One of Dr. Harrit´s co-authors pretty much predicted the inevitable failure of Dr. Millette a couple of weeks prior to Mohr´s public release of the preliminary report, calling it the "official non-response". Chemist Kevin Ryan notes in the article that Millette had participated in the official WTC dust studies and that a whistle-blower has charged those studies with fraud. The article also doubts Millette´s intention to actually address the evidence that Harrit et al. present in the 2009 paper, since Dr. Millette had consistently ignored the abundant iron spheres in the WTC dust in his previous studies. But those spheres happen to be the signature residue of the thermitic red/gray chips, and the tell-tale sign of a thermite reaction.
And as I and Talboo document in detail in the third chapter of our fundraising article for Mark Basile - first posted in November 2012 - the Millette report has never given the impression of having been intended for peer-reviewing and publishing due to its fundamental flaws: Although Millette´s chips do have some superficial similarities to the chips studied by Harrit et al., neither the red nor the gray layers actually match the composition and characteristics of Dr. Harrit´s chips upon close inspection. And as Mr. Ryan had predicted, Dr. Millette does not even attempt to address or refute the ignition of the Harrit et al. chips at about 430°(C) and the resulting iron spheres in the residue. Dr. Millette actually refuses to replicate the ignition tests with his chips, and we speculate in our article that this is because he knows that these tests would confirm that he has not been studying the correct chips.
Our fundraising article goes over this whole debate in detail and although it is pending it´s second major update, I am happy to announce that the revision will include a positively identified Harrit et al. FTIR spectrum for the red layer. Rev. Mohr and his crowd have been clinging to Millette´s FTIR spectrum because it is supposed to debunk Harrit et al., so it is appropriate to use that crown-jewel of the report to render Millette´s preliminary report null and void. Ryan´s FTIR spectrum for the red material confirms the suspicions laid out in our article, as it is quite clear that it does not match Millette´s red layer FTIR, so Dr. Millette failed to study the correct red/gray chips, and Rev. Mohr has of course been notified:
Above: Millette´s "WTC chip" FTIR spectrum. Below: Ryan´s spectrum for the red layer studied in the 2009 Harrit et al. paper is the upper spectrum below. Below that is a spectrum for one layer of the multi-layer chips also reported in the 2009 paper.
