Actually, it was one firefighter, Nicholas Demasi, and his friend "honorary firefighter" Mike Bellone, neither of whom will confirm the story since the self-published book
Behind the Scenes: Ground Zero came out in 2003. Their story is not credible in any way. Here's what Demasi said:
At one point I was assigned to take Federal Agents around the site to search for the black boxes from the planes. There were a total of four black boxes. We found three.
How were they searching? They were
driving a golf-cart like ATV. Somehow, while driving around the site
months after the collapses, amongst billions of pounds of rubble, they turn up
three “black boxes” from two aircraft! These devices must have been on top of the rubble, yet they remained unseen by the thousands of other people there (the boxes are orange, not black, and it is highly unlikely that recorders from AA11 would have wound up in the same vicinity as recorders from UA175).
Then, this huge news doesn’t get reported at the time and Demasi doesn’t tell the 9/11 Commission or anyone else? Instead he tells the story in a self-published book? Any red flags going up?
The only article referencing Bellone's version that I’ve been able to find is in the
American Free Press, and we’ve seen how accurate and honest their reporting is. In the undated article, which states that the recorders were found “before January, 2002,” Bellone says of the FBI agents on the scene,
"They confronted me and told me to not to say anything,” recalled Bellone, referring to one of three reddish-orange boxes with two white stripes he saw in the back of DeMasi’s ATV. “I said, ‘Give me a good reason.’ When they couldn’t, I told them I wouldn’t shut up about it.
“Why should I? I have nothing to hide and nothing to gain. It’s the truth, and Nick and I are sticking to our story as we always have.”
Source
If that is so, what has Mr. Bellone done to get the word out? Has he filed lawsuits or even FOIA requests? He mentions that only one other newspaper has interviewed him. Has he taken his story to the legitimate press? How about a website? Nothing.
The only “corroboration” I’ve been able to find for DeMasi and Bellone’s story is this anonymous-source piece at Counterpunch:
Now there is stronger evidence that something is amiss than simply the alleged non-recovery of all four of those boxes. A source at the National Transportation Safety Board, the agency that has the task of deciphering the date from the black boxes retrieved from crash sites-including those that are being handled as crimes and fall under the jurisdiction of the FBI-says the boxes were in fact recovered and were analyzed by the NTSB.
"Off the record, we had the boxes," the source says. "You'd have to get the official word from the FBI as to where they are, but we worked on them here."
The official word from the NTSB is that the WTC crash site black boxes never turned up. "No recorders were recovered from the World Trade Center," says the NTSB's Lopatkiewicz. "At least none were delivered to us by the FBI." He adds that the agency has "always had a good relationship' with the FBI and that in all prior crime-related crashes or flight incidents, they have brought the boxes to the NTSB for analysis.
Source
