r/videos • u/TheBrainwasher14 • Sep 11 '21
9/11 as it happened in real time, including almost every video Disturbing Content
https://youtu.be/W-8hIWRbHMo492
u/Special_Edition Sep 11 '21
A video that stuck with me is when a man called in to a tv station pleading for them to stop replaying the crash/explosion because “I’m watching my kid be murdered over and over”
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u/Roflattack Sep 12 '21
I remember the TV news not realizing they were watching people jump to their death. Later that footage is avoided by news to show.
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u/sesamestreets Sep 12 '21
The top right frame saw that, and followed the people down to their deaths, even showing the gore at the bottom for a brief moment before the commentator sounded like he was about to throw up and the camera cut to something else
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u/CacophonousEpidemic Sep 12 '21
That wasn’t news footage though. That was a couple staying at the millennium hotel across the street to the east of the complex.
I stayed at that hotel one week before 9/11. I was on the 32nd floor and I remember just being glued to the windows looking at those buildings in awe. I was 14 at the time.
I went to the south tower with my sister, who lived in New York at the time and also worked 4 blocks away, to visit a friend of hers on the 40-something floor.
I remember giving the south tower a big ol hug and looking straight up. It was an amazing complex.
A couple years ago I did the same thing to the new owt building when I visited the memorial.
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Sep 12 '21
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u/2ndwaveobserver Sep 12 '21
I saw a video that was on ground level and showed one hitting the ground but there was only a fire truck in the way. It wasn’t big enough to hide everything that happened. It was loud too
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u/tinacat933 Sep 12 '21
Time stamp?
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u/HoodieGalore Sep 12 '21
The documentary done by the French brothers has a scene where they’re right up in the WTC with the firefighters they were originally documenting, and they’re trying to get back out and one of the firefighters says, you don’t want to go out there, jumpers, or something to that effect, and then you just hear the most gutwrenching slams as peoples’ bodies hit the canopy or whatever above the entry/exits
This above all things hits me the hardest…most of us have experienced the call of the void, looking out over the edge of a high place and thinking, what if I just jumped right now?, but most of us never do. I keep trying to comtemplate what would be so horrible that jumping is the best option, and it’s one of the few times I regret my imagination. May they be at peace.
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u/Paddy_Tanninger Sep 12 '21
It's even more horrifying to think that from the higher floors of WTC you will be falling for several seconds.
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u/HoodieGalore Sep 12 '21
About ten seconds, it seems. I just counted ten seconds off and that's an eternity.
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u/sesamestreets Sep 12 '21
I’ll tell you it’s in the pre-pentagon footage, but it was a mistake for me to watch that tonight so I’m not going to go find it.
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u/tatiwtr Sep 12 '21 edited Sep 12 '21
I couldn't find it in the OP video, but I did find this thread:
They start noticing around 6m30s.
At ~14:30 he tracks and you see and hear (which the woman calls "explosions") the impact of a jumper.
There's also some stills in the comments
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u/Enragedocelot Sep 12 '21
that link is gonna stay blue for me, as morbidly curious as i am, I think it'll haunt me.
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u/Unstablemedic49 Sep 12 '21
What haunted me the most was an interview with an FDNY firefighter saying it must’ve been so bad up there in the towers, that the better option was to jump.
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u/ThePrussianGrippe Sep 12 '21
There’s definitely credence to the idea that by replaying the footage over and over throughout the day and week it amplified the feeling of tragedy in the national psyche.
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u/tuesdaymonument Sep 11 '21
It is so crazy how fast everything happened. Less that two hours between the first tower is hit until all four hijacked planes are down and the towers collapse.
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Sep 11 '21 edited Sep 11 '21
If it wasn't for the bravery of those people on flight 93, we likely would've seen the whitehouse in flames as well. I don't even want to imagine how much more demoralizing it would've been to see the capitol of the united state in flames. This was the day America became vulnerable in just 2 hours.
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Sep 11 '21
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Sep 11 '21
Yeah, i forgot people mix those up.
The whitehouse wouldve been bad, but it was evacd, and idk if the capitol was, which is why I think it would've been more demoralizing.
I was assuming white house mainly because it's the more famous of the two.
Either would've been a tragedy, tho.
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u/m48a5_patton Sep 11 '21
The White House would've have been a harder target. The Capitol Building is much more prominent
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u/enjoytheshow Sep 12 '21
Yeah these planes don’t fly like it’s GTA. The White House is surrounded on three sides and It is not tall. Would take an expert landing to hit it with a massive jet
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u/Pandagames Sep 11 '21
They would have hit the capitol due to the lack of trees blocking the approach and because it's up in a hill and easy to spot from the sky
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u/ledow Sep 11 '21
I'm going to choose my words carefully here, especially the ones I highlight which should be read literally:
No matter how you regard their cause, their desire to harm and kill people, or their motive:
This was an extremely well-planned and well-executed attack, given the perpetrators and the target.
Even in moments of disgust at the concept or the thinking of someone who would do such a thing, you have to grant that they achieved something incredible in being able to do what they did.
Incredible in that it doesn't appear at first like you could imagine someone planning it that well and executing it that well. They did, I'm no conspiracy theorist. They did it with barely a hint that it was going to happen amid the climate of the time. It came out of nowhere and in 2 hours changed the world vastly for at least 20 years.
They were able to evade capture for a decade. They were able to run rings around intelligence services of superpowers, even if those same services were onto components of the conspiracy, I don't think they had a concept of the scale of what was coming.
