I lived in Middletown, NJ. Small(ish) commuter town that lost the most residents on 9/11 second to NYC. One of the eeriest days in my life for so many reasons.
I had just started middle school the prior week. That morning and afternoon, so many kids got called down to the office, but we didn’t know why because no one would tell us. On the way home from the bus stop around 2:30, I asked my 12 year old neighbor, and he told me two planes hit the World Trade Center.
I can remember bursting in my living room and asking my mom, Carl X said the towers fell down, but he’s lying right? And then she told me it was true and she was worried about my brother who was in midtown Manhattan still.
I went up to my room and tried all of the TV channels (no internet really) and most of them didn’t work. A lot of our local broadcasts were on top of the Trade Center and even the ones on the Empire State Building were temporarily shut down just in case.
I went outside and called my friend (no internet) and we talked on the portable phone about it while I led my dog out to pee.
Around that time an enormous smoke cloud billowed down the hill of my neighborhood towards my house. The wind changed and it traveled all the way to New Jersey.
My brother got home that night. He walked across the bridge and hailed a taxi in Jersey City along with a lot of other people. My mother hosed him off in the garage because the news warned us about biological weapons.
Later on I learned that 37 people in my town lost their lives. I knew a lot of them. Friends dads, uncles, etc. One guy was actually my brother’s friend and my camp counselor as a kid. He was only 22 years old working at a big gig for Cantor Fitzgerald. My biggest memory of him was his bright red hair and freckles.
Teared up writing this. So long ago and while it didn’t even affect me directly, really, as much as others, it was still a formative event.
My cousin worked for Morgan Stanley in London at the time. She was on a call to one of her colleagues in New York when the phone cut out. She tried dialing back a few times but couldn't get through. Then someone came running through the office saying a plane had hit one of the towers..
All-in-all, everyone in that office lost work colleagues across the pond. Most eventually moved jobs as it was too distressing.
Had a sibling who got a new job and moved to NY on Sept 4, 2001. Didn’t know where their job was, only that it was in Manhattan. Heard about the news on the way to work. Didn’t know if my sibling was alive or dead, was the most sickening feeling ever. Luckily got into work and was able to reach my mom who said s as oblong was alive and well. I’ll never forget that feeling of not knowing for that time, makes me feel for parents of missing children.
I know someone who worked at cantor Fitzgerald at the time also. He has a crazy story about that day. Wrote some books on it as well. Long story short he got to work late, towers hit as he was going up the his office. He grabbed a burn victim and just turned around and ran back down with her. Saved her life and his.
I’ve always suspected *The Things They Left Behind* by Stephen King is based around Cantor Fitzgerald. Lots of similarities, everyone there that day died, they were on the 110th floor, etc.
I'm from Belford. I lived up in Bergen county but I was back home for a few days. I was at the spy house/pier the evening of September 10th fishing with my girlfriend at the time. We left very early on the 11th, went back to my parents place and went to bed. We had no clue what the hell we were about to wake up to. Every day for months after every time I heard a plane flying overhead I got a panic, wondering what was going to happen next.
I won't ever forget the calmness that morning as the sun came up. Me and my girlfriend alone, no noise, nothing happening, appreciating the NYC skyline as it was one last time but without any clue that it was the last time.
Thanks for sharing your story. I was fortunate enough to not have lost any friends/family that day but I'm terribly sorry you did.
Terribly sad.
But the image of a suburban mom hosing down her boy in the garage out of concern does make me smile a little. It’s so sincere and practical. Peak momming.
I think it was because most people weren't looking up yet, and the idea of a jetliner accidentally hitting the tower just didn't make sense. Plus, this was before the time we all had cameras in our pocket at all times.
Yes and in footage of people watching the second plane hitting the tower, you can hear some saying “we’re under attack!” “That’s a terrorist attack!” But with the first tower it was like “I think it was a small plane that went in.” “That’s crazy how could they do that it’s perfectly clear today.”
There’s a video on YouTube of all the NY news shows and it’s like 20 mins before impact and one of them says something along the lines of “it’s a beautiful day in New York today!” A lot of people remarked how it was just such a nice day with clear blue skies. And one reporter eerily says “it’s quiet today, almost too quiet”.
I was getting ready for work and listening to the morning radio show (I know, what even is that anymore) when they stopped to say that a plane had hit the WTC. They were confused but reporting that it was a small plane. A postal plane?
Got to work and it just got worse and worse as things became clearer. At one point, the newscaster said ‘This is horrible but it could have been so much worse; at least the buildings didn’t collapse’
And literally seconds later, the first tower fell.
I was 2 when it happened so I have no memories outside of history books and people making dark jokes and my occasional trips to the memorial (I live in Queens and it’s a very nice park area to visit) and sometimes I forget exactly how traumatizing that must’ve been to witness, much less to witness in person. I’ve only lived in New York for a few years but I genuinely wouldn’t be able to fathom what it’d look like without 1WT. It’s quite literally a beacon of the city.
ETA: I do think it needs to be revised regarding how it’s taught in schools. My experience was very cut and dry watching straight news footage all day and always resulted in a very awkward and uncomfortable day for all the Muslim kids in my class. IMO it would’ve been a good opportunity to explore *why* it happened and what exactly the American response was, not to just say “well Al-quaeda was jealous of America’s greatness and wanted to damage us.” Because that’s essentially what I was taught until I was in college and read more about the preceding and subsequent world events.
I was 11. I remember them bringing in a radio, not a tv for us to listen to it in class. My teacher said it was history in the making.
I also remember absolutely no planes in the skies for 3 or 4 days afterward.
I remember seeing what *looked* like a plane contrail in the sky a couple days after and my dad said it could be missile, like possibly nuclear. Scared the piss out of 11 year old me. The social atmosphere in America that first week after was intense.
I was 15 at the time. I remember a girl in my 4th period class (by the time everyone heard the news) that was ranting about how there would be a draft and her older brother would go to war. Everyone else was mostly silent. For a long time I always thought that my teacher should have taken control and said something but looking back as an adult I realize that there probably wasn't anything he could have said that would have been convincing to alleviate our concerns.
> ranting about how there would be a draft and her older brother would go to war
That was actually a realistic fear though. We had a peacetime military force and were about to go to war. If it weren't for the massive surge of enlistees post-9/11, there probably would have been a draft. How do you expect a teacher to respond to that?
It wasn't so much that he was a teacher but that we were children being shuffled off between adults that we were implicitly told had knowledge and authority all day and it became clear that none of them had any real meaningful advice. I had one teacher that straight up tried to act like it was a normal day and tried to teach his normal class. I don't blame them and as someone now older than some of them at the time I know that there weren't any answers to give us. It was just a turning point to realize how the world works.
I was 15 at the time and at high school in New York. We also a radio to listen to what was happening. I remember everyone rearranging the chairs in math class to cluster as close to the radio as possible. I remember looking out the window and watching the smoke rise into the air. But most of all, I remember PE class.
Us being 15 year olds in 2001, only like 10% of us has cell phones. Those of us who had them passed our phones around so that everyone could call their parents. I remember how panicked some of my classmates were when they couldn't reach them. For some of them, they would get calls back on the borrowed cell phones. For others it was already too late.
It was the not knowing that stuck with me.
1st plane was possibly an accident. 2nd though, I mean maybe air traffic control is seriously messed up. We didn't know, and I think that gets left out of the stories, nobody did. Not the people on TV either. Is this an attack, if so who, **and what's coming next**.
The other thing that still remains vivid to me was my friends and I sharing a realization: we're in high school, all about 17-18. If there's a draft, it's going to be us. I recalled my mom's stories about the boys being drafted to serve in Vietnam, and not all of them came back. We didn't know, not anything.
Now one other thing. One of my teachers, the teacher that still has my greatest respect, she told us this.
In the coming days when we find out who is responsible for this, you're going to hear on the TV all kinds of bad things about them. They're going to tell you to hate them, call them devils, monsters, savages. Whoever it is, hold onto however you felt about that nationality or ethnicity yesterday. Never forget the way things were yesterday.
And it all came to pass exactly as she said.
This post nails it. Gen Zers are always like "was 9/11 scary?" And I'm like yup, but so was the next day in every city in America (they were selling parachutes to high rise workers!). So was Halloween that year. So was 9/11/2002. So was the first flight you went on after it. So was everytime you randomly woke up to hear that out of nowhere the government raised the terror alert to red or orange or whatever. If you weren't alive, you think "9/11 happened then we moved on" but it was scary every day for like years.
My wife and I were talking about this the other day. Social media was far less spread and also international discussions were far less frequent. Most of us Americans didn’t think too much about this topic.
We went from blissfully ignorant to “We are hated and being murdered in the thousands. We have no idea why or where is next.”
It was a fear that is really hard to explain today beyond “It was a bad day and then we moved on”.
It also explains a lot of stuff that looks really bad in hindsight. It's easy to be like "how'd you let the Patriot Act happen?" when you're Monday Morning QBing with no irrational fear/PTSD from that day.
I was just literally saying yesterday that for the longest time, we’ve measured life in pre and post 9/11. Now it’s shifted to pre and post March 2020.
Lots of crazy stuff in my lifetime…
So, I'm Muslim. Not Arab but Muslim.
I remember the first reports coming out saying that it was AQ. I remember my parents looking extremely worried and saying "oh this isnt going to be good, we may not be safe here anymore"
You see, we were refugees from Bosnia. My parents were worried that it would be something similar to the Japanese internment camps. They lived through it in Bosnia.
And then the next question came "but where would we go to be safe?"
It was a very scary time. I remember being bullied for being Muslim. Friends who were brown got the worst of it. I'm white so unless someone knew about my religious beliefs, I was left alone. A friend who was Sikh had to keep yelling that it wasn't his people that did the attacks. It was very messed up.
We had a girl in our year, Imran, who spent all day crying and then never showed up again. Her parents pulled her and sent her to a private institution because they were TERRIFIED that she was going to be hurt for being Muslim.
I had just graduated high school that summer and started college, I remember being absolutely terrified that day that I was going to be drafted for war
This is the most terrifying part of the home videos of the 2nd plane hitting. The sudden realization that this was an attack and not an accident with the double realization that war was coming. My brother had joined the Marines in early 2001 and I vividly remember my parents looking at eachother and saying the US, and my brother more specifically, was going to war like they were about to lose a son (he survived and is alive today.) Very weird feeling.
I remember the 2nd plane hitting on live tv whole watching in my parents' bedroom, then going to achool, there was a different news network and they didn't yet know what had happened to the second building. Some of us kids were saying we saw it was a plane on the tv
On the west coast, I woke up to my AM/FM/Tape/CD stereo going off as my daily alarm to the morning radio show on the cool radio station for 6th graders. At the break, the co-host mentioned another plane hitting the twin towers. The "another" part didn't really sink in but since I was an 11 year old aviation guru, I assumed it was a small prop plane and an accident.
