JUST A FEW YEARS ago Ed Munyak, a fire protection engineer for the city of San Jose, seemed like a lonely, out-there figure, a sometimes-target because of his outspoken position on the events of Sept. 11, 2001. These days, hundreds of other building trade professionals have joined him in challenging the official narrative about the collapse of three buildings at New York’s World Trade Center (WTC) on that fateful, traumatic day.

Munyak, of Los Altos Hills, is a mechanical and fire engineer whose job is to review building plans to ensure they comply with the California Building and Fire Code. In 2007, after speaking out on his own for a few years, Munyak signed on with a then-fledging organization called Architects and Engineers for 911 Truth (AE911 Truth), founded by Bay Area architect Richard Gage.

Today, far from being isolated, Munyak now counts as allies 804 professional architects and building engineers from around the country. Collectively, they have joined Munyak’s call for an independent technical investigation of the causes of the WTC buildings collapse. In doing so, they reject the federal government’s conclusions that two airplanes alone brought the buildings down-without the aid of pre-planted explosives.

Munyak and his fellow AE911 supporters recently received acknowledgement from the FBI’s counterterrorism division, which concluded that the organization’s core evidence deserves-and will get-FBI scrutiny. In a letter, Deputy Director Michael J. Heimbach assessed AE911’s presentation as “backed by thorough research and analysis.”

Munyak and his professional allies insist that they are not conspiracy theorists, and they refuse to speculate on the “why” or “who” of 9/11. Munyak described their basic position in an interview with Metro.

“Buildings do not fail from fire related causes in the way that World Trade Center 1, 2 and 7 failed. Steel frame or composite steel buildings, modern high-rise buildings-they just do not collapse catastrophically like that. It’s impossible.

“Only if you sever columns in some other way will those buildings collapse. It takes too much energy, and that energy was not there even with adding in all that jet fuel. It defies all engineering analysis and theory that those buildings collapsed in that manner. It just doesn’t make any sense.”

Apparently reinforcing this position, a team of three scientists working at technical laboratories in the United States and Denmark reported in April that analysis of dust that they say was gathered at the World Trade Center found evidence of the potent incendiary/explosive “super thermite,” used by the military.

The re-investigation movement received attention this week after it percolated into the high ranks of the Obama administration.

The President’s green jobs advisor, Van Jones, resigned on Sept. 5 amidst a controversy over his statements about Republicans and his endorsement of a 2004 statement by the group 9/11 Truth.org, when he was head of an Oakland non-profit organization.

The letter, signed by more than 100 official-version doubters, called for “immediate public attention to unanswered questions that suggest that people within the [Bush] administration may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war.”

Patriotic Duty San Jose architect Thomas Lyman Chamberlain, another member of AE911 Truth, calls the official account of the 9/11 events “a fraud.”

“In light of the human life and liberties being taken based on that fraud,” Lyman wrote on the AE911.org site, building industry professionals “have a patriotic duty to invoke their credentials on behalf of the victims and the integrity of our nation.”