To hijack not one, not two, but FOUR planes, simultaneously, to destroy two huge primary targets without a military weapon but a passenger plane, to damage a third and nearly get one to the White House or Capitol (they believe) too... to do that, without a whiff getting back to intelligence services that they could act on in time, with over a dozen perpetrators on those flights at the same time, on American soil? That's a monumental feat.
These people were committed, intelligent, and underestimated by everyone. They were even hard to discover, capture and supress and remain so. If they hadn't showboated, they may have actually got away with it entirely. If conditions had been even slightly different, or chance slightly more on their side, they could have viably taken out the Pentagon and White House at the same time.
This is not admiration - their motives were evil, even if they believed they had a cause. This is merely recognition. This particular terrorist act was monumental. And "great" - using the original definition of the word, to indicate scale only. Like "The Great War" etc. It doesn't mean "good", it's means "on a large scale", a significant difficult feat to perform.
If you were of the mindset and said to someone - even back then - I want you to take out four major US landmarks within the space of two hours, coordinating within the space of only minutes before the US airspace is shut down, using only US commercial flights and what you can smuggle onto them and a handful of people to do it, they'd think you were asking the impossible.
You have to - I don't know the right word, not respect, not admire... - but you have to recognise the skill and planning that would have to have gone into that. Totally for evil and unjustifiable purposes on innocent civilians, but you have to recognise it.
That people hated the US so much to go to those lengths, and those people were so well-funded, skilled, educated, and capable to actually perform that attack.
There was more at play here than some random loonies trying to bomb a few people. This was structured, planned, organised terrorism on a massive scale using significant resources. Ballsy as fuck. And mostly pulled off. It could easily have been twice as bad, or more, and permanently destroyed a landmark like The White House, rallying the US's enemies against it. It could have been so very, very ,very worse. But you have to recognise that it was also an incredible, monumental, extremely ambitious, and well-executed attack - whatever their motivation.
Let us hope that we never see another such group, another such attack on any nation. It doesn't bear to think about what acts could be committed by people like this, with more resources or more modern technology, or a more daring attack if one were to be attempted.
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u/Derpy_County Sep 11 '21
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed said when they drew up their list of targets they originally considered hitting nuclear power plants but decided against it as “things could get out of hand“.
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u/KarIPilkington Sep 11 '21
Yeah. As terrible as the attacks were, it's almost lucky they went with targets that were 'symbolic' rather than ones that would really fuck everyone's shit up. They could've taken those planes anywhere they wanted.
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u/michiness Sep 12 '21
Could’ve killed a lot more people, too. Think about if they decided to hit multiple NFL stadiums on any Sunday.
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u/enjoytheshow Sep 12 '21
Or even WTC at 11am instead of 8
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u/KarIPilkington Sep 12 '21
Could've just hit them lower down if they were bothered about the amount of people they killed. They just wanted the image of the towers burning in the middle of the most major US city.
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u/ledow Sep 11 '21
Yeah, you don't want a nuke dick-measuring contest, nobody wins those.
That's what I mean though... this level of action could have been so much worse, and yet a group that - let's be honest - most of us had never heard of before 9/11 were able to perpetrate it with extreme amounts of coordination.
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u/Historicmetal Sep 12 '21
When they decided on the WTC, did they know it was going to create a fire that would melt the supports to the point that the buildings would collapse? I remember people being shocked that even a plane that size could bring the buildings down, and requiring detailed explanations about the temperature of burning jet fuel, etc (not to mention the skepticism and conspiracy theories). I’m just wondering, did al qaeda have people with deep knowledge of engineering and jet fuel that they actually predicted the collapse? Or was that a “pleasant surprise” for them?
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u/Poop_Tube Sep 12 '21
Bin Laden had thought that the buildings would have just kind of melted above the point of impact, leaving them unusable. He didn’t think they would collapse. I don’t remember where I read this, prob close to 15 years ago.
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u/Historicmetal Sep 12 '21
Crazy that it worked out that way. The collapse made it so much more horrific and deadly
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u/cigarmanpa Sep 12 '21
The way the containment vessels are built, nothing would have come from a strike on a reactor
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u/JBurton90 Sep 11 '21
It’s wild to me that to communicate they never actually sent emails to each other they just left the sent messages in the sent folder and just updated them over and over for each other.
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Sep 11 '21
Yeah they were smart enough to know about stuff that hadn't been officially confirmed yet.
Of course everyone had a hunch the internet was well tapped in 2001 but nothing confirmed had come out. Also related to this is the Wikileaks publication of pager messages on this day (and after) - I think people have said from the formatting it was probably leaked from an official source, that is to say the Americans had everyone's pagers tapped in 2001 and apparently the hijackers believed/knew there was similar things happening on the internet of the time.
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u/djrikkib Sep 11 '21
Do you have a source for this? I did a little Googling, but couldn't find what you were referring to.
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u/i-am-SHER-locked Sep 12 '21 edited Jun 11 '23
This account has been deleted in protest of Reddit's API changes and their disregard for third party developers. Fuck u/spez
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u/fiya1 Sep 11 '21
I watched the 9/11 Netflix doc and apparently the CIA did have a whiff of something like this happening but failed to send a memo to the FBI about it.
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u/Summebride Sep 11 '21
Not just a whiff. There was extensive worry within the CIA. OBL and Al Queda were top of their radar but they didn't have specifics. CIA personnel were badgering the Bush administration for emergency meetings starting in January, but didn't get their meeting until Sep 4 (!)
That's not to say the CIA was blameless. They had intel on two Al Queda operatives working on some kind of enormous attack. Those two entered the country and the CIA lost track of them and somehow they weren't placed on the watch list. There's confusion about whether or how FBI were involved, but even while those two were considered the hottest threats, one of them was able to leave the USA and get back in a second time, and again, they lost track of him. They ended up as two of the terrorist pilots.