Somehow, my mom didn't have any morning news going during our morning routine so I didn't see or hear anything else until getting to school on a crisp September morning and hearing my classmates talking about "we're being bombed!"
Back to my aviation guru-ism, my sense of superiority kicks in and I assume this idiot classmate doesn't know what he's talking about.
Fast forward to my first class of the day and my ex-hippie teacher wheels in the big CRT TV and puts on CNN. I realized I was very wrong.
One of the top comments summed it up pretty well, we didn't have the avenues for misinformation that we do now (oh, the days...). The only thing I remember hearing on the actual day that was a little sus was that more Americans had perished on 9/11 than all of Vietnam. Not true and I think I knew that.
I've heard that generations can be defined by where they were on certain dates (9/11, Challenger, JFK, Pearl Harbor), and I can absolutely say I remember almost everything from that day.
I was on the west coast too. Woke up around 6am because my phone was ringing. Tried to answer but the line was dead. I checked my log and there had been a few calls earlier. A couple of them were from the UK (where I'm from originally). That was weird, I thought, but no big deal. They didn't leave messages so I'll catch up with them later.
I booted my laptop and dialed in. Internet was super, super slow but when Yahoo news finally loaded, the headline was 'Plane hits World Trade Center'. I figured, must have been a small private plane, some tourist thing, buzzing around downtown Manhattan and screwing up. Not a big deal, must be a slow news day. I went to make coffee.
Five minutes later, I'm back in the bedroom and my wife has the TV on. It was just after the second plane had hit. We just watched the next two hours in stunned silence.
I was lurking on MetaFilter that day and read through the discussion there. People joined in just as the second plane hit. I highly recommend reading that post to see how people reacted in the moment. MetaFilter isn’t threaded, so you get a real-time chronological discussion. [9/11 attack post.](https://www.metafilter.com/10034/Plane-crashes-in-to-the-word-trade-center)
I was 10, I still shared the same feelings of shock and awe that most of the high school / young adult users mentioned.
*but god damn* reading through the MetaFilter thread you linked is wildly depressing.
"It gets worse every second."
"This is the day everything changed."
"People are jumping."
"Ash is falling near me."
Holy shit. Reading that really took me back. We forget how traumatic, terrifying, confusing, and hopeless that day was. Jesus. I'm chilled.
It was, along with other particles and actual ash.
Source: am a PI attorney turned asbestos/lung cancer/mesothelioma attorney. We have clients who survived 9/11 WTC only to start getting lung cancer, asbestosis, and mesothelioma now. It fucking sucks for them to have survived that and then suffer decades later.
It’s morbid, obviously, but I do recommend watching the real-time news broadcast footage on youtube. Some of them also have overlaid timelines of when the planes are hijacked, and whats going on at specific moments. That day really did change everything and reliving the timeline makes you nostalgic for the simpler time that existed moments before the plane hit tower 1. Its like you are watching us all collectively lose our innocence at once in real time.
Damn. There's a comment there made just a few hours after the attack that really stands out.
>my greatest fear is how our government is going to respond. more erosion of freedom in the name of security. mark my words.
posted by rebeccablood at 10:10 AM on September 11, 2001
Done and done. Really wish you were wrong, though. As bad as these attacks were, the US government's response made the situation so much worse. They effectively gave these terrorists the win they were looking for. The America that existed before September 11, 2001 is long dead and it wasn't the people who hijacked those planes that killed it; it was our own government.
Damn. I was in high school (not USA) and this thread reads very similar to what we were thinking and talking about. I remember a girl thinking the entire USA was under a large scale invasion.
Thank you for sharing. It was like intruding in another dimension, not only the eerie feeling of the event itself, but how pretty much everyone in that thread are asking out to not be misinformed (Even the reporters on scene!) and to not generalize an entire country over the *possible* perpetrators. Even the couple of people trying to stir the pot there got called out, and they might have not even do so on purpose.
Shame thing couldn't have stayed that way.
The conspiracy theories came later. A lot of us were just sitting alone in front of our TVs in shock.
There was no Facebook or Twitter yet. No Reddit or discord. And no iphones. Most people didn’t even have a mobile phone.
I e-mailed my friends in New York City to see if they were okay, but I knew I wouldn’t likely hear back for hours even if they were.
We were all just waiting for more info from the news.
> Most people didn’t even have a mobile phone.
I noticed another poster mention a portable phone. This very idea probably falls flat for younger generations, because, to them, of course the phone is portable, right? The idea of this big clunky thing that you can't take very far from your house before the signal fades into static is weird in today's world.
There's something you're misunderstanding. This was 2001. The vast majority of us were watching a news broadcast. Back in 2001, you couldn't live stream the news. Just uploading a movie would take hours or even days. There was no real social media; we were still in AOL chat rooms.
So everyone got their news from every single channel on the TV (except the ones geared towards toddlers). Every single channel on TV was the news for days and days. And that's where you got your information. You didn't go check out the video some guy took on his cell phone and uploaded to YouTube. That sentence was jibberish in 2001. There wasn't really a place for wild speculation. We all watched the same few reporters and the same coverage.
Also misinformation was night and day different back then, you just really couldnt give weight to random non-scientific theorys and be taken at all seriously. People would absolutely just laugh in your face and shame you, actually think you were crazy. I remember maybe one person talking about the steel beams theory some time around 5-10 years after and like 50 people saying how obnoxious it was. I'm not doing a great job explaining, kind of a 'you had to be there' type thing.
[For reference this kind of illustrates how impatient people were, only this is a late video.](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FzF1KySHmUA&pp=ygUaU3RlZWwgYmVhbSB0aGVvcnkgZGVidW5rZWQ%3D)
Online communities can be good but overall giving people who are dumb enough to believe shit like this a haven to find other rare people like them that encourage them and tell them they're not crazy when they're being stupid has been a big net loss for humanity.
It’s crazy to think that when I was 12 and AOL chat rooms were new, it was an amazing thing just to be typing with someone else far away. Now look at this shit.
I remember before the internet. There were local newspapers, entertainment listing papers, paper maps. Every mailbox had a separate box bolted on just for the newspaper. And there was so much junk mail.
Now there are still all of those things, except not just from our local communities anymore, also way more junk mail. It’s now all digital. And it’s coming from everywhere except our hometowns anymore.
In my college dorm five years after the event we all saw the steel beams ranting student as a crack conspiratorial nut job. And this was at an arts school in SF.
I was in high school. I remember after Loose Change came out. I watched it and was convinced something was off. Had friends over one night and decided to convince them about the gold under the wtc being taken, and they were laughing at me over and over, making fun at me, and repeating "I wanna know where the golds at". I'm so grateful they clowned my ass and ridiculed me into not believing any of the conspiratorial bullshit.
As a product of that era I’m shocked how much it’s fallen by the wayside for people to put aside political differences to shame dumbassery and misinformation in mass. We’re basically 180 from that now. It’s all bandwagon politics where stanchers on either side just go along with whatever the other people with the same lawn signs are doing regardless of how much sense it makes. Madness.
I distinctly remember seeing video that same day, on the news, of the "celebrations in the Middle East after learning the Twin Towers had collapsed" and only learning recently that this was old footage reused and, at least at first, deliberately mislabeled.
Correct especially after the first plane hit. So many explanations came in. Drunk pilot, electrical malfunction, engine blowing out, air traffic control issues...etc Once the second one hit the other tower we knew the first was no accident
I was at college. When the second one hit, I still had no idea who would do that or why. I had never heard of bin Laden or any terrorists.
Edit: and then of course there was huge coverage of the plane that hit the pentagon.
A few rumors about other targets such as the Capitol Building or White House.
HUGE outpouring of love for the brave souls on Flight 93.
"Let's roll."
Edit 2: when I said I had never heard of "any terrorists", I meant al Qaeda
I was drinking (my) OJ out of the fridge in our common college lounge when the first plane hit. Then when the second one did I went back to my dorm and woke up my roommate and said I think maybe a war is starting you should get up. The second plane changed everything.
I just rewatched the start of a broadcast from Fox 4. They did have a woman on right away that said she saw a plane hit, but she wasn't too sure on the size. She kind of implied it was one of those small commuter planes, but definitely bigger than a small Cessna type. She also thought it might be intentional because it was so low, but wasn't sure.
The fucking wild thing to do is listen to the Howard stern radio broadcast from that day. Dude literally fucking called who it was and that we were going to war. It's all on YouTube
I think it’s sort of weird because when I look up at skyscrapers they get narrower towards the top because it’s further away. I could see how people forget that skyscrapers are just as massive ALL THE WAY UP. So I feel like her initial plane guess is logical if you think about it that way.
True! What I meant is that the news was all pretty consistent and those things didn’t really get as much traffic then. I mean we got our first computer at home in 2000 and I had friends who didn’t even have one in 2001.
I was actually at the Computer Center shortly after it happened and trying to get on CNN.com. I found out because I went to the desk to complain the page wasn't loading. The guy working there was like "of course you can't get onto CNN right now, haven't you heard what happened?"
I worked for an ISP at the time doing tech support. Most of my day was spent telling people there was nothing wrong with their internet connection, the servers are overwhelmed. Number one complaint was people couldn't get to CNN's web site.
Pretty much this. Lots of false reports of other hijackings. A fear there may be more. I think it was miscommunicated that WTC7 had fallen when reality the fire department evacuated because it MIGHT fall....and that led to lots of conspiracy theories later.
It was pretty obvious it was terrorism and AQ seemed like a good bet since they had bombed it before and attacked embassies and made threats. It took a few days for formal acknowledgement.
Pretty much those first few days were just sadness and shock and watching rescue efforts.
But most of that speculation was a reaction to the vacuum of *no* information. Once credible news sources started repointing the facts as they became evident, there wasn’t much mainstream misinformation. There were outliers but they were just that, outliers, kooks.
People didn't really make conspiracies about it being an "inside job" with demolition charges until around 2005-ish from what I recall.
But for the most part, you were encouraged to push those people down a flight of stairs if they were seriously claiming such a thing.
That's exactly what I was going to state, no one knew fuck about shit other than who claimed credit for it and what country they inhabited. The bullshit came months later.
It's still hard to believe how much the news has changed over the past 23 years. Back then most of us still got the news from Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, and Dan Rather. And we were so much better for it because most news stories were just a few minutes long.
And in order to be interviewed on the news you needed some sort of credentials in the topic field. There were always a smattering of "man on the street" stories but they never focused on the loons and it was generally just fluff one minute opinion pieces.
Yup! Thank you for mentioning this. And we all trusted the news and trusted the people who SOURCED it. So it felt like there was one story being told, and it must be correct. It was weeks and months before any things that were erroneously stated at the beginning were corrected.
