A Fourth Camera Filmed It. Two Men Took The Tape And Never Came Back.
Our measurement of the descent used three angles. A retired building engineer says a fourth camera on an adjacent roof recorded the same minutes, and that the tape was collected by two men who gave no receipt.
NEW YORK, United States — Three cameras is enough to measure a descent. Four would be better, and there was a fourth.
Aurelio Pentecost-Nam maintained a rooftop security installation four blocks north. It ran on tape, it recorded continuously, and its sight line to the building we wrote about on Thursday was, on his account, unobstructed.
He says two men came for the tape within a fortnight, gave their names verbally, wrote nothing down and left no receipt.
"I was not suspicious," he said. "Everybody was collecting everything. I assumed it would come back like the others came back. It did not, and after a while there was nobody left to ask."
He reported it once, in 2004, to an office that no longer exists. He kept no copy.
We have not been able to establish which agency, if any, holds the tape, or whether it was ever logged. The three surviving angles remain the basis of our measurement and we are not revising it.
We print this because a fourth angle would settle the descent to a precision the other three cannot reach, and because a tape taken without a receipt is a tape nobody can now be asked for.
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- Aurelio Pentecost-Nam, Retired building engineer. Interviewed twice at his home, on the record 2026
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