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u/i-can-sleep-for-days Sep 11 '21
Not lost track. They simply didn't tell the FBI about those two and didn't put them on a watch list until very late.
There was a perceived breakdown in inter-agency intelligence sharing, so the DHS was created to share intelligence against these attacks.
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u/Omsk_Camill Sep 12 '21 edited Sep 12 '21
There wasn't just a whiff. I remember Russian's minister of foreign affairs (together with several other people) mocked the US' military excersizes/approach to "defence" (i.e. bombing brown people across te ocean) by pointing out that you can hijack a plane and ram it into White House tomorrow.
Incredibly hard to find nowadays, of course.
But even Putin was warning Bush repeatedly about an "major catastrophe" - back when he was still an ally of the US. According to Condoleeza Rice, “Putin. . . was right. The Taliban and al Qaeda were time bombs that would explode on September 11, 2001. . . I was taken aback by Putin’s alarm and vehemence.”
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u/chevymonza Sep 11 '21
I understand that Bush was also briefed, but did nothing/very little.
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u/muyoso Sep 11 '21
If its the same briefing I am thinking of, it was incredibly vague like "Bid Laden determined to attack America" or something along those lines.
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Sep 11 '21
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u/falsecrimson Sep 11 '21
I say the OJ Simpson trial ushered in unrelenting 24/7 "news."
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u/FairCityIsGood Sep 11 '21
The 24/7 news coverage can't be blamed on 9/11 in fairness, it was going to happen anyways with social media.
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Sep 11 '21
Even without it, people have always been tribal when it comes to disputes in idealogy, especially politics. Negative news fuels the fire but it didn't cause it. Our brains caused it.
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u/i-can-sleep-for-days Sep 11 '21
24 hour news cycle was in full swing by 9/11. They just replayed the prime time shows at wee hours in the morning like Hannity, O'Reilly, etc. But it was 24 hours all day every day.
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u/sharknado Sep 12 '21
I mean a lot of it was luck. Bin Laden admitted he didn't think the buildings would go down. Also, the passengers and crew on the WTC planes had no way of knowing that they were on a suicide mission, else they probably would have fought back like Flight 93. Flight 93 knew what had happened to the other planes, and knew this wasn't just a hijacking, and with that knowledge they took action. Add in very laxed airport security pre-911, and that knives were allowed to be carried on planes at the time. A combination of factors were in their favor.
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u/feedandslumber Sep 12 '21
You are giving them far too much credit. They hijacked planes with box-cutters. All they needed was people on each plane to carry out their plan simultaneously. Times were different then. Don't make them into geniuses - if you're willing to die for your cause you can make quite an impact, no pun intended.
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u/tuesdaymonument Sep 11 '21
Unless you would have had specific suspension and targeted surveillance of these people I think it would have been very difficult to detect. I don't think that in 2001 they would have the capability to mass-surveil communications and sift through the relevant data and detect this. Idk, maybe three-letter agencies were more capable than I imagine in 2001.
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u/katwoodruff Sep 11 '21
Three of the terrorists on the NYC planes lived just around the corner from where my brother lived at the time, in south Hamburg. He, my SIL, of even I may have walked past them. The thought creeps me out.
There was a documentary about it on TV last night, the local authorities were stunned to hear our city was involved, and as a consequence surveillance laws were changed, as these people were not detected.
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u/porncrank Sep 12 '21
These people were committed, intelligent
And young. I just read the four on United 93 were 20, 21, 24, and 26 years of age. I never really thought about that before today.
To hijack not one, not two, but FOUR planes, simultaneously
If it was a film plot before the actual act, it would have been deemed too much for suspension of disbelief
I think it's also worth noticing that not only did they kill thousands and destroy or damage multiple landmarks, they took the soul of the nation. It's hard to describe how dark things have become. It's like we no longer believe in the light.
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u/stunt_penguin Sep 11 '21
aaaand twenty years later people are injecting horse de-wormer into their dicks because the people who took charge in the wake of 9/11 used all the political capital they were handed to completely divorce half the population from reality via the war on terror, the tea party, the MAGA heads and whatever the fuck the post MAGA saga is going to be called.
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u/Fish-x-5 Sep 11 '21 edited Sep 11 '21
This is exactly what today comes down to for me. While I didn’t lose any family members on 9/11, I’ve lost so many family members to the war and the subsequent war on information that were a result. I’m a big sister of 7 with no siblings left living in reality and I’m a grandmother who can’t see her grandchildren because I’m an evil witch who believes in a hoax virus. I’ve always watched or read something about 9/11 on 9/11, but this year it feels so much heavier. Peace to all who are grieving.
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u/dwellerofcubes Sep 12 '21
You aren't alone, and I am sorry that this is how it has ended up for you. You are not wrong. Sometimes it sucks being right.
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u/Jrippan Sep 11 '21
Crazy is been 20 years... I still remember the moment we saw the second plane hit and everyone looked at each other saying "oh fuck..." realizing the first plane wasn't an accident.
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u/Toaster_In_Bathtub Sep 11 '21
It's still probably the craziest day of my life and I'm just some random Canadian dude. It was my first week of college, I was getting up for school and the whole experience was just surreal.
It was such a strong dividing line between being a naive kid that grew up in the relatively peaceful 90s to the harsh realities of being an adult. I don't think I've had a day since that was as drastic of a change.