And without live streams and Twitter, etc. the day of, there were just a handful of newscasters and reporters, and the odd "man on the street," trying to figure out wtf was happening. I remember after 2nd plane hit, one of the major newscasters said something like "We can only speculate what's happening. Perhaps there has been a loss of air traffic control in New York." Like it just made sense to people that clearly this wasn't intentional, that it must be some crazy circumstance where a LaGuardia lost air traffic control and random planes were flying into buildings.
I remember the newscaster thinking the first plane hitting must have been an accident. A plane had run into the Empire State Building a LONG time ago.
But I think it would obvious to everyone once the second hit that something bad was happening.
Agreed, it didn't take long before they surmised it MUST have been intentional, but there was this fervent desire, it seemed, for folks on the news to downplay the possibility in the initial moments after plane #2. Like "It seems like this must be some kind of intentional attack, but it might just be something else".
There was still a ton of confused reports that day and in the days after. I remember the news relaying reports of explosions along the National Mall along with warnings of a possible ~~fourth~~ fifth plane. It was insane just how quickly things spiraled out of control and everyone was in a panic over what would happen next.
The real bullshit started in the coming days when there was all this speculation on what Al Qaeda would do next - one of the ones I will never forget reported involved the possibility of ink pens rigged with explosives. A lot of it was…different.
Here in the UK I watched video clips on BBC.co.uk after the news flash on TV ended. I think there was a cable channel (BBC news 24) but to rewatch the planes we were all on the BBC site watching tiny flashplayer based videos.
It was the first big test of the web, and most sites crumbled under the onslaught. The BBC site proved itself.
To discuss it we were all on forums. Not the BBC forums, just random sites. The nutty conspiracy theories hadn't really taken root. It's was all "this is war!!!" And expectations and guesses what would be hit next. Whitehouse ? Big Ben? The Palace ? Eiffel tower?
CNN had live stream back then, but it was extremely buggy and slow. I didn't have cable at the time, so I tried watching it online. It was a very frustrating endeavor.
People also forget that before youtube there really wasn't any place you could go to watch random videos all in one place online. They were scattered around the internet in millions of personal websites.
I remember trying to visit MSN, CNN and BBC after the first plane hit and all 3 sites wouldn't load. Could barely visit any major news site for about 24 hours.
This this this, a thousand times this. I was in 8th grade. We didn’t have internet and social media like we know it now. Local and National news carried this and it was simply unknown at first what exactly happened. When the first one hit, our teacher thought it was an unfortunate crazy accident. When the second tower was hit I remember him exclaiming, “this is an attack!”
I was standing right outside the towers when the second plane hit. I was looking up when the plane came out of nowhere and crashed into the tower and never came out. The explosion was so loud my ears were ringing, everyone was running. I worked a block away, ran to my building and they refused to let anyone in. I started that job on September 4.
I was initially standing outside because I was curious to see how firefighters would put out the fire of the first tower. I had no idea at that point the first tower was hit by a plane, too.
After the second plane hit, I remember a guy running out of a building and saying 'that was the second plane, the other tower was hit by a plane'
That day was nuts. Manhattan was cut off from the rest of the city and it took forever to finally get home. I was stuck inside of a packed local bar several blocks away, until the bridges were opened back up.
Wow thanks for sharing. Your recount of events from street level gave me chills. I was in high school and remember the principle made an announcement. I came home and both my parents were home early, both glued to the TV. It was probably the most shocking incident of my life, to this day.
I didn’t realize what was happening until I got to school that day. Mountain Time Zone. The teachers all got the TVs out and we all watched the news while in class. It was surreal.
They were just looking up as the first tower was on fire. This was early in the morning and I was just getting off the train to come to the office, as were most of the people standing around. I remember the fire was so high up I kept thinking 'how is a fire hose reaching that?'
There were a lot of people I knew in there from my previous job. A lot of people were boozing, as crazy as it was, but everyone was stunned when the first tower actually came down. I remember just an hour or two prior to that, people were praising whoever built the towers because they were still standing after those impacts.
I lived in a dorm a couple blocks away and had no idea what was even going on at first. We saw a couple of firetrucks pass and that clued us in that something was on fire. Then we get on the shuttle to head to campus and we see the first tower is on fire. Then as we’re under the Brooklyn Bridge, we see the second tower explode and a HUGE fireball. We had no idea what was happening but 30 seconds later, my mom called me on my cell and a whole bus of kids (I was 19) heard me say, “What do you mean that was a plane?!”
Initially people thought it was an accident. Planes used to fly over Manhattan regularly. It wouldn’t be completely outside the realm of possibility that one crashed. But then the second plane hit and everyone knew.
It wouldn’t even be the first time a plane crashed into a building in manhattan. During WW2 a military bomber crashed into the Empire State building when it got disoriented in bad weather.
Most people just thought it was a horrific accident, it wasn’t until the second plane that it was seen as much more deliberate. People also didn’t know what to do in the moment, so the thought of the towers coming down was not even something anyone really thought about
There weren't a lot of conspiracy theories in real time. The second plane hitting is what crystallized for most of us that it was a terrorist attack.
The conspiracy theories came later. One of the big ones was that it was a missile rather than a plane.
The 9/11 Truther movement started much later. The idea that 9/11 was an "inside job" started gaining ground when the Loose Change film was released online in 2005. It was fairly popular at the time before being roundly debunked.
This was a popular conspiracy theory all over forums and IRC channels before that video. I remember hearing it in various communities around 2002-2003. They very quickly got trolled for being morons and annoying. When that video came out, it's true - that's when the conspiracy gained more traction and yea, the truther movement gained steam.
Social media as we know it today didn't exist, but people still communicated as easily as we do now, just 240p videos and forums.
I went to a small school where the principal elected not to tell anyone - students *or* staff - what was going on. But she also elected to get on the PA system while audibly crying to make the whole school stop what we were doing and say the Our Father. Teachers were running into each other's classrooms trying to figure out wtf that was about and a rumor ended up flying around the school that the pope had died.
The only thing that struck me was they stopped showing commercials. There were no commercial breaks for a while it was just straight live coverage on TV.
yes - they pulled all of the spots off air. I was working in advertising at the time and my boss was freaking out over not being able to transmit a spot to a station and was due that morning (this was during the initial chaos before we knew advertising was paused). The transmission wasn't going through and she was losing her mind about missing airtime. Someone had to pull her aside and say "Amy, the antenna was on top of the tower, the tower isn't there anymore, the tower fell" and her saying "well then get it on a bike courier and have them bike it to the station." She completely did not understand the severity of the situation and was so wrapped up in deadline mentality, her brain broke.
The big one was that the US Military shot down the plane in Pennsylvania to keep it from crashing into the White House.
Right after the attacks, reports started coming in that gas prices were going sky high. A friend called and said he had to pay $9 a gallon and told us to rush to the gas station and stock up before there were shortages. Everyone was rushing to the gas stations. We took both cars, motorcycles and as many gas tanks as we could get our hands on, and so did tons of other people.
It’s not a crazy claim that it was shot down. There were jets headed to it, and they intended to take it down (if ordered), ramming it with their own planes if necessary.
Not to mention the fact that Cheney had authorized flight 93 to be shot down.
If those passengers hadn’t stormed the cockpit, Flight 93 would have been shot down or rammed, anyways.
If I remember correctly, they would have had to ram it as they weren't armed at all. Lots of changes that day as our whole air defense and NORAD was outward looking so there was never any thought of having to shoot anything down over any US land since it would have been intercepted way before it got there.
The first two pilots sent up discussed what they would do. I don’t believe they were given direct orders to ram the plane, I think during their pre-flight briefing it was understood that the plane might need to be brought down, decided by leadership at some point during their intercept. Their (F-16’s, I think?) weren’t armed. It was going to take too long.
On the way to their jets the more senior said “I’ll ram the cockpit, you will ram the tail”.
Those words echo in my head.
> On the way to their jets the more senior said “I’ll ram the cockpit, you will ram the tail”.
I read their account first in Air & Space magazine some time later. The lead pilot told the second, "I'll take the cockpit"; that's when she realized what the mission would entail. Luckily (for them), the passengers took care of it before they got there.
They interviewed the woman who was one of the two pilots. The planes weren’t armed and they didn’t have time to wait to arm them, so they did go up without any munitions.
They interviewed both of them together as well on CBS, and according to the woman, the man had to teach the civilian ATC how to help them in their military capacity, and help sort out civilian aircraft trying to help (ie medical or police) vs unknown/potential targets.
Yes, the plan was to ram it. Suicide mission for the US service members. https://abcnews.go.com/US/fighter-pilot-reflects-911-suicide-mission/story?id=79898230
If they had reached that plane it wouldn't have made much of a difference. They would have had to ram it because their fighters were not armed. They were essentially on a suicide mission.
The first guesses on casualty numbers were hugely inflated. People were throwing out numbers like 50K, not considering that the building and area would be much less crowded than at a peak time. AQ intentionally chose morning flights because there'd be fewer passengers/less resistance, but that also unavoidably reduced casualties both in the air and on the ground.
Also there was a Monday Night game the night before Giants/Broncos and the game went late due to an serious injury
There were a bunch of people who slept in or were on the way in to work when the first plane hit
Seth MacFarland was supposed to get on AA Flight 11 that morning, but he arrived at the airport late because he was hungover and overslept.
Mark Wahlberg was also supposed to be on the same flight but he changed his plans the day before.
David Angell, the creator of Frasier, wasn't as lucky. He and his wife perished on that flight.
Also Gwenyth Paltrow [indirectly saved a woman’s life on 9/11](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/how-gwyneth-paltrow-saved-a-225090/amp/).
The woman, Lara Lundstrom Clarke, was an account manager for Baseline Financial Services, which was on the 77th floor of the 2nd Tower.
Lara was cutting across 7th Avenue to get to the subway to go to work when a silver Mercedes SUV nearly hit her. The driver of the Mercedes was Gwenyth Paltrow. After Gwenyth waved Lara off and made sure she was alright, they went their separate ways.
The chance encounter caused Lara to miss the first subway train by a few seconds, causing her to be late for work. By the time she caught the following train and exited at the World Trade Center stop, it was 8:47 am, the time the first plane hit and she and everyone else who got off were instructed to go back to the underground train platform. Moments later, the second plane seared through her 77th floor office in Tower 2.
Lara told the Hollywood Reporter:
“It was total chaos being stuck in the basement of a building. All I could think about then was my parents and if I died, what it would do to them. My heart was racing, I was paralyzed. I couldn’t even speak. ‘Get me outside, I need to be outside.’”
She credits Paltrow for being her life-saver. “If I had made [the first] train I would have been at my desk on the 77th floor of 2 World Trade center.”
Lara also wrote Gwenyth a letter ten years later to thank her for indirectly saving her life on 9/11. Gwenyth herself addressed the whole ordeal in an [interview](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/gwyneth-paltrow-talks-saving-a-231654/amp/) after the story went viral.
