We are told that there were 64 passengers were on board Flight 77. We count 59, including 6 crew members. We presume they mean 59 passengers and crew, plus 5 Hijackers Patsies. There is no Arab name on the list of victims as reported by the media (see Passenger Links below).

The capacity of Flight 77 was 239 passengers, and with 53 passengers aboard, that is an occupancy rate of 23%. We have flown a great deal in Europe and North America, and never at any time in the last decade have we flown a trans-continental flight that was 3/4 empty (this is of course pre-9/11). The numbers appear out-of-whack, thankfully. And so, a lingering question is why the passenger loads on the four planes hijacked in US skies are being described by industry officials as "very, very low."

Three of the transcontinental flights departed for the West Coast with at least two thirds of the seats empty. Only 37 of the 182 seats were occupied -- including four by hijackers, at least two in first class -- as United Airlines' Flight 93 left Newark for San Francisco. Through July, airlines in the United States reported flights on average were 71 percent capacity this year.

There is no evidence that the hijackers actually "shopped for flights" at all. In some cases we are told that they simply purchased their tickets over the Internet.

But this is truly a bizarre passenger list. Well, if you look at the occupations of the passengers of Flight 77, you get a strange feeling that something is wrong with this picture:

For a random collection of passengers, this is a very impressive manifest. We use the results of Killtown's work on the passenger list, which was drawn from the canonical sources of 9/11 victims biographical information on the Internet: the numbers in square brackets are the numbers in Killtown's listing .

• a senior scientist with the US Navy, retired Army. [12] A third-generation physicist whose work at the Navy was so classified that his family knew very little about what he did each day. They don't even know exactly why he was headed to Los Angeles on the doomed American Airlines Flight 77.

• a Boeing engineer in Integrated Defense Systems; he served in the US Air Force for four years, and for the National Security Agency for 14 years. [36]
• a director of program management at Raytheon, US Army (ret.) [28] who helped develop and build anti-radar technology for electronic warfare. Raytheon's website notes that they are leaders in every phase of the Precision Strike kill chain; are the world's leading organization at Missile Defense; provides state-of-the-art technology to detect, protect and respond to terrorism and provide Homeland Defense; and that their technology forms the eyes, ears and brains of Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance systems, from the Predator to the Global Hawk.
• a retired naval aviator who worked for Veridian Corp., a defense contractor, who was working with military aircraft and weapons systems [56] A Navy test pilot who worked on the development of the F18. "He had done a number of black programs -- which means top-secret," said his son. "We were given no details."

• an electrical engineer with defense contractor BAE Systems. [41] largest technical support supplier to the US Navy. BAE Systems is an industry leader in flight control systems, which are present on nearly every US military aircraft. BAE electronic warfare systems such as their jamming system are vital to the US Navy operations.
• 2 Boeing propulsion engineers: a lead Propulsion Engineer and a Project Manager with Boeing Satellite Systems, [32] and a lead engineer for Boeing Satellite Systems. [40]
• a software architect with Lockheed Martin Corp., US Army (ret.). [42] A manager in the systems and software architecture department.
• a Vice President for software development, EMSolutions and retired Lieutenant Commander, Navy. [18] He spent 20 years in the US Navy, where he developed high capacity signal processors, multi-processor application software and innovative signal processing algorithms. EMSolutions maintains a facility security clearance, and has contracts with Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO) and BAE Systems.

• a technical group manager at Xon Tech, a defense-related research and development firm [46] He previously worked as an engineer at the Naval Research Lab. Also a technical manager of Xon Tech [53].
• a retired Navy Rear Admiral, former Navy pilot, and retired American Airlines pilot. [24]
• a senior executive at the Defense Department. [29] A budget analyst/director of the programming and fiscal economics division who worked at the Pentagon.
• a former Navy electronics technician worked as a Department of Defense contractor with Vrendenburg Co. in Washington [57]
• managing partner and co-founder of Stratin Consulting. and retired Marine Corps Lieutenant and Vietnam War veteran [26]
• a lawyer who had worked with the Navy Judge Advocate General's Corps. [49]

• and of course, there was Barbara Olson, attorney, CNN Commentator and wife of the United States Solicitor General. [39]

The odds against this being a random group of 53 American Airlines passengers are simply astronomical! There are more top secret security clearances here than in most medium-sized cities in America.

Especially astounding in this bizarre passenger list is the preponderance of Navy personnel amongst the 4 armed services, and the tilt toward propulsion and guidance systems amongst all of the possible secret technologies. It's almost as if someone put this list together thinking that Navy personnel were expendable - or needed to be expended.

This looks like a charter flight for the military-industrial complex; it's almost as if this plane should have taken off from the Pentagon, rather than supposedly crashing into it.