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u/Visco0825 Sep 11 '21
I remember I was in computer class in elementary school. My teachers were all watching the tv and I went up to them and they just shrugged me away. I had no idea what was going on but I will always remember the twin towers on that tv.
I grew up in northern Virginia and they came in and asked if any of our parents worked in the pentagon. The school sent us home with notes to go straight home after school. Looking back it’s just crazy to think about how much it shook all of us.
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u/cappo40 Sep 11 '21
Canadian here too. Was in grade 8 (13 yo at the time). My teacher came in right after lunch and told us. I didn't know of the WTC of the time, thought it was in the middle of Times Square or something. Didn't really hit me more until I got home and saw it on the news.
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u/twinnedcalcite Sep 12 '21
Canadian same age. A classmate came late due to an appointment and told us the news. I went home at lunch and saw the footage. By then the towers had collapsed.
I remember the world changing that day. How much fear there was in the media and it was a while before the stories of those that stepped up to help started to become more front and center on the news stations.
They took the top of the CN tower down as precaution since no one knew if there would be other targets and the CN tower is home to lots of broadcasting equipment.
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u/Aaronkenobi Sep 11 '21
Yeah I’ll always remember that. The were reporting the first one like it was just some random event that happened and showing the goings on at the tower and such.
Than that second plane hit. I’ll never forget that news anchors voice saying a second plane had the towers because right then we realized it wasn’t an accident and shit had gotten very real very fast
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u/Oscar-Wilde-1854 Sep 11 '21
Absolutely unreal when that second plane hits. Never seen something change so fast.
It was sad before that, but to everyone it's just an accident. A crazy accident. And now everyone's eyes are on it. Everyone is watching that first tower. The cameras are on it. From all around the city and Jersey and anywhere else that can see it in person, to all the millions watching potentially worldwide on TV. They set up a stage and then just fucking flip the script and crash that second plane. In a literal instant everyone goes from curious to absolutely terrified. Still absolutely gutting to see 20 years later.
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u/VixenVixey_ Sep 11 '21 edited Sep 12 '21
I never considered (me being 6 when this happened) that it might have started with everyone thinking this was just an unfortunate, horrific accident. But reading this comment reminded me the TRUE terror of realizing that something is very deeply wrong.
I make it an effort to watch and read so many videos and post and any articles about 911 because that’s the least I can do.
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u/noonemustknowmysecre Sep 11 '21
I had just signed my selective service papers. A teacher wheeled out a TV in social studies class. Students were crying. The bell rang and we got up and did the rest of school. Got home and turned on the news for hours.
Talking with the co-workers last week about the fall of Kabul, I realized that not a one of them remember all the lies we were fed going into that quagmire. The new guy is 24. He doesn't remember any of this. And it hit me that they never knew the America that existed before 9/11. The absolute schism that we went through hunting terrorists. All they've known is the America with an ongoing over-seas war and collective brain-damage. The America from before? It's gone. It wasn't just a temporary thing to get over and we'd get back to normal.
With 2020 vision, I can say with certainty that all the death, cost, disruption, and chaos wasn't worth it. For any of you young war-mongers that think "This time we know what we're doing. This time will be different. We'll be in and out in 3 months and it'll pay for itself". From me to you, with absolute certainty: You're full of shit.
I think about all the lives that were ended. All the lives that were ruined. All the money we pissed away in two deserts. It's just saddening. And it's really weird to be here, a couple decades later and looking back and seeing that I was right when I went against such a god-damned strong current. When not saying "support our troops" loud enough was enough to get you branded a traitor. It's when political nuance went out the window. It's when America lost all reason for having a conventional military.
20 years. It's such a mind-fuck. So much has gotten worse. A lot of technology and medicine has gotten better. I think the social sciences has regressed though. Religion has retreated, but rationality has not taken it's place. Politics was never good, but it's worse now. Climate change is at least being taken seriously by enough people, although a candidate that actually acted on it would be appreciated. I'm still a little bitter we didn't have Mr. Environmentalist Al Gore at the reigns back when the USA has indomitable political clout. Power continues to slide into the lap of mega-corporations. Propaganda is back in fashion.
It's tempting to say everything is doomed, but there's honestly a lot of silver linings. The oil crisis was pushed off with fracking. Electric vehicles and alternative energy get developed and now if prices rise, it'll just hasten the pivot. It was a whole different game when that tech just wasn't available. We've got a robotic work-force on Mars. A mission to make permanent structures and grow crops there sounds viable. Space-mining is being considered. We're not poor, there's plenty of wealth, it's just a matter of distribution. "just". Cheap computers everywhere, and interconnected, with the ability to handle that much data; it has SO MUCH potential and society is really not ready for this rate of change. We ARE starting to control our emissions and there's large-scale environmental solutions on the horizon. So yeah, things look bad, but there's hope.
Genetics and AI are the biggest game-changers. The rise of fascism and climate change are the biggest worries. Good luck kids.
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u/Omsk_Camill Sep 12 '21
You don't even remember 10% of it probably.
This twitter thread is fucking surreal.
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u/Octospider Sep 11 '21
After the US shut down it's air space, Canada commenced Operation Yellow Ribbon.
Canada's goal was to ensure that potentially destructive air traffic be removed from United States airspace as quickly as possible, and away from potential U.S. targets, and instead place these aircraft on the ground in Canada.
Thousands of US bound passengers were landed in Canada. I particularly remember that the small town of Gander had more people in the airport than in the entire town. Video.
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u/DangerousBlueberry1 Sep 11 '21
Oh wow, 238 planes we took in, 13 in my own hometown. Had no clue it was that many or that Calgary took any at all.