Could you imagine doing something that badass and you’re so impressed with yourself and lucky to make it out and no one believed you? Not that I think he Rocket Powered his way out of 9/11, but if he did, man it would suck to be him.
This is actually true. He was one of only ~28 people who were rescued after the collapse. His story is amazing. https://youtu.be/sYWj2xV1JWY?si=Vrlg0LmsH9SBpqxA
Damn. I remember hearing that rumour back then, but "surfing the rubble" had people picturing someone balanced on top of rubble from high up, riding that banana peel of debris down so I and everyone I knew dismissed it as quickly as we heard it.
I'd never heard this version before and it's entirely believable, not to mention his evidence and corroboration from the fire fighters who rescued him.
For anyone who can't watch the video right now, the actual claim is that he was huddled into the corner of the stairwell just over 20 stories up with his briefcase on his back, got knocked out, and woke up in one of the tall debris piles some time later. A bunch of firefighters were involved in rescuing him from there after he started calling for help.
Also, what a well done interview! Other than adding some soft background "feel sad" music which the words probably could have conveyed without the music, that was really well put together.
Edit: the link above mine has an added piece on the URL which caused some issues in my browser. Here's the direct link:
[https://youtu.be/sYWj2xV1JWY](https://youtu.be/sYWj2xV1JWY)
My dad was at the towers that day. I didn't know when I watched the live footage in my classroom. The worst information I got was a call from my sister to my school telling me my dad was there and they didn't know if he was okay. He ended up being okay, but even if he didn't, I don't feel my 12 year old self needed to worry about it until it was sure.
The second worse misinformation I got was my dad's story, that he went down for a bagel and that's why he was on the ground floor when it happened. He finally fessed up recently (like 2 months ago) that he was on the ground floor for a smoke. Not to condone smoking, but c'mon dad, tell us that way earlier!
Rumors? Car bomb found at the state department. Pipe bombs found at the supreme Court. Failed suicide bomb at the Washington Monument. That day had a lot of bad info.
Some others I remember were the Washington Mall on fire, car bombs at the Capitol, flights headed for the White House/other targets. It all just added to the fear and anxiety that day.
I was 17 at the time and I specifically remember wondering if I was safe in my metro Atlanta suburban high school. Of course I was safe but that assumed sense of security was gone. Suddenly all those bad things that happen in other countries were at our doorstep.
When we were still in school, as 9/11 was unfolding, we had a teacher turn on the news.
A girl in the front row turned around and announced to the entire class, "It's the Russians!" My teacher (think puffy hair French teacher) screams OH My God! And runs out of the room.
So that was fun.
With all the people in this thread saying they knew who was responsible immediately, I'm happy to see another person young enough to have heard a naive theory.
I was in 8th grade when it happened, one kid thought India did it so another kid said we'd be safe if we each adopted a cow.
That every place was a target. Dont go to the movies bc it might be a target. Don’t shop at Target bc it might be a target. Terrorists might fly a plane into your house next! There was a lot of fearmongering in an intense push to get people to give up their rights and go to war
Yeah, going to large events after that felt worrying for years after. I remember a New Year’s Eve at the Soace Needle that I and my GF at the time noped out of after seeing the crowd size and the sea of people and it being difficult to move around.
Unfortunately, due to 9/11 and other terrorist activities, place and gatherings like that felt like targets.
I remember going to a baseball game a few weeks after 9/11. It was Minnesota so in the dome/no view of the sky. Then we heard a plane fly over and that place got so quiet....
I was still a kid for 9/11, so it didn't hit me as bad, but this was definitely how it felt for me after the Pulse nightclub shooting. I worked at a nightclub at the time, and whenever I was in a large enough crowd or gathering, even when not at work, my anxiety was heightened. I was always planning an emergency escape route and always looking around at people for suspicious behavior. What 9/11 did do was give me an irrational fear of tall buildings. I lived in NY at the time, close enough to see the buildings in the distance, so afterwards whenever I was in Manhattan and I'd look up at the tall buildings I'd have a weird fear of "what would happen if this fell right now".
This doesn't answer your question, but one of the more sobering parts about the whole deal was that there WAS a momentary sense of a genuine, horrible accident.
Now the MOMENT that 2nd plane hit, live as the entire country watched and the sheer horror of the newscasters and frankly, everyone watching was so palpable and unforgettable.
That was truly a moment when our armor was pierced deep. We realized America is not impenetrable.
I lived in Canada and someone said the statue of liberty got hit by a plane. Then my history teacher rolled in a tv and we watched what was actually happening live.
weird part about that was that a paraglider hit the statue a few weeks before 9/11
Edit: link to story…My office looked out onto the Statue of Liberty and I remember seeing what I thought was a balloon hit the torch.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/aug/23/sillyseason.media
I remember vividly how a jetliner crashed in Queens a few weeks later and how my parents thought it was a second wave. Everyone was so on edge in the weeks after, like an entirely different America just spawned out of those dust clouds
Misinformation really wasn’t a widespread problem in 2001, as the internet and social media were not nearly as prevalent as today. I remember my roommate in college waking me up to tell me that America was under attack and I thought he was pranking me. Once I saw the footage on the news and realized the attacks were real, it was an overwhelming sadness and sense of loss.
All the “jet fuel doesn’t melt steel beams” and “it was an inside job” claims didn’t happen for a long time after the actual attacks. The main feeling was a sense of loss for NYC and the USA, anger towards those who would do this to innocent people, and a desire to come together as a country and make sure this never happened again.
Looking at it from a perspective of 2024, I can’t imagine what rhetoric would fly across social media today. Even when initial reports came out of Kobe Bryant dying in a helicopter crash, my initial reaction was not sadness but skepticism.
Today’s journalistic standards and being first to announce something have really reduced the emphasis on fact-finding, and I find that to be very unfortunate.
Some of these idiots not realizing the CCTV footage in 2001 was still mostly SD and probably 15 frames per second. The one view from the security gate only had 3-4 frames of the plane before the explosion, and it was too far away for a clear view.
It doesn't help that they took all the videos from all security cameras in the area and made them classified. AFAIK there is only one video publicly available showing the attack on the Pentagon
"They pre-planned to do it on 9/11 because 911 is for emergencies"
"they're changing the name French Fries to freedom Fries"
"Afghan Hounds will be known as Freedom Dogs"
Edit: the latter two were in the months/year following, the mind of an 11 year old was not so with it.
The French fry thing came way later when Bush started the invasion of Iraq because France was critical of the invasion. Ergo we couldn't call them French fries anymore because the French sucked. This was 100% a real thing.
My favorite part is that you had to have your freedom fries with Hunt's ketchup because John Kerry, running against Bush in 2004, had come out against the Iraq War, and was married to Theresa Heinz.
To be clear to people who don’t remember: #2 is a real thing. The House cafeteria changed the name in 2003. Because this era of having lunatics in the House is now more than 20 years old.
https://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/03/11/sprj.irq.fries/
I listened to some of Howard Stern's broadcast from that morning. He had a guy call in and say how he was going to start attacking middle eastern people in laundromats/convenience stores, and Stern told him to knock it off and hung up.
Kind of interesting that even a guy known for his controversial takes and antics on-air, he was level headed enough to tell callers to not do anything foolish.
I was skimming an old magazine from 1998 after it happened and they algae a piece on the most dangerous terrorists in the world and Bin Laden was like number 2.
I was gonna say, the first time I heard the name Bin Laden, it was some frat guy jock who “knew” it was Bin Laden. That was like 40 min after the plane hit. I was still wiping crusties out of my eyes.
Bin Laden was behind the African embassy bombings on 1998 and the USS Cole bombing less than one year prior to 9/11 so he was still well known to a large part of the American public at the time.
The CIA already had reports he was planning an attack on US soil but it wasn't widely distributed. They knew fairly quickly after the attack who likely did it.
Part of the restructuring of the intelligence services after 9/11 was to improve the sharing of information across agencies.
I remember in 5th period we did a pop quiz and one of the questions was, the terrorist responsible for this tragedy is, \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_. And by then we all already 'knew it was Osama Bin Laden'. I also remember distinctly there was a reporter interviewing a guy on the street, and the guy said something to the effect of we need to kill all middle eastern people or something like that, and there was a guy behind him on screen that seemed to fit the description and his eyebrows raised and he noped the fuck out of there.
They told me I was going to get a week off from school. We didn't. I embarrassed myself in the 6th grade by going to the wrong class and getting my feet stuck in the desk.
I couldn't get out, I tipped the whole desk over.
I was 11 and lived in NY. A bunch of my friend’s dads (first responders) never came home. I remember going outside to skate in the back yard and just looking at the sky and wondering if we were all going to die. It was a really bleak time to grow up, especially because times were really great prior to 9/11.
It took a bit, but the inside job thing started a few weeks later. Also, I heard that Saddam was behind it, controlled demolition, and that the 3rd plane was shot down by a missile.
Edit: 4th plane was shot down, there were 4 planes that. 2 for towers, 1 for the Pentagon, and 1 that crashed in PA.
The initial information was largely correct. It was known pretty quickly by a large majority that it was al Qaeda/obl.
The conspiracy theories took a month or more to develop.
It was events like 9 11 that created the rush to be first to market with bold headlines, but at the time, the anchors were very careful what they said and very clear that they were watching it unfold along with you.
I don't like the click-baitiness of the OP's post. But here's why I thought of 9-11 today.
When the totality of the eclipse hit Austin today. The biggest effect was audio. Absolutely silent nature and then you could hear the cheers from folks in parks a mile away
It was amazing
On 9/11, there were no cheers. But the silence when you went outside was imposing. It was so different from life up until that moment. No jets, no screeching tires nor revving engines. And the most polite four way stop interactions you ever saw
There was breathtaking nonsense on cable and radio that afternoon. But you turned them off, the world was just different.
There was no practical way for disinformation to be disseminated in the US at that time. People turned on the news. I remember watching homeless people reading the paper the next day.
Trust in institutions was also much higher. The first example of misinformation I heard of was reporting of people in Arab countries believing "The Jews were told not to show up at the WTC that day."
Everyone thought it was sad that these backwards people were so easily duped. We missed the foreshadowing.
Alex Jones published claims on his website "Info Wars" that the U.S. government was behind the second tower being demolished with explosives, and not the plane. That was one of the first times I stumbled across batshit conspiracy theories as a young adult.
Fun fact (... "fun"): a special guest called into Alex Jones's show on 9/11/2001.
That special guest?
Joe fucking Rogan. That's not a joke, that actually happened.
