Lieutenant James Walsh: "The [north tower] didn't fall the way you would think tall buildings would fall. Pretty much it looked like it imploded on itself."

Assistant Commissioner Stephen Gregory: "I thought . . . before . . . No. 2 came down, that I saw low-level flashes. . . . Lieutenant Evangelista . . . asked me if I saw low-level flashes in front of the building, and I agreed with him because I . . . saw a flash flash flash . . . [at] the lower level of the building. You know like when they demolish a building, how when they blow up a building, when it falls down? That's what I thought I saw."

FDNY Captain Dennis Tardio: "I hear an explosion and I look up. It is as if the building [south tower] is being imploded, from the top floor down, one after another, boom, boom, boom."

Wall Street Journal reporter John Bussey: [in his WSJ office] "I . . . looked up out of the office window to see what seemed like perfectly synchronized explosions coming from each floor. . . . One after the other, from top to bottom, with a fraction of a second between, the floors blew to pieces."

Beth Fertig (of WNYC Radio): "It just descended like a timed explosion--like when they are deliberately bringing a building down. . . . It was coming down so perfectly that in one part of my brain I was thinking, 'They got everyone out, and they're bringing the building down because they have to.'"

Naudet brothers film clip:
Fireman 1: "We made it outside, we made it about a block . . . ."
Fireman 2: "We made it at least two blocks and we started running." He makes explosive sounds and then uses a chopping hand motion to emphasize his next point: "Floor by floor it started popping out . . . ."
Fireman 1: "It was as if they had detonated--as if they were planning to take down a building, boom boom boom boom boom . . . ."
Fireman 2: "All the way down. I was watching it and running. And then you just saw this cloud of s**t chasing you down."

Paramedic Daniel Rivera: “It was a frigging noise. At first I thought it was---do you ever see professional demolition where they set the charges on certain floors and then you hear 'Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop'? That's exactly what--because I thought it was that. When I heard that frigging noise, that's when I saw the building coming down.”

Firefighter Richard Banaciski: [South Tower] "[T]here was just an explosion. It seemed like on television [when] they blow up these buildings. It seemed like it was going all the way around like a belt, all these explosions."

Deputy Commissioner Thomas Fitzpatrick: "We looked up at the [south tower] . . . . All we saw was a puff of smoke coming from about 2 thirds of the way up . . . . It looked like sparkling around one specific layer of the building. . . . My initial reaction was that this was exactly the way it looks when they show you those implosions on TV."

Firefighter James Curran: "When I got underneath the north bridge I looked back and . . . I heard like every floor went chu-chu-chu. Looked back and from the pressure everything was getting blown out of the floors before it actually collapsed."

Battalion Chief Dominick DeRubbio: [South Tower] "It was weird how it started to come down. It looked like it was a timed explosion."

Firefighter Kenneth Rogers: "[T]here was an explosion in the south tower. . . . I kept watching. Floor after floor after floor. One floor under another after another and when it hit about the fifth floor, I figured it was a bomb, because it looked like a synchronized deliberate kind of thing. I was there in '93."

Firefighter Christopher Fenyo: "At that point, a debate began to rage because. . . many people had felt that possibly explosives had taken out 2 World Trade, and officers were gathering companies together and the officers were debating whether or not to go immediately back in or to see what was going to happen with 1 World Trade at that point. The debate ended pretty quickly because 1 World Trade came down."

(The 9/11 Commission did not hint at the existence of these testimonies in its official report.)