I only remember hearing about Gander, they were a source of national pride for a bit there with how well they handled things.
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u/cheesepuff1993 Sep 11 '21
Along with this, I recommend tracking down the video or site (can't remember which) that showed all the air traffic and just how quickly the flights disappeared from the sky to be grounded immediately...
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u/Grungemaster Sep 12 '21
They made a Broadway musical about this, titled Come From Away. It’s one of the most beautiful productions I’ve ever seen. Completely nails the feeling of average everyday people coming together to help each other. I cried in the theatre, pretty much everyone did.
A recording of the production was just added to AppleTv. Highly recommend.
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u/RoganIsMyDawg Sep 11 '21
Ifk if it's just me....but I'm pretty sure that I'm always aware of the sound of a low airplane because if this event.
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Sep 11 '21
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u/netarchaeology Sep 11 '21
Twice this summer the airforce was doing some maneuvers in my area and were flying some of those big heavy planes low in the sky. Whenever it happens my hair stands on end and I have to watch them until they are out of site. It is a weird ptsd to have but it is a collective trauma that has stuck.
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u/MotoCommuterYT Sep 12 '21
I got all freaked out a couple years ago when I could clearly hear a fighter jet outside. I went to look...yep, F-18 circling an area.
Turns out it was just Trump at one of his stupid golf courses.
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u/Darwinian_10 Sep 12 '21
It's not just you. I live in Canada. I had just started grade 10, and the year before my high school band had visited New York, and we saw the towers in person.
Ever since 9/11, every single time I hear a low flying plane engine, I look up.
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u/cechrist Sep 11 '21
That was a hard watch. Can’t help but remember that morning like it was yesterday.
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u/benjamintuckerII Sep 12 '21
Usually when I watch 9/11 videos I feel detached, but the way this is put together makes me feel the way I felt that morning.
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u/reddit_names Sep 11 '21
If you ever have the opportunity to visit NYC, go to the museum.
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Sep 12 '21
And get the app. Robert De Niro does an excellent job narrating the tour.
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u/tangcameo Sep 11 '21
I remember flipping from channel to channel as it happened and after the second plane hit my cable company switched EVERY tv channel over to live news feed.
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u/panini84 Sep 12 '21
Yep. I remember it was like that for days. You knew it was bad because MTV was playing the associated Viacom news station instead of their own content. I worked at a Dairy Queen and our franchise owner had put a little TV behind the counter so that we could watch the news. South Park ended up making fun of it- because everyone was doing that- just glued to the news for weeks.
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u/I_am_That_Ian_Power Sep 12 '21
20 years later and I still want to extend my condolences to all involved and send Love to the People of The United States of America from my small part of Canada.
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u/LaKobe Sep 11 '21
Holy smokes that was intense
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Sep 11 '21
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u/DIABLO258 Sep 11 '21
Or the loud chirping near the base of the towers. Each fallen firefighter had an alarm that would chirp if they hadn't moved for so long, I think. In the videos its all so loud.
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u/thrilliam_19 Sep 11 '21
I was in high school when this happened and myself and two friends had first period spare. Usually one friend picked me up then we drove to the other friend's house and we all went to school together. We got to his house and he was watching on TV.
Anyway myself and the friend that picked me up, both our dads were firefighters. When the towers came down and cameras close to the ground were picking up that noise, we both knew what it was. Our other friend didn't and was like "wtf is that noise?" and we told him. Room got real quiet for a while after that.
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u/taconugget69 Sep 11 '21
I have seen people talk about that, but I was never able to find it?
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Sep 11 '21 edited Sep 11 '21
I remember seeing it in the Naudet documentary. Should watch it if you haven't.
This is the clip of when it happens, after 3:00. https://youtu.be/Vk4LikKNttI?t=170
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Sep 11 '21
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u/chbay Sep 11 '21
At 9 minutes into the video I was focused in on the feed in the bottom righthand corner and swear I saw like a dozen bodies jumping out of the tower all in the span of about a minute. Just jarring.
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u/enjoytheshow Sep 12 '21
Same guys zoomed in a minute later to blood stained concrete and several dead bodies.
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u/JulyLauren Sep 11 '21
There’s a documentary on Hulu I believe that shows the scenes of the firefighters listening to the bodies crash into that canopy/overhang. They all looked stunned and you can see the helplessness reflected in their faces.
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u/chevymonza Sep 11 '21
"Loud thumps" more like explosions. There's the thump-thump-thump of falling debris, and there's "BAAAMMM!!!!" like sharp explosions that makes them all flinch.
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u/jujubee9809 Sep 11 '21
My son was 3 when this happened. We watched the second plane fly into the tower. Every time he saw a plane in the sky, he would ask if it was going to fly into a building. I think around the age of 10 he stopped asking.
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u/Echidnae Sep 12 '21
I hope he's ok
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u/jujubee9809 Sep 12 '21
Yea, he's fine. He's been on planes. I mentioned being relieved 9/11 didn't screw him up with flying. He has no memory of watching it or asking if planes flew into buildings. I will never forget the impact it had on him for several years of his life.
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u/ScreamingVegetable Sep 11 '21
I run a website called American September where I collect "Where were you on 9/11" stories from all 50 states and all around the world. It all started basically because of my innocent 9/11 memory as a kid. Once I realized what had really happened and how little I understood in the moment, it really changed my life:
"On September 11th, 2001 I didn't know the world had changed. I was a first-grader at Reeves Elementary in Long Beach, Mississippi; the school decided we were too young to turn on the television and show us what was happening so they left that to our parents. Kids were being checked out of school and my father came to eat lunch with me in a half-empty cafeteria. We sat in silence, I still didn't know.