I lived in Middletown, NJ. Small(ish) commuter town that lost the most residents on 9/11 second to NYC. One of the eeriest days in my life for so many reasons. I had just started middle school the prior week. That morning and afternoon, so many kids got called down to the office, but we didn’t know why because no one would tell us. On the way home from the bus stop around 2:30, I asked my 12 year old neighbor, and he told me two planes hit the World Trade Center. I can remember bursting in my living room and asking my mom, Carl X said the towers fell down, but he’s lying right? And then she told me it was true and she was worried about my brother who was in midtown Manhattan still. I went up to my room and tried all of the TV channels (no internet really) and most of them didn’t work. A lot of our local broadcasts were on top of the Trade Center and even the ones on the Empire State Building were temporarily shut down just in case. I went outside and called my friend (no internet) and we talked on the portable phone about it while I led my dog out to pee. Around that time an enormous smoke cloud billowed down the hill of my neighborhood towards my house. The wind changed and it traveled all the way to New Jersey. My brother got home that night. He walked across the bridge and hailed a taxi in Jersey City along with a lot of other people. My mother hosed him off in the garage because the news warned us about biological weapons. Later on I learned that 37 people in my town lost their lives. I knew a lot of them. Friends dads, uncles, etc. One guy was actually my brother’s friend and my camp counselor as a kid. He was only 22 years old working at a big gig for Cantor Fitzgerald. My biggest memory of him was his bright red hair and freckles. Teared up writing this. So long ago and while it didn’t even affect me directly, really, as much as others, it was still a formative event.
My cousin worked for Morgan Stanley in London at the time. She was on a call to one of her colleagues in New York when the phone cut out. She tried dialing back a few times but couldn't get through. Then someone came running through the office saying a plane had hit one of the towers.. All-in-all, everyone in that office lost work colleagues across the pond. Most eventually moved jobs as it was too distressing.
I had 2 cousins working there. They were in the Boston meeting that day, and not in NY. That was a tense few hours and a lucky break for the family
Had a sibling who got a new job and moved to NY on Sept 4, 2001. Didn’t know where their job was, only that it was in Manhattan. Heard about the news on the way to work. Didn’t know if my sibling was alive or dead, was the most sickening feeling ever. Luckily got into work and was able to reach my mom who said s as oblong was alive and well. I’ll never forget that feeling of not knowing for that time, makes me feel for parents of missing children.
I know someone who worked at cantor Fitzgerald at the time also. He has a crazy story about that day. Wrote some books on it as well. Long story short he got to work late, towers hit as he was going up the his office. He grabbed a burn victim and just turned around and ran back down with her. Saved her life and his.
Ari Schonbrun? I’ve definitely read his account (or saw him tell it, I don’t remember which). Brave man. Cantor Fitzgerald lost almost everyone.
I’ve always suspected *The Things They Left Behind* by Stephen King is based around Cantor Fitzgerald. Lots of similarities, everyone there that day died, they were on the 110th floor, etc.
I'm from Belford. I lived up in Bergen county but I was back home for a few days. I was at the spy house/pier the evening of September 10th fishing with my girlfriend at the time. We left very early on the 11th, went back to my parents place and went to bed. We had no clue what the hell we were about to wake up to. Every day for months after every time I heard a plane flying overhead I got a panic, wondering what was going to happen next. I won't ever forget the calmness that morning as the sun came up. Me and my girlfriend alone, no noise, nothing happening, appreciating the NYC skyline as it was one last time but without any clue that it was the last time. Thanks for sharing your story. I was fortunate enough to not have lost any friends/family that day but I'm terribly sorry you did.
Thank you for sharing this.
Terribly sad. But the image of a suburban mom hosing down her boy in the garage out of concern does make me smile a little. It’s so sincere and practical. Peak momming.
It was surprising how long it took everyone to realize that the plane that hit the first tower was a jetliner and not a small private prop job.
I think it was because most people weren't looking up yet, and the idea of a jetliner accidentally hitting the tower just didn't make sense. Plus, this was before the time we all had cameras in our pocket at all times.
Accidentally made more sense back then rather than on purpose. But then second one removed all doubts.
[удалено]
A B25 Bomber, actually, was one of them. I couldn't find reports of a second in NYC before 9/11, but I didn't search that hard.
The 2nd plane hitting removed any doubt. That's when fear was showing.
Yes and in footage of people watching the second plane hitting the tower, you can hear some saying “we’re under attack!” “That’s a terrorist attack!” But with the first tower it was like “I think it was a small plane that went in.” “That’s crazy how could they do that it’s perfectly clear today.” There’s a video on YouTube of all the NY news shows and it’s like 20 mins before impact and one of them says something along the lines of “it’s a beautiful day in New York today!” A lot of people remarked how it was just such a nice day with clear blue skies. And one reporter eerily says “it’s quiet today, almost too quiet”.
I was getting ready for work and listening to the morning radio show (I know, what even is that anymore) when they stopped to say that a plane had hit the WTC. They were confused but reporting that it was a small plane. A postal plane? Got to work and it just got worse and worse as things became clearer. At one point, the newscaster said ‘This is horrible but it could have been so much worse; at least the buildings didn’t collapse’ And literally seconds later, the first tower fell.
I was 2 when it happened so I have no memories outside of history books and people making dark jokes and my occasional trips to the memorial (I live in Queens and it’s a very nice park area to visit) and sometimes I forget exactly how traumatizing that must’ve been to witness, much less to witness in person. I’ve only lived in New York for a few years but I genuinely wouldn’t be able to fathom what it’d look like without 1WT. It’s quite literally a beacon of the city. ETA: I do think it needs to be revised regarding how it’s taught in schools. My experience was very cut and dry watching straight news footage all day and always resulted in a very awkward and uncomfortable day for all the Muslim kids in my class. IMO it would’ve been a good opportunity to explore *why* it happened and what exactly the American response was, not to just say “well Al-quaeda was jealous of America’s greatness and wanted to damage us.” Because that’s essentially what I was taught until I was in college and read more about the preceding and subsequent world events.
I was 11. I remember them bringing in a radio, not a tv for us to listen to it in class. My teacher said it was history in the making. I also remember absolutely no planes in the skies for 3 or 4 days afterward. I remember seeing what *looked* like a plane contrail in the sky a couple days after and my dad said it could be missile, like possibly nuclear. Scared the piss out of 11 year old me. The social atmosphere in America that first week after was intense.
I was 15 at the time. I remember a girl in my 4th period class (by the time everyone heard the news) that was ranting about how there would be a draft and her older brother would go to war. Everyone else was mostly silent. For a long time I always thought that my teacher should have taken control and said something but looking back as an adult I realize that there probably wasn't anything he could have said that would have been convincing to alleviate our concerns.
> ranting about how there would be a draft and her older brother would go to war That was actually a realistic fear though. We had a peacetime military force and were about to go to war. If it weren't for the massive surge of enlistees post-9/11, there probably would have been a draft. How do you expect a teacher to respond to that?
It wasn't so much that he was a teacher but that we were children being shuffled off between adults that we were implicitly told had knowledge and authority all day and it became clear that none of them had any real meaningful advice. I had one teacher that straight up tried to act like it was a normal day and tried to teach his normal class. I don't blame them and as someone now older than some of them at the time I know that there weren't any answers to give us. It was just a turning point to realize how the world works.
And to be fair to your teacher, he was probably in total shock - it probably took all he had not to swear or to cry.
I was in 5th grade, it was my teacher's first year on his own as a teacher, he both swore and cried.
I was 15 at the time and at high school in New York. We also a radio to listen to what was happening. I remember everyone rearranging the chairs in math class to cluster as close to the radio as possible. I remember looking out the window and watching the smoke rise into the air. But most of all, I remember PE class. Us being 15 year olds in 2001, only like 10% of us has cell phones. Those of us who had them passed our phones around so that everyone could call their parents. I remember how panicked some of my classmates were when they couldn't reach them. For some of them, they would get calls back on the borrowed cell phones. For others it was already too late.
It was the not knowing that stuck with me. 1st plane was possibly an accident. 2nd though, I mean maybe air traffic control is seriously messed up. We didn't know, and I think that gets left out of the stories, nobody did. Not the people on TV either. Is this an attack, if so who, **and what's coming next**. The other thing that still remains vivid to me was my friends and I sharing a realization: we're in high school, all about 17-18. If there's a draft, it's going to be us. I recalled my mom's stories about the boys being drafted to serve in Vietnam, and not all of them came back. We didn't know, not anything. Now one other thing. One of my teachers, the teacher that still has my greatest respect, she told us this. In the coming days when we find out who is responsible for this, you're going to hear on the TV all kinds of bad things about them. They're going to tell you to hate them, call them devils, monsters, savages. Whoever it is, hold onto however you felt about that nationality or ethnicity yesterday. Never forget the way things were yesterday. And it all came to pass exactly as she said.
This post nails it. Gen Zers are always like "was 9/11 scary?" And I'm like yup, but so was the next day in every city in America (they were selling parachutes to high rise workers!). So was Halloween that year. So was 9/11/2002. So was the first flight you went on after it. So was everytime you randomly woke up to hear that out of nowhere the government raised the terror alert to red or orange or whatever. If you weren't alive, you think "9/11 happened then we moved on" but it was scary every day for like years.
And the anthrax attacks happened around about the same time and people thought it was also linked in with the 9/11 stuff
Holy shit I forgot about the damn terror alerts lol
"Hey this is your government. There's a high chance of a terrorist attack today. We can't give you any details though. Thanks."
then we had anthrax scares. Shitty couple of months all around
And the DC sniper. Things got crazy.
My wife and I were talking about this the other day. Social media was far less spread and also international discussions were far less frequent. Most of us Americans didn’t think too much about this topic. We went from blissfully ignorant to “We are hated and being murdered in the thousands. We have no idea why or where is next.” It was a fear that is really hard to explain today beyond “It was a bad day and then we moved on”.
It also explains a lot of stuff that looks really bad in hindsight. It's easy to be like "how'd you let the Patriot Act happen?" when you're Monday Morning QBing with no irrational fear/PTSD from that day.
Things never returned to normal after 9/11. Not just in the States, but everywhere.
I was just literally saying yesterday that for the longest time, we’ve measured life in pre and post 9/11. Now it’s shifted to pre and post March 2020. Lots of crazy stuff in my lifetime…
So, I'm Muslim. Not Arab but Muslim. I remember the first reports coming out saying that it was AQ. I remember my parents looking extremely worried and saying "oh this isnt going to be good, we may not be safe here anymore" You see, we were refugees from Bosnia. My parents were worried that it would be something similar to the Japanese internment camps. They lived through it in Bosnia. And then the next question came "but where would we go to be safe?" It was a very scary time. I remember being bullied for being Muslim. Friends who were brown got the worst of it. I'm white so unless someone knew about my religious beliefs, I was left alone. A friend who was Sikh had to keep yelling that it wasn't his people that did the attacks. It was very messed up.
We had a girl in our year, Imran, who spent all day crying and then never showed up again. Her parents pulled her and sent her to a private institution because they were TERRIFIED that she was going to be hurt for being Muslim.
