WORLD TRADE CENTER CONTROLLED DEMOLITION CONSPIRACY THEORIES
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The World Trade Center controlled demolition conspiracy theory is a conspiracy theory which contends that the collapse of the WTC was not caused by the airliner crash damage that occurred as part of the September 11, 2001
 attacks, nor by resulting fire damage, but by explosives installed in the buildings in advance.

Early on, advocates such as physicist Steven E. Jones, architect Richard Gage, software engineer Jim Hoffman, and theologian David Ray Griffin, argued that the aircraft impacts and resulting fires could not have weakened the buildings sufficiently to initiate a catastrophic collapse, and that the buildings would no have collapsed completely, nor at the speeds that they did, without additional energy involved to weaken their structures.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the magazine Popular Mechanics examined and rejected these theories. Specialists in structural mechanics and structural engineering generally accept the mode of a fire-induced, gravity-driven collapse of the World Trade Center buildings, an explanation that does not involve the use of explosives. NIST did not test for explosive compound residue in steel samples, stating the potential for inconclusive results, and noting that similar compounds would have been present during construction of the towers.

In 2006, Jones suggested that thermite or super-thermite may have been used by government insiders with access to such materials and to the buildings themselves, to demolish the buildings. Later, Niels H. Harrit et al. stated that they had found evidence of nano-thermite in samples of the dust that was produced during the collapse of the World Trade Center towers.

In April 2009, Steven E. Jones, along with Niels Harrit and 7 other authors published a paper in The Open Chemical Physics Journal, titled, 'Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center  Catastrophe'.NIST then said that there was no "clear chain of custody" to prove that the four samples of dust came from the WTC site. Jones invited NIST to conduct its own studies using its own known "chain of custody" dust, but NIST did not investigate.