Mo. -- At first, Dave vonKleist seems like one of those guys that sells salad spinners, ginsu knives or vacuum cleaners at the Missouri State Fair in Sedalia. But after viewing his movie "911 In Plane Sight," one winds up believing he just could be right! At any rate he does a passable George Bush immitation.

About 50 people attended the April 27 showing at W.C. Morris Auditorium on the Central Missouri State University campus. The movie was the last of three films shown by the Third Party Alliance of CMSU with help from the Johnson County Libertarian Party.

"This room should be filled," vonKleist said, indicating that he wouldn't mind if you bought one copy of the movie and gave away copies to 100 friends as long as people see it.

He starts off in an opening monologue by explaining that the movie could upset people because it challenges the deep belief that we want our government to be run by good people. He further explains that conspiracy theories tend to go through three stages: Denial, violent opposition and widespread acceptance. But like the Chinese students on U.S. soil, fresh from the mainland never having heard of the persecution of Falun Gong in their own country, vonKleist argues that we wake up every morning at the mercy of our news sources.

"The powers that be want power," vonKleist explains in his opening monologue. "That's what they do."

He proceeds to make the case that 9-11 could have been perpetrated by the Bush White House against us in order to secure "permission" from us to use the U.S. military for a war against oil-rich countries. The reason to go to war would be to secure three countries between the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea in order to build an oil pipeline: Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran.

VonKleist maintains that the Carlyle Group, a global private equity firm, could be behind the move to further their interests in oil exploration and development companies. The Carlyle Group also reportedly invests heavily in defense contractors. Osama bin Laden's family also reportedly had millions of dollars invested in the Carlyle Group. The Bush Family is reportedly a huge investor in the Carlyle Group, and Bush Sr. reportedly a former director of that group. The bin Laden family was flown out of the U.S. under tight security on six chartered airplanes.

Through a series of logical steps with holes big enough to walk an elephant through, but not necessarily wrong, vonKleist explains that the conspiracy theory surrounding the 9-11 incident occasionally surfaces with evidence. Evidence indicates the possibility of truth rather than mere theory.

On the morning of 9-11, vonKleist and his wife, Joyce Reilly, were doing their 7-10 a.m. radio show from Versailles, Mo. The north tower had already been hit when they got the news. vonKleist told his listeners to save their videotapes of the incident. Later, he requested his audience to send the tapes to his studio.

"I found a couple of things on those tapes that just blew me away," he says.

Some of the discrepancies between the official story and what vonKleist turns to as evidence of a potential conspiracy are:

* The explosion on not one, but two planes prior to hitting the tower.
* The presence of unusual topography on the bottom of the airplanes, which could be a missle launcher.
* The unusual engine patterns on the planes, not indicative of the type of the planes they were supposed to be.
* The type of plane that crashed into the Pentagon could not have made such a small hole in the wall. This originally surfaced on a French website called Hunt the Boeing. The roof didn't collapse until after the fire departments arrived. There are undamaged computer terminals and a wooden stool with an unsinged book open on it. There was no crater around the wall where the explosion occurred. We have heard no accounts of environmental cleanup required for the 8,600 gallons of airplane fuel that would have been spilled.
* Video footage released from the only security camera on that wall at the Pentagon shows an explosion but no plane. No video footage taken by internal cameras, theoretically recording the world's most secure building, captured the explosion. A video camera from a nearby gas station was "reported" to have been confiscated by government authorities.
* Flight 93, a Boeing 767, which supposedly crashed in a Pennsylvania field, was reported by WCPO-TV Channel 9 in Cincinnati, Ohio to have landed at the local Cleveland Hopkins International airport. The plane was the subject of a bomb scare and the passengers were detained while it was investigated at 9:43 a.m. eastern time. Flight 93 reportedly crashed in the field at 10 a.m. in Pennsylvania. WCPO has removed the story with a note that it is factually incorrect.
* Tower 3 was purposefully brought down just hours after it was structurally compromised by the collapse of the other two towers. Operations such as that take weeks to plan and execute, suggesting that the charges were in place before the third tower was brought down.
* George Bush supposedly referred to seeing the first plane fly into the first tower, when the footage captured by a private sector film crew that showed the first crash would not be available for weeks.
* Arab hijackers are supposedly speaking to each other in broken English toward the end of the Flight 93 debacle. vonKleist maintains that they would have spoken in Arabic rather than another language if they were really Arabic.

Experts disagree, eyewitness accounts differ ... but does the film lie? New sources frequently report something in haste only to get it wrong. Experts disagree.

vonKleist obviously makes the mistake of using eyewitness accounts, expert supposition, and opinions about the crash as potential facts, stating that he is just bringing light to the issue without casting blame.

Sometimes the camera angles chosen for various frames leave questions about what a viewer actually sees. The video pooh poohs the testimony of some experts and promotes the testimony of other experts that support the "theory."

However, the material weaves a fabric of plausibility.

I asked vonKleist if he'd been contacted by the government. "No," he said. "As long as they ignore me they have plausible deniability about the incident and no reason to investigate further."

Chief Plower of Engine 331 from the Metropolitan Washington Airport Authority saw the Pentagon damage. He agreed to appear on vonKleist's radio show, but cancelled one hour before air time. The two firefighters scheduled to appear with him were placed on indefinite leave.

Perhaps if a tornado can drive a piece of hay straw through a glass window, a Boeing 757 can get its 124' 10" frame through a 16-foot hole.

We still just don't know, much as we still don't know who shot John F. Kennedy. And we still want to believe the people running our government are benevolent.

But this movie is worth a look. The DVDs are available online.

Dave vonKleist tells a good story, makes a good movie and does some pretty funny schtick. But just because he's a performer doesn't make him wrong ... or right.