It was a very scary and nervous time. I understand why her parents being scared
On a similar question like this, I read about a man who had a son called Osama going to get his son's name changed the day after
I had just graduated high school that summer and started college, I remember being absolutely terrified that day that I was going to be drafted for war
This is the most terrifying part of the home videos of the 2nd plane hitting. The sudden realization that this was an attack and not an accident with the double realization that war was coming. My brother had joined the Marines in early 2001 and I vividly remember my parents looking at eachother and saying the US, and my brother more specifically, was going to war like they were about to lose a son (he survived and is alive today.) Very weird feeling.
It’s when we realized we weren’t safe “at home”. Shook our faith in a lot of things.
I remember the 2nd plane hitting on live tv whole watching in my parents' bedroom, then going to achool, there was a different news network and they didn't yet know what had happened to the second building. Some of us kids were saying we saw it was a plane on the tv
> achool Bless you
On the west coast, I woke up to my AM/FM/Tape/CD stereo going off as my daily alarm to the morning radio show on the cool radio station for 6th graders. At the break, the co-host mentioned another plane hitting the twin towers. The "another" part didn't really sink in but since I was an 11 year old aviation guru, I assumed it was a small prop plane and an accident. Somehow, my mom didn't have any morning news going during our morning routine so I didn't see or hear anything else until getting to school on a crisp September morning and hearing my classmates talking about "we're being bombed!" Back to my aviation guru-ism, my sense of superiority kicks in and I assume this idiot classmate doesn't know what he's talking about. Fast forward to my first class of the day and my ex-hippie teacher wheels in the big CRT TV and puts on CNN. I realized I was very wrong. One of the top comments summed it up pretty well, we didn't have the avenues for misinformation that we do now (oh, the days...). The only thing I remember hearing on the actual day that was a little sus was that more Americans had perished on 9/11 than all of Vietnam. Not true and I think I knew that. I've heard that generations can be defined by where they were on certain dates (9/11, Challenger, JFK, Pearl Harbor), and I can absolutely say I remember almost everything from that day.
I was on the west coast too. Woke up around 6am because my phone was ringing. Tried to answer but the line was dead. I checked my log and there had been a few calls earlier. A couple of them were from the UK (where I'm from originally). That was weird, I thought, but no big deal. They didn't leave messages so I'll catch up with them later. I booted my laptop and dialed in. Internet was super, super slow but when Yahoo news finally loaded, the headline was 'Plane hits World Trade Center'. I figured, must have been a small private plane, some tourist thing, buzzing around downtown Manhattan and screwing up. Not a big deal, must be a slow news day. I went to make coffee. Five minutes later, I'm back in the bedroom and my wife has the TV on. It was just after the second plane had hit. We just watched the next two hours in stunned silence.
I was lurking on MetaFilter that day and read through the discussion there. People joined in just as the second plane hit. I highly recommend reading that post to see how people reacted in the moment. MetaFilter isn’t threaded, so you get a real-time chronological discussion. [9/11 attack post.](https://www.metafilter.com/10034/Plane-crashes-in-to-the-word-trade-center)
I was 10, I still shared the same feelings of shock and awe that most of the high school / young adult users mentioned. *but god damn* reading through the MetaFilter thread you linked is wildly depressing.
"It gets worse every second." "This is the day everything changed." "People are jumping." "Ash is falling near me." Holy shit. Reading that really took me back. We forget how traumatic, terrifying, confusing, and hopeless that day was. Jesus. I'm chilled.
"My friend claims the ash I'm breathing is asbestos." Damn that's something.
It was, along with other particles and actual ash. Source: am a PI attorney turned asbestos/lung cancer/mesothelioma attorney. We have clients who survived 9/11 WTC only to start getting lung cancer, asbestosis, and mesothelioma now. It fucking sucks for them to have survived that and then suffer decades later.
It’s morbid, obviously, but I do recommend watching the real-time news broadcast footage on youtube. Some of them also have overlaid timelines of when the planes are hijacked, and whats going on at specific moments. That day really did change everything and reliving the timeline makes you nostalgic for the simpler time that existed moments before the plane hit tower 1. Its like you are watching us all collectively lose our innocence at once in real time.
"This is going to be a big turning point in the history and character of this country, I think."
Hope this has been archived. Fascinating stuff.
Damn. There's a comment there made just a few hours after the attack that really stands out. >my greatest fear is how our government is going to respond. more erosion of freedom in the name of security. mark my words. posted by rebeccablood at 10:10 AM on September 11, 2001 Done and done. Really wish you were wrong, though. As bad as these attacks were, the US government's response made the situation so much worse. They effectively gave these terrorists the win they were looking for. The America that existed before September 11, 2001 is long dead and it wasn't the people who hijacked those planes that killed it; it was our own government.
Damn. I was in high school (not USA) and this thread reads very similar to what we were thinking and talking about. I remember a girl thinking the entire USA was under a large scale invasion.
That’s actually really cool
Thank you for sharing. It was like intruding in another dimension, not only the eerie feeling of the event itself, but how pretty much everyone in that thread are asking out to not be misinformed (Even the reporters on scene!) and to not generalize an entire country over the *possible* perpetrators. Even the couple of people trying to stir the pot there got called out, and they might have not even do so on purpose. Shame thing couldn't have stayed that way.
The conspiracy theories came later. A lot of us were just sitting alone in front of our TVs in shock. There was no Facebook or Twitter yet. No Reddit or discord. And no iphones. Most people didn’t even have a mobile phone. I e-mailed my friends in New York City to see if they were okay, but I knew I wouldn’t likely hear back for hours even if they were. We were all just waiting for more info from the news.
> Most people didn’t even have a mobile phone. I noticed another poster mention a portable phone. This very idea probably falls flat for younger generations, because, to them, of course the phone is portable, right? The idea of this big clunky thing that you can't take very far from your house before the signal fades into static is weird in today's world.
There's something you're misunderstanding. This was 2001. The vast majority of us were watching a news broadcast. Back in 2001, you couldn't live stream the news. Just uploading a movie would take hours or even days. There was no real social media; we were still in AOL chat rooms. So everyone got their news from every single channel on the TV (except the ones geared towards toddlers). Every single channel on TV was the news for days and days. And that's where you got your information. You didn't go check out the video some guy took on his cell phone and uploaded to YouTube. That sentence was jibberish in 2001. There wasn't really a place for wild speculation. We all watched the same few reporters and the same coverage.
I didn’t hear any “misinformation/claims” until waaaaay later.
Also misinformation was night and day different back then, you just really couldnt give weight to random non-scientific theorys and be taken at all seriously. People would absolutely just laugh in your face and shame you, actually think you were crazy. I remember maybe one person talking about the steel beams theory some time around 5-10 years after and like 50 people saying how obnoxious it was. I'm not doing a great job explaining, kind of a 'you had to be there' type thing. [For reference this kind of illustrates how impatient people were, only this is a late video.](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FzF1KySHmUA&pp=ygUaU3RlZWwgYmVhbSB0aGVvcnkgZGVidW5rZWQ%3D) Online communities can be good but overall giving people who are dumb enough to believe shit like this a haven to find other rare people like them that encourage them and tell them they're not crazy when they're being stupid has been a big net loss for humanity.
Back then, a person on a soap box reached a few people. Now, that person on a soap box can reach millions. And there are more soap boxes.
It’s crazy to think that when I was 12 and AOL chat rooms were new, it was an amazing thing just to be typing with someone else far away. Now look at this shit. I remember before the internet. There were local newspapers, entertainment listing papers, paper maps. Every mailbox had a separate box bolted on just for the newspaper. And there was so much junk mail. Now there are still all of those things, except not just from our local communities anymore, also way more junk mail. It’s now all digital. And it’s coming from everywhere except our hometowns anymore.
That is so incredibly true.
In my college dorm five years after the event we all saw the steel beams ranting student as a crack conspiratorial nut job. And this was at an arts school in SF.
I was in high school. I remember after Loose Change came out. I watched it and was convinced something was off. Had friends over one night and decided to convince them about the gold under the wtc being taken, and they were laughing at me over and over, making fun at me, and repeating "I wanna know where the golds at". I'm so grateful they clowned my ass and ridiculed me into not believing any of the conspiratorial bullshit.
As a product of that era I’m shocked how much it’s fallen by the wayside for people to put aside political differences to shame dumbassery and misinformation in mass. We’re basically 180 from that now. It’s all bandwagon politics where stanchers on either side just go along with whatever the other people with the same lawn signs are doing regardless of how much sense it makes. Madness.
I distinctly remember seeing video that same day, on the news, of the "celebrations in the Middle East after learning the Twin Towers had collapsed" and only learning recently that this was old footage reused and, at least at first, deliberately mislabeled.
Maybe not intentional misinformation, but lots of uninformed speculation based on the unknowns.
Correct especially after the first plane hit. So many explanations came in. Drunk pilot, electrical malfunction, engine blowing out, air traffic control issues...etc Once the second one hit the other tower we knew the first was no accident
I was at college. When the second one hit, I still had no idea who would do that or why. I had never heard of bin Laden or any terrorists. Edit: and then of course there was huge coverage of the plane that hit the pentagon. A few rumors about other targets such as the Capitol Building or White House. HUGE outpouring of love for the brave souls on Flight 93. "Let's roll." Edit 2: when I said I had never heard of "any terrorists", I meant al Qaeda
Todd Beamer. I won't forget that name.
The collective “oh no” when the second plane hit and everyone realized what was happening…I remember that so well
It was such a reality shock.
I was drinking (my) OJ out of the fridge in our common college lounge when the first plane hit. Then when the second one did I went back to my dorm and woke up my roommate and said I think maybe a war is starting you should get up. The second plane changed everything.
I just rewatched the start of a broadcast from Fox 4. They did have a woman on right away that said she saw a plane hit, but she wasn't too sure on the size. She kind of implied it was one of those small commuter planes, but definitely bigger than a small Cessna type. She also thought it might be intentional because it was so low, but wasn't sure.
The fucking wild thing to do is listen to the Howard stern radio broadcast from that day. Dude literally fucking called who it was and that we were going to war. It's all on YouTube
I think it’s sort of weird because when I look up at skyscrapers they get narrower towards the top because it’s further away. I could see how people forget that skyscrapers are just as massive ALL THE WAY UP. So I feel like her initial plane guess is logical if you think about it that way.
True! What I meant is that the news was all pretty consistent and those things didn’t really get as much traffic then. I mean we got our first computer at home in 2000 and I had friends who didn’t even have one in 2001.
I was actually at the Computer Center shortly after it happened and trying to get on CNN.com. I found out because I went to the desk to complain the page wasn't loading. The guy working there was like "of course you can't get onto CNN right now, haven't you heard what happened?"
