Many local residents believe the plane was shot down, which they say would explain why parts of the plane and its contents were found strewn over a large area.

One question, “is what happened to the physical wreckage of the plane?”

“There was no plane,” Ernie Stull, mayor of Shanksville, told German television in March 2003:

Nena Lensbouer, who had prepared lunch for the workers at the scrap yard overlooking the crash site, was the first person to go up to the smoking crater.

Lensbouer told AFP that the hole was five to six feet deep and smaller than the 24-foot trailer in her front yard. She described hearing “an explosion, like an atomic bomb”—not a crash.

Lensbouer called 911 and stayed on the line as she ran across the reclaimed land of the former strip mine to within 15 feet of the smoking crater.

Lensbouer told AFP that she did not see any evidence of a plane then or at any time during the excavation at the site, an effort that reportedly recovered 95 percent of the plane and 10 percent of the human remains.

While specific details vary, the explanation for the disappearance of the plane is that the reclaimed land acted like liquid and absorbed the aircraft, which is said to have impacted at between 450 and 600 miles per hour.