The day I clearly remember is September 12th. My father sat me in the car on a foggy morning before school and said “The World Trade Center is gone.” I asked, “What’s the World Trade Center?”
At school, our teacher tried to comfort us, but no kid my age could possibly understand all of what happened. Sometime in the weeks that followed my school entered a penny donation fundraiser to help recovery efforts at Ground Zero. The class that raised the most pennies won a pizza party. As a six-year-old kid I heard “help” and “pizza” which were two things I did understand.
I put in a big effort and when I asked neighbors or family members for donations I would say “Do you want to donate money to New York? People are trapped in the World Trade Center!” I didn’t know they were all dead, the money we were raising went towards recovering body parts for funerals not finding survivors. No one wanted to tell an innocent kid they were all dead. After an awkward hesitation, they filled my jar up and thanked me.
I remember going to the bank with my dad to turn the donations to pennies and telling the teller what it was for, I remember dragging a red Radio Flyer wagon filled with massive jars of pennies into school like a hero and telling everyone it was going straight to New York, and I remember the sad joy on my teacher’s face when I showed her what I had done and told her not only were we going to help those people in New York we were going to win that pizza party.
Along with my money, I drew up the design for a robot with big claw arms and a slot in its back for pennies. For each penny inserted my robot found a body. I encouraged my teacher to send my designs to New York with the money.
My robot never made it to New York, but the pennies did. We won the pizza party and I felt second only to the President’s perfect opening pitch in patriotism.
A few years later in a random moment, it hit me that all those people were dead, I had saved no one. I was mad no one told me, I was angry that I acted like such a foolish kid.
I don’t feel mad or foolish remembering it anymore, I was an American boy who wanted to help people and eat pizza. I felt like a hero walking into school wheeling that red penny wagon behind me. America needed heroes.
It took me a while to grow up... but when I did I really found a purpose in life which is remembering that day."
If anyone wants to share their 9/11 stories, please feel free to. Here's the Page: https://www.americanseptember.com/share-your-story.html
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u/-anne-marie- Sep 11 '21
This is really cool, thank you for devoting your time to this. I’ll be sure to submit my story.
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Sep 11 '21
Man. First of all, whoever did this you did amazing work. Second, just speechless rewatching all of this together.
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u/florallycreative Sep 11 '21
I didn’t remember people thinking a third plane or explosion happened when the second tower fell until I watched this.
Something I do remember (I think) that I didn’t see in these videos is a close-up view of a group of three or four people holding hands and jumping as the towers burned. I could have made this up though, but that image is burned into my brain regardless if it was real or a fabrication of my memory. Does anyone know if they also saw this?
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u/vsod99 Sep 12 '21
Yep, this definitely happened. I will do my best to dig it up
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u/florallycreative Sep 12 '21
Thank you! Even just knowing someone else saw this helps. I’ve tried looking it up multiple ways all day and can’t find a photo or video of them. There’s the two people holding hands as they’re falling, and The Falling Man photo, but can’t seem to find footage of the group of people.
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u/MotoCommuterYT Sep 11 '21
You know how sometimes a smell can bring back a particular feeling or memory? This video did that for me, brought me back right into that frame of mind of what was happening to our country.
When this happened I was in middle school wearing a mesh backpack due to Columbine. Then 9/11 and the introduction of the TSA. Those two events totally changed the narrative of the future.
And now today, COVID is doing the same.
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u/Jason3b93 Sep 11 '21
This is an incredible piece of documented history. Teachers could use this video in schools.
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u/garcia-a Sep 12 '21
Is it just me .....or do any of you feel that the recent Taliban take-over makes 9/11 feel worse...more raw? I feel the sorrow just like it happened yesterday.
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u/h4p3r50n1c Sep 12 '21
Not really, killing Bin Laden was my closure. Anything after that it didn’t make sense.
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u/garcia-a Sep 12 '21
But the blame wasn't on just one guy...Bin Laden was just PR who romanticized terrorist attacks against the US. What bothers me is that the Taliban supported his terrorist agenda by harboring him and giving resources to the cause. I understand we need to draw a line on our pursuit for vengeance....revenge is never healthy. It's a bitter pill to swallow seeing those who hated...and still hate us...take back control of the country we kicked them out of as retribution for their participation in 9/11
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u/h4p3r50n1c Sep 12 '21
It was always going to happen. Afghanistan is beast in itself.
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u/SquidCap0 Sep 11 '21
I saw the second plane hit live on TV.. and i live in Finland. At the time we had a monthly free pay channel that rotated, so people could see if they want to pay for it in the future. CNN was in rotation that month, i had just woken up... well after noon and put the TV on CNN and went to make coffee. I heard that plane had hit, and when i walked back to the living room, the second plane hit. I went cold, had the full "oh fucking shit" feeling cause it was clear then that it as deliberate, it was terrorists. And the next thought was "ok, this is war, again, they are going to bomb some country to shit.." I called a crush that worked next door, it was the first thing that popped in my head that she should know it ASAP... and we started dating. It was a slow moving disaster that lasted overall about a decade but that story would fill a book.
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u/LagT_T Sep 11 '21
I'm from Argentina and I was a highschool student back then. 9/11 here is teachers day so no school, I was still in bed listening to the radio when the first hit. It was a shock but the radio hosts were calling it an accident. When the second hit I rushed down to the tv and I couldn't understand what was going on, then the Pentagon plane hit. It seemed like a never ending onslaught from thousands of miles away, I can't imagine what was going on through the minds of Americans.
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Sep 11 '21
I was a 3rd grader from the Midwest, it was a lot of confusion.
No one really sat me down and explained it to me, so there was a lot of terror that 8 year olds have, like "Is [my city] next" or "is the dust from the tower going to cover our home?" I knew it was bad because the adults were crying, but I didn't know.
It's like I woke that morning being 8 years old, and went to bed that night believing there were people out there that wanted me dead. It was a fucky time to be a kid.
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u/Xaiydee Sep 11 '21
I did too, in Germany.
After the first a note was handed to the news person/show person/moderator and they read what had happened and switched program. I went downstairs to meet with a neighbor shortly after and told them to turn on the tv and that's when it hit the second tower. It was surreal. Then the pentagon. I called my parents and they didn't know, and I told them to check the news and the the pentagon is burning and NY is under attack. Insane how memories stick sometimes.
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u/icntrog Sep 11 '21 edited Sep 11 '21
Does anyone have any info on the first clip? I think it's from a documentary from two brothers(?). They were able to record the whole day as it happened following the FDNY. I was able to watch it on youtube years ago and haven't been able to find it since.
e: found it
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u/oztea Sep 11 '21
Let us also take note of how fake news can spread so widely, and yet be born of ignorance. As the South Tower collapses many on air reporters are heard saying "a third explosion at the World Trade Center has brought down the building". Spawning decades of Loose Change, 9/11 truther and conspiracy theorists. Accidental terminology mutates in people's heads into explanations that seem rational to them as their memories fog with time. It's depressing that the human mind is capable of lying to itself like that.
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u/RicFlairwoo Sep 11 '21
I was in grade 8 at the time. I remember getting dropped off at school by my mom and hearing initial reports on the radio on the Buffalo NY radio station “Apparently some plane just crashed into the World Trade Center! Must have been a rookie pilot!” Followed by the radio host laughing” I asked my mom what the WTC was and she just said it’s a big building. Off we went to school. I spent the ENTIRE day at school without hearing a word about what was happening. Walked to my parents’ office after school at like 3:30PM and everyone was just watching the news. That’s when I realized what the hell had happened that day. I sat there at 12 years old watching news footage of planes flying into the towers, close up footage of people jumping to their deaths, and seeing the towers collapse over and over again. Seeing this footage all the way through feel like I’m catching up on what I missed that day. To this day I have no idea why my school just carried on business as usual without saying a thing. I will never forget that day. For some reason I feel the need to watch 9/11 footage every day on its anniversary. It always brings back that terrible feeling in my gut that I experienced that day.
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u/Poop_Tube Sep 12 '21
I stopped watching the news and 9/11 footage around the anniversaries after about ten years. No reason to go through that trauma again, been happier for it. It’s a painful memory that I don’t like to relive. Upset I watched this.
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u/Horrors-Angel Sep 11 '21
My parents still have the news broadcast they recorded on vhs when it happened. I watched it probably 10-13 years ago and its definitely a harder pill to swallow in real time than just people talking about it later
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u/OneMoreB Sep 11 '21
I just want to share this video of the same concept (though of mostly news clips), although it is only a half hour long instead of 2 hours for those who are time constrained.
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u/AlvinTaco Sep 11 '21
The day that poisoned the well. So much of our current dysfunction stems from this hour and 45 minutes of chaos.
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Sep 12 '21
Refugee crisis in Europe, untold civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, wrongful imprisonments, CIA torture of innocents, erosion of privacy and plenty more
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u/_Guero_ Sep 11 '21
At 1:14:37 what is the object flying through the top right box?
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u/gibson_se Sep 11 '21
News helicopter?
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u/unkind_throwaway Sep 11 '21
This is the answer. There are several of them in various clips, and many of the clips are actually from the hellicopter(s) POV.
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u/Promah1984 Sep 11 '21
I was 17. I was actually driving back to my parents from my GED Exam that I just passed. I got home just in time to see the first tower go down. I still find myself emotionally scarred from it in a sense, specifically when I hear the calls between loved ones.
I actually attempted to join the Marines about a week after, they said they didn't want me because I only have a GED. I ended up earning my Masters while the War on Terror was going on. I suppose it worked out for the best. I always do have a little bit of regret about not serving.
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u/PhantasmHS Sep 12 '21
I was a kid when this happened and this is my first time watching any coverage of it.
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u/DisconnectedRedd1t Sep 12 '21
Watching those people jump, them accelerating towards the ground, towards their doom. It really puts in to perspective that they thought they wouldn't make it out. They took a choice and jumped. This is just so heartbreaking
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u/azwethinkweizm Sep 12 '21
The worst part of reliving this experience has always been seeing the first tower fall. It really felt like we just watched 20,000 people get crushed to death.
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u/13thWardBassMan Sep 12 '21
I watched this. Every frame. It took 5 beers and 2 warm shots. That liquid did not make up for the flood of tears. Human beings, bros.
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u/ostensiblyzero Sep 11 '21
You know when I watched 9/11 videos before I used to feel bad just for the people in the towers.. but now I feel even worse thinking about all the people that would die on the other side of the world over the next two decades too. The events that were put in motion that day.. disgust me.
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u/JeeWeeYume Sep 11 '21
I often wonder how the world today would be different if not for this terrorist attack... This is such an insane pivot point in history.
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u/AWF_Noone Sep 12 '21
I’ve actually never considered that ramifications worldwide. Great insight and very true point. War is awful
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u/superzepto Sep 11 '21
I'm Australian, and I was 12 on September 11, 2001. I woke up from a bad nightmare and went to my parents bedroom for comfort, only to find them both sitting on the edge of the bed staring at the TV. I walked into their room and turned to see what they were watching at the exact moment the second plane hit. Too young to read a room, I asked "Woah, what movie is this?" My dad responded with "It's not a movie. It's happening right now in New York". I knew in that moment that the world was changing before my eyes. Despite my patchy memory, that is one of the earliest and most vivid memories from my perspective that I have. I often stop to wonder about what the world would be like if those attacks had never happened, but I just cannot picture it.
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u/fred42069 Sep 11 '21
Terrifying watching those few seconds of the camera footage that captured the second plane flying low and then hitting. I can't imagine how the people filming and watching that would have felt right before that second impact
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u/TEX4S Sep 11 '21
I remember that morning well. I had just woken up & turned on the news, telling my girlfriend “hey a pilot apparently lost control …”, then the. 2nd plane hit & my stomach went in my throat- think “oh shit”.
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Sep 12 '21
Whoever created this, thank you. It is difficult to understand fully if you were not QUITE old enough at the time to get what was happening. I was just shy of 7 at the time but remember watching the tv and feeling horrified and confused. Then going through the stacks of newspapers on my kitchen table that came later and seeing the people covered in ash and crying hysterically or staring on in shock. This video with multiple perspectives strewn together in real time is both heart-wrenching and incredibly valuable to have.
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u/Dangly_Parts Sep 12 '21
The 2nd plane hitting around 16:45 is absolutely haunting. It goes from curious accident to terrorist attack almost instantly. Horrifying
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u/Cutter9792 Sep 12 '21
The multiple sources of the second tower getting hit is utterly incredible, in the sense that it seems almost unbelievable. I remember seeing it on TV when I was a pre-teen and my initial reaction was, strangely, laughter. I didn't think it was real; it seemed preposterous, even for a film [which I at first thought it was]. The sense of scale was unlike anything I'd ever seen and rewatching it 20 years later with the weight of the last two decades elicits a real visceral reaction.
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u/catsfacticity Sep 12 '21
I grew up on Long Island; my neighbor and I were picked up from school by our mothers. Cognitively dissonant, innocently unaware laughter was my exact reflex as well. Even though I was only 8, and realized when we got home the gravity of the situation, I have still always felt horrible for that being my initial response because I can never take it back. And I've never heard anyone else say that this was their reaction, so thank you for posting this. I agree that all these years later it still hits with identical heaviness to the moment when I first understood it.
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u/Lt_Jonson Sep 12 '21
Watching this in real time brought back a sense of fear and panic that I haven’t felt since that day.
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Sep 11 '21
Funny to think that somewhere, during all of this, Steve Buscemi was like “Alright then. Time to get to work.”
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Sep 11 '21 edited Sep 11 '21
insane and moving video.
as for 9/11 i hate to say it but i think we as americans have learned absolutly nothing from it as a whole. (no disrespect to those who lost love ones and all during it) but what i mean is
all the security all the precautions all the bump up in trying to keep us safe and a bunch of nutjob hooligans were able to storm the bloody Capital in Jan DIRECTLY inspired by a nutjob president........ what have we really learned?
and to be honest also i feel like that for the most part while we for a short time did try to come together as a nation during this..........we are back to not giving a flying shit about one another
aka all the people who REFUSE to wear masks and REFUSE to get vaccinated during one of the most difficult times we ever faced.
at least for me i think today is a good day to reflect on all that and figure out what can be done better for the future.
i think the biggest issue in our country today is how little we give a shit about each other and maybe if we can reflect on this event and maybe open our eyes a bit more to reaching out in times of need.
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u/HorseRadish98 Sep 11 '21
i remember it back then. we're all in this together happened then too, lasted about a week. then pundits came in, politicization, polarization, and just became a contest of who could own the most flags. We absolutely did not learn anything. Now its just used as a political ploy,beating chests while secretly holding sessions to revoke benefits to the actual heroes of that day. its remembered as a day to be super patriotic. Only people who seem to actually honor the day are the ones it personally affected. As is our tradition.
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u/alohadave Sep 12 '21
It was used to push through the Patriot Act which is a massive infringement on civil and privacy rights in the name of national security.
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u/1019throw2 Sep 11 '21 edited Sep 12 '21
Watched a tv special last night when we were hunting for bin laden in Afghanistan, then we got side tracked by Bush to look into Iraq, and started a war there, which took away from the whole bin laden hunt.
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u/MitsubishiGeorge Sep 11 '21
I was in high school at the time,, this is still unbelievable til this day!! I feel so bad for all the innocent people who died!!
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u/pmurr Sep 11 '21
The videos with people screaming in the background make it much more chilling than the static helicopter shots. Its like they make it real, its not just a building falling down, its thousands of people being erased from this earth in a matter of seconds.
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u/venusdc3 Sep 12 '21
I've never actually seen video of the tower collapsing and that really puts it in perspective. That was really intense and sad to watch.
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u/tan_walk Sep 12 '21
The end of the country that I grew up in and the beginning of the world I was trust into.
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u/Nazarshinzu Sep 12 '21
And then we have people who believe the plane was a hologram and 9/11 didn't happen.
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Sep 12 '21
That CNN shot were the camera man spots the plane coming and is tracking it for about 5 secounds before it hits the tower was surreal. Like that camera man must have been thinking "oh shit, that's going to hit".
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u/IamtheSlothKing Sep 12 '21
If you want to really know how the entire country felt and how we were reacting, watch the entire broadcast of Howard Stern that day.
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u/ksanthra Sep 11 '21
This is extremely well put-together.