"Pancake Collapse" a quick Keyword Study(curious)

[§ê¢rꆧ]

I was watching the History Channel's "Life After People" (a psyops subject in its own right, I suppose, but this isn't about that), and the narrator used the phrase "pancake collapse" to describe the way an environmentally-degraded building might collapse in the future, without human maintenance. Also fairly recently, the term was used on some other tv show that I cannot remember, unfortunately. I think it may have been the firefighter show, "Rescue Me" in reference to a burning building.

ANYHOW, This got me to wondering about the phrase "pancake collapse." How common of a phrase was it before it emerged as a weak explanation for the collapse of the towers on 9/11?

If you use the tools here (or something similar) to search Google in the dates 1995 (as early as the Google archive seems to go) to September 10, 2001 for the exact phrase "pancake collapse" you find exactly 5 hits.

Click for the Google results of keywords "pancake collapse" in Google's archive Jan 1, 1995 to Sept. 10, 2001

That's not a whole lot, is it?

From Sept 10, 2001 to Sept 10, 2002 it jumps to 125 results

Then, from Sept 10, 2001 to Sept 10, 2004 (2004 is as far as it seems you can search by date from this site) there are 157 results.

If you search "pancake collapse" now, you find 8770.

So, most of those sites and stories and pages were made after Sept 10, 2004. Not surprising I suppose, with the 911 Truth Movement picking up its pace around then, and the 9/11 Commision Report being released onJuly 24, 2004 (according to Wikipedia, but that jives with memory)

What I find a little curious is the aforementioned mere 5 results for "pancake collapse" in Google's archive Jan 1, 1995 to Sept. 10, 2001 It strikes me almost a non-existent phrase on the Internet at that point. Now, granted the Internet has grown naturally in that time and you would expect any exact phrasing of keywords to grow in number over time.

But I suspect if you survey the 8770 sites that now have the exact phrase 'pancake collapse' most of them will be about 9/11, or possible KW hijacks of the phrase. This makes the phrase 'pancake collapse' appear to be more something concocted by spinmeisters than a natural phrasing to explain a common phenomenon in structural failure.

I realize this is just speculation like much of KW/psyop talk, but I find it curious. And I think searching specific dates on Google can be valuable in exploring the Keywords.

[Zap]

"Near dawn, another crew rescued three survivors from deep in the pancaked ruins of a supermarket. "

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100117/ap_ ... earthquake

[stefano]

I think that's sound, §ê¢rꆧ. One influential debunker used the phrase and it immediately got grasped at and quoted. Is it possible to use that tool to find the first surviving use of a phrase? I'll have a look. I'm sure you could do the same analysis with 'weapons of mass destruction', or 'death panels'.

Just a little brain fart I wanted to put in that other thread on GD, then couldn't be bothered - 'pancake collapse' in the sense it gets used in now can only really make sense to a North American, since to no-one else does 'pancake' evoke a pile of flat things. To most people it'll mean a folded or rolled-up crêpe. So the whole Dan in real life thing is completely ridiculous. 'Pancake collapse' became an explanation for the towers falling because the image of a plate of heaped pancakes is present in the American mind, not the other way around, with pancakes being promoted to make you think (or not think?) pancake collapse.

[barracuda]

FWIW, there are a variety of north american phrases equating scenes of destruction to food, but how this came to be a common symbolism, I couldn't imagine, e.g. a "tacoed" bicycle wheel, or a side hit automobile accident referred to as a "t-bone".

[jingofever]

Google News is probably a more accurate tool for tracking the genesis and propagation of words and phrases. Google Groups is somewhat OK as well (but probably not for this example).

The earliest mention I found is Two Firemen Hurt At Blaze In Bronx from 10 August 1980.

The Google News excerpt is (given my search terms: pancake building collapse):

"It was a pancake collapse," said Chief John Connelly of the 19th Battalion. "The entire building was flaming and it went down to the ground. ...

There are a number of other early examples.

[§ê¢rꆧ]

Interesting, Nightline (from a March 2010 broadcast) frames the 'pancake collapse' as a conspiracy theory, when it didn't originate there at all

From the NIGHTLINE covers 911 Truth in wake of Pentagon Shooting thread:



The news narrator says at about 2:50 "Their film [Loose Change] peddles some largely discredited arguments, claiming that jet fuel was not hot enough to melt the steel structures, that the buildings pancaked down in controlled explosions..."

It just seems odd to attribute the pancake collapse theory - an early part of the official narrative - onto the Controlled Demolition theory.