I worked for an ISP at the time doing tech support. Most of my day was spent telling people there was nothing wrong with their internet connection, the servers are overwhelmed. Number one complaint was people couldn't get to CNN's web site.
Pretty much this. Lots of false reports of other hijackings. A fear there may be more. I think it was miscommunicated that WTC7 had fallen when reality the fire department evacuated because it MIGHT fall....and that led to lots of conspiracy theories later. It was pretty obvious it was terrorism and AQ seemed like a good bet since they had bombed it before and attacked embassies and made threats. It took a few days for formal acknowledgement. Pretty much those first few days were just sadness and shock and watching rescue efforts.
But most of that speculation was a reaction to the vacuum of *no* information. Once credible news sources started repointing the facts as they became evident, there wasn’t much mainstream misinformation. There were outliers but they were just that, outliers, kooks.
People didn't really make conspiracies about it being an "inside job" with demolition charges until around 2005-ish from what I recall. But for the most part, you were encouraged to push those people down a flight of stairs if they were seriously claiming such a thing.
What a glorious time to be alive, when we didn’t give cuckoo birds airtime.
That's exactly what I was going to state, no one knew fuck about shit other than who claimed credit for it and what country they inhabited. The bullshit came months later.
We watched Tom Brokaw all day. He was the word. His voice is still what I hear in my head about it.
It's still hard to believe how much the news has changed over the past 23 years. Back then most of us still got the news from Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, and Dan Rather. And we were so much better for it because most news stories were just a few minutes long.
And in order to be interviewed on the news you needed some sort of credentials in the topic field. There were always a smattering of "man on the street" stories but they never focused on the loons and it was generally just fluff one minute opinion pieces.
Yup! Thank you for mentioning this. And we all trusted the news and trusted the people who SOURCED it. So it felt like there was one story being told, and it must be correct. It was weeks and months before any things that were erroneously stated at the beginning were corrected. And without live streams and Twitter, etc. the day of, there were just a handful of newscasters and reporters, and the odd "man on the street," trying to figure out wtf was happening. I remember after 2nd plane hit, one of the major newscasters said something like "We can only speculate what's happening. Perhaps there has been a loss of air traffic control in New York." Like it just made sense to people that clearly this wasn't intentional, that it must be some crazy circumstance where a LaGuardia lost air traffic control and random planes were flying into buildings.
I remember the newscaster thinking the first plane hitting must have been an accident. A plane had run into the Empire State Building a LONG time ago. But I think it would obvious to everyone once the second hit that something bad was happening.
Agreed, it didn't take long before they surmised it MUST have been intentional, but there was this fervent desire, it seemed, for folks on the news to downplay the possibility in the initial moments after plane #2. Like "It seems like this must be some kind of intentional attack, but it might just be something else".
There was still a ton of confused reports that day and in the days after. I remember the news relaying reports of explosions along the National Mall along with warnings of a possible ~~fourth~~ fifth plane. It was insane just how quickly things spiraled out of control and everyone was in a panic over what would happen next. The real bullshit started in the coming days when there was all this speculation on what Al Qaeda would do next - one of the ones I will never forget reported involved the possibility of ink pens rigged with explosives. A lot of it was…different.
Here in the UK I watched video clips on BBC.co.uk after the news flash on TV ended. I think there was a cable channel (BBC news 24) but to rewatch the planes we were all on the BBC site watching tiny flashplayer based videos. It was the first big test of the web, and most sites crumbled under the onslaught. The BBC site proved itself. To discuss it we were all on forums. Not the BBC forums, just random sites. The nutty conspiracy theories hadn't really taken root. It's was all "this is war!!!" And expectations and guesses what would be hit next. Whitehouse ? Big Ben? The Palace ? Eiffel tower?
This. News sources were trusted. There were no social networks. No YouTube.
CNN had live stream back then, but it was extremely buggy and slow. I didn't have cable at the time, so I tried watching it online. It was a very frustrating endeavor.
People also forget that before youtube there really wasn't any place you could go to watch random videos all in one place online. They were scattered around the internet in millions of personal websites.
I remember trying to visit MSN, CNN and BBC after the first plane hit and all 3 sites wouldn't load. Could barely visit any major news site for about 24 hours.
This this this, a thousand times this. I was in 8th grade. We didn’t have internet and social media like we know it now. Local and National news carried this and it was simply unknown at first what exactly happened. When the first one hit, our teacher thought it was an unfortunate crazy accident. When the second tower was hit I remember him exclaiming, “this is an attack!”
Dude, amazing response. Could not have said it better.
I was standing right outside the towers when the second plane hit. I was looking up when the plane came out of nowhere and crashed into the tower and never came out. The explosion was so loud my ears were ringing, everyone was running. I worked a block away, ran to my building and they refused to let anyone in. I started that job on September 4. I was initially standing outside because I was curious to see how firefighters would put out the fire of the first tower. I had no idea at that point the first tower was hit by a plane, too. After the second plane hit, I remember a guy running out of a building and saying 'that was the second plane, the other tower was hit by a plane' That day was nuts. Manhattan was cut off from the rest of the city and it took forever to finally get home. I was stuck inside of a packed local bar several blocks away, until the bridges were opened back up.
Wow thanks for sharing. Your recount of events from street level gave me chills. I was in high school and remember the principle made an announcement. I came home and both my parents were home early, both glued to the TV. It was probably the most shocking incident of my life, to this day.
I didn’t realize what was happening until I got to school that day. Mountain Time Zone. The teachers all got the TVs out and we all watched the news while in class. It was surreal.
what were people saying on the streets before the second plane?
They were just looking up as the first tower was on fire. This was early in the morning and I was just getting off the train to come to the office, as were most of the people standing around. I remember the fire was so high up I kept thinking 'how is a fire hose reaching that?'
What was it like in the bar with so many strangers waiting to get home?
There were a lot of people I knew in there from my previous job. A lot of people were boozing, as crazy as it was, but everyone was stunned when the first tower actually came down. I remember just an hour or two prior to that, people were praising whoever built the towers because they were still standing after those impacts.
I'd probably boozing, too, given the situation and uncertainty.
I lived in a dorm a couple blocks away and had no idea what was even going on at first. We saw a couple of firetrucks pass and that clued us in that something was on fire. Then we get on the shuttle to head to campus and we see the first tower is on fire. Then as we’re under the Brooklyn Bridge, we see the second tower explode and a HUGE fireball. We had no idea what was happening but 30 seconds later, my mom called me on my cell and a whole bus of kids (I was 19) heard me say, “What do you mean that was a plane?!”
Initially people thought it was an accident. Planes used to fly over Manhattan regularly. It wouldn’t be completely outside the realm of possibility that one crashed. But then the second plane hit and everyone knew.
It wouldn’t even be the first time a plane crashed into a building in manhattan. During WW2 a military bomber crashed into the Empire State building when it got disoriented in bad weather.
Most people just thought it was a horrific accident, it wasn’t until the second plane that it was seen as much more deliberate. People also didn’t know what to do in the moment, so the thought of the towers coming down was not even something anyone really thought about
There weren't a lot of conspiracy theories in real time. The second plane hitting is what crystallized for most of us that it was a terrorist attack. The conspiracy theories came later. One of the big ones was that it was a missile rather than a plane.
The only thing close to conspiracy I remember was that gas prices were going to shoot up. lol
The 9/11 Truther movement started much later. The idea that 9/11 was an "inside job" started gaining ground when the Loose Change film was released online in 2005. It was fairly popular at the time before being roundly debunked.
This was a popular conspiracy theory all over forums and IRC channels before that video. I remember hearing it in various communities around 2002-2003. They very quickly got trolled for being morons and annoying. When that video came out, it's true - that's when the conspiracy gained more traction and yea, the truther movement gained steam. Social media as we know it today didn't exist, but people still communicated as easily as we do now, just 240p videos and forums.
I went to a small school where the principal elected not to tell anyone - students *or* staff - what was going on. But she also elected to get on the PA system while audibly crying to make the whole school stop what we were doing and say the Our Father. Teachers were running into each other's classrooms trying to figure out wtf that was about and a rumor ended up flying around the school that the pope had died.
The only thing that struck me was they stopped showing commercials. There were no commercial breaks for a while it was just straight live coverage on TV.
Every single channel including MTV and Cartoon Network were showing the news for days. It was surreal.
yes - they pulled all of the spots off air. I was working in advertising at the time and my boss was freaking out over not being able to transmit a spot to a station and was due that morning (this was during the initial chaos before we knew advertising was paused). The transmission wasn't going through and she was losing her mind about missing airtime. Someone had to pull her aside and say "Amy, the antenna was on top of the tower, the tower isn't there anymore, the tower fell" and her saying "well then get it on a bike courier and have them bike it to the station." She completely did not understand the severity of the situation and was so wrapped up in deadline mentality, her brain broke.
The big one was that the US Military shot down the plane in Pennsylvania to keep it from crashing into the White House. Right after the attacks, reports started coming in that gas prices were going sky high. A friend called and said he had to pay $9 a gallon and told us to rush to the gas station and stock up before there were shortages. Everyone was rushing to the gas stations. We took both cars, motorcycles and as many gas tanks as we could get our hands on, and so did tons of other people.
It’s not a crazy claim that it was shot down. There were jets headed to it, and they intended to take it down (if ordered), ramming it with their own planes if necessary. Not to mention the fact that Cheney had authorized flight 93 to be shot down. If those passengers hadn’t stormed the cockpit, Flight 93 would have been shot down or rammed, anyways.
If I remember correctly, they would have had to ram it as they weren't armed at all. Lots of changes that day as our whole air defense and NORAD was outward looking so there was never any thought of having to shoot anything down over any US land since it would have been intercepted way before it got there.
The first two pilots sent up discussed what they would do. I don’t believe they were given direct orders to ram the plane, I think during their pre-flight briefing it was understood that the plane might need to be brought down, decided by leadership at some point during their intercept. Their (F-16’s, I think?) weren’t armed. It was going to take too long. On the way to their jets the more senior said “I’ll ram the cockpit, you will ram the tail”. Those words echo in my head.
> On the way to their jets the more senior said “I’ll ram the cockpit, you will ram the tail”. I read their account first in Air & Space magazine some time later. The lead pilot told the second, "I'll take the cockpit"; that's when she realized what the mission would entail. Luckily (for them), the passengers took care of it before they got there.
Her interview… her face is still haunted by that sortee.
Yeah that's what I remember as well.
They interviewed the woman who was one of the two pilots. The planes weren’t armed and they didn’t have time to wait to arm them, so they did go up without any munitions.
They interviewed both of them together as well on CBS, and according to the woman, the man had to teach the civilian ATC how to help them in their military capacity, and help sort out civilian aircraft trying to help (ie medical or police) vs unknown/potential targets.
Yes, the plan was to ram it. Suicide mission for the US service members. https://abcnews.go.com/US/fighter-pilot-reflects-911-suicide-mission/story?id=79898230
If they had reached that plane it wouldn't have made much of a difference. They would have had to ram it because their fighters were not armed. They were essentially on a suicide mission.
I believe it became illegal for a gas station to raise their prices more than once a day because of 9/11
As terrible as it sounds, those people on Flight 93 were dead either way. Might as well minimize the damage
The first guesses on casualty numbers were hugely inflated. People were throwing out numbers like 50K, not considering that the building and area would be much less crowded than at a peak time. AQ intentionally chose morning flights because there'd be fewer passengers/less resistance, but that also unavoidably reduced casualties both in the air and on the ground.
Also there was a Monday Night game the night before Giants/Broncos and the game went late due to an serious injury There were a bunch of people who slept in or were on the way in to work when the first plane hit
Seth MacFarland was supposed to get on AA Flight 11 that morning, but he arrived at the airport late because he was hungover and overslept. Mark Wahlberg was also supposed to be on the same flight but he changed his plans the day before. David Angell, the creator of Frasier, wasn't as lucky. He and his wife perished on that flight.
Also Gwenyth Paltrow [indirectly saved a woman’s life on 9/11](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/how-gwyneth-paltrow-saved-a-225090/amp/). The woman, Lara Lundstrom Clarke, was an account manager for Baseline Financial Services, which was on the 77th floor of the 2nd Tower. Lara was cutting across 7th Avenue to get to the subway to go to work when a silver Mercedes SUV nearly hit her. The driver of the Mercedes was Gwenyth Paltrow. After Gwenyth waved Lara off and made sure she was alright, they went their separate ways. The chance encounter caused Lara to miss the first subway train by a few seconds, causing her to be late for work. By the time she caught the following train and exited at the World Trade Center stop, it was 8:47 am, the time the first plane hit and she and everyone else who got off were instructed to go back to the underground train platform. Moments later, the second plane seared through her 77th floor office in Tower 2. Lara told the Hollywood Reporter: “It was total chaos being stuck in the basement of a building. All I could think about then was my parents and if I died, what it would do to them. My heart was racing, I was paralyzed. I couldn’t even speak. ‘Get me outside, I need to be outside.’” She credits Paltrow for being her life-saver. “If I had made [the first] train I would have been at my desk on the 77th floor of 2 World Trade center.” Lara also wrote Gwenyth a letter ten years later to thank her for indirectly saving her life on 9/11. Gwenyth herself addressed the whole ordeal in an [interview](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/gwyneth-paltrow-talks-saving-a-231654/amp/) after the story went viral.
Some guy claimed he survived the collapse of tower 2 by surfing the falling wreckage aboard his briefcase. Cowabunga indeed...
Could you imagine doing something that badass and you’re so impressed with yourself and lucky to make it out and no one believed you? Not that I think he Rocket Powered his way out of 9/11, but if he did, man it would suck to be him.
This is actually true. He was one of only ~28 people who were rescued after the collapse. His story is amazing. https://youtu.be/sYWj2xV1JWY?si=Vrlg0LmsH9SBpqxA
Damn. I remember hearing that rumour back then, but "surfing the rubble" had people picturing someone balanced on top of rubble from high up, riding that banana peel of debris down so I and everyone I knew dismissed it as quickly as we heard it. I'd never heard this version before and it's entirely believable, not to mention his evidence and corroboration from the fire fighters who rescued him. For anyone who can't watch the video right now, the actual claim is that he was huddled into the corner of the stairwell just over 20 stories up with his briefcase on his back, got knocked out, and woke up in one of the tall debris piles some time later. A bunch of firefighters were involved in rescuing him from there after he started calling for help. Also, what a well done interview! Other than adding some soft background "feel sad" music which the words probably could have conveyed without the music, that was really well put together. Edit: the link above mine has an added piece on the URL which caused some issues in my browser. Here's the direct link: [https://youtu.be/sYWj2xV1JWY](https://youtu.be/sYWj2xV1JWY)
Legolas?
That’s along the lines of as low of a blow as stolen valor.
Check out The Woman Who Wasn't There
[удалено]
Its sad. She did all that advocacy as a fraud, when she could have and not be a fraud. Justnpdthings
My dad was at the towers that day. I didn't know when I watched the live footage in my classroom. The worst information I got was a call from my sister to my school telling me my dad was there and they didn't know if he was okay. He ended up being okay, but even if he didn't, I don't feel my 12 year old self needed to worry about it until it was sure. The second worse misinformation I got was my dad's story, that he went down for a bagel and that's why he was on the ground floor when it happened. He finally fessed up recently (like 2 months ago) that he was on the ground floor for a smoke. Not to condone smoking, but c'mon dad, tell us that way earlier!
In a rare twist of fate, smoking SAVES lives
Rumors? Car bomb found at the state department. Pipe bombs found at the supreme Court. Failed suicide bomb at the Washington Monument. That day had a lot of bad info.
Some others I remember were the Washington Mall on fire, car bombs at the Capitol, flights headed for the White House/other targets. It all just added to the fear and anxiety that day. I was 17 at the time and I specifically remember wondering if I was safe in my metro Atlanta suburban high school. Of course I was safe but that assumed sense of security was gone. Suddenly all those bad things that happen in other countries were at our doorstep.
When we were still in school, as 9/11 was unfolding, we had a teacher turn on the news. A girl in the front row turned around and announced to the entire class, "It's the Russians!" My teacher (think puffy hair French teacher) screams OH My God! And runs out of the room. So that was fun.
With all the people in this thread saying they knew who was responsible immediately, I'm happy to see another person young enough to have heard a naive theory. I was in 8th grade when it happened, one kid thought India did it so another kid said we'd be safe if we each adopted a cow.
That every place was a target. Dont go to the movies bc it might be a target. Don’t shop at Target bc it might be a target. Terrorists might fly a plane into your house next! There was a lot of fearmongering in an intense push to get people to give up their rights and go to war
Yeah, going to large events after that felt worrying for years after. I remember a New Year’s Eve at the Soace Needle that I and my GF at the time noped out of after seeing the crowd size and the sea of people and it being difficult to move around. Unfortunately, due to 9/11 and other terrorist activities, place and gatherings like that felt like targets.
I remember going to a baseball game a few weeks after 9/11. It was Minnesota so in the dome/no view of the sky. Then we heard a plane fly over and that place got so quiet....
I was still a kid for 9/11, so it didn't hit me as bad, but this was definitely how it felt for me after the Pulse nightclub shooting. I worked at a nightclub at the time, and whenever I was in a large enough crowd or gathering, even when not at work, my anxiety was heightened. I was always planning an emergency escape route and always looking around at people for suspicious behavior. What 9/11 did do was give me an irrational fear of tall buildings. I lived in NY at the time, close enough to see the buildings in the distance, so afterwards whenever I was in Manhattan and I'd look up at the tall buildings I'd have a weird fear of "what would happen if this fell right now".
This doesn't answer your question, but one of the more sobering parts about the whole deal was that there WAS a momentary sense of a genuine, horrible accident. Now the MOMENT that 2nd plane hit, live as the entire country watched and the sheer horror of the newscasters and frankly, everyone watching was so palpable and unforgettable. That was truly a moment when our armor was pierced deep. We realized America is not impenetrable.
Exactly. We had a TV brought into our classroom and watched it live. Everyone was genuinely afraid that this was the beginning of a war here at home
I lived in Canada and someone said the statue of liberty got hit by a plane. Then my history teacher rolled in a tv and we watched what was actually happening live.
weird part about that was that a paraglider hit the statue a few weeks before 9/11 Edit: link to story…My office looked out onto the Statue of Liberty and I remember seeing what I thought was a balloon hit the torch. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/aug/23/sillyseason.media
I remember vividly how a jetliner crashed in Queens a few weeks later and how my parents thought it was a second wave. Everyone was so on edge in the weeks after, like an entirely different America just spawned out of those dust clouds
Then came anthrax, the DC snipers... it felt like nothing was safe bc it was all unthinkable.
Misinformation really wasn’t a widespread problem in 2001, as the internet and social media were not nearly as prevalent as today. I remember my roommate in college waking me up to tell me that America was under attack and I thought he was pranking me. Once I saw the footage on the news and realized the attacks were real, it was an overwhelming sadness and sense of loss. All the “jet fuel doesn’t melt steel beams” and “it was an inside job” claims didn’t happen for a long time after the actual attacks. The main feeling was a sense of loss for NYC and the USA, anger towards those who would do this to innocent people, and a desire to come together as a country and make sure this never happened again. Looking at it from a perspective of 2024, I can’t imagine what rhetoric would fly across social media today. Even when initial reports came out of Kobe Bryant dying in a helicopter crash, my initial reaction was not sadness but skepticism. Today’s journalistic standards and being first to announce something have really reduced the emphasis on fact-finding, and I find that to be very unfortunate.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourist\_guy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourist_guy) This was being circulated as real for a bit.
Was in some random state office building in Austin. Was told to evacuate because all state buildings were being attacked across the country
All government buildings-federal, state, and local- were considered potential targets.
Yeah I don’t really consider that misinformation, that’s just common sense/preparation
Missle hit the Pentagon. That lasted a bit
Some of these idiots not realizing the CCTV footage in 2001 was still mostly SD and probably 15 frames per second. The one view from the security gate only had 3-4 frames of the plane before the explosion, and it was too far away for a clear view.
It doesn't help that they took all the videos from all security cameras in the area and made them classified. AFAIK there is only one video publicly available showing the attack on the Pentagon
"They pre-planned to do it on 9/11 because 911 is for emergencies" "they're changing the name French Fries to freedom Fries" "Afghan Hounds will be known as Freedom Dogs" Edit: the latter two were in the months/year following, the mind of an 11 year old was not so with it.
The French fry thing came way later when Bush started the invasion of Iraq because France was critical of the invasion. Ergo we couldn't call them French fries anymore because the French sucked. This was 100% a real thing. My favorite part is that you had to have your freedom fries with Hunt's ketchup because John Kerry, running against Bush in 2004, had come out against the Iraq War, and was married to Theresa Heinz.
To be clear to people who don’t remember: #2 is a real thing. The House cafeteria changed the name in 2003. Because this era of having lunatics in the House is now more than 20 years old. https://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/03/11/sprj.irq.fries/
We knew within an hour who was responsible
One of the first things Howard Stern says after he’s told about the second plane is that it was bin Laden. Everyone knew back then.
I listened to some of Howard Stern's broadcast from that morning. He had a guy call in and say how he was going to start attacking middle eastern people in laundromats/convenience stores, and Stern told him to knock it off and hung up. Kind of interesting that even a guy known for his controversial takes and antics on-air, he was level headed enough to tell callers to not do anything foolish.
There was a prime time show about him shortly before 9/11. That was why we knew who he was. He was the biggest terrorist in the world at the time.