This thread is hard to keep up with, but I think it's time that I get back to my point about where the dirt from the crater ended up.
Has everyone seen Sandia Labs' test of crashing an F-4 into a concrete wall at 480 mph?
Here's a hi-res photo (2.1 MB)
Here's a lower-res photo of the same thing.
See that blast of very small debris coming out of the crash? Some of that is pulverized concrete, some of it is airplane pieces. Even though the motion of the plane was into the wall, there is still a large amount of debris blasted
away from the wall, back in the direction that the plane came from. In fact, just about every ounce of the plane would have been blasted backwards, some at very high speed. And fuel onboard (there was no fuel in this test) would have been carried with the blast debris, back in the direction the plane came from.
Now the wall that it hit is harder than the ground was in Pennsylvania, but at 500 mph, the ground still didn't "give" very much. There would be a large amount of debris blasted up out of the ground, and most of the plane pieces, and much of the fuel, would be in that blast (not a blast due to fuel exploding, just due to the kinetic energy as in the F-4 test). The plane would be ripped to shreds and scattered in the surrounding area, as you can see from the debris around the crater, and the debris that covered the house and garage. The fuel that got entrained in this blast would have quickly mixed with the air, providing for a quick burn (not at all like the B-52 crash), and a burn that was up off the ground, in the surrounding air. The fact that it would have burned quickly, then rose, is consistent with the neaby grass that's not scorched.
And
that's where the dirt from the crater went - it was blasted out by the impact, and is scattered, with the plane debris, in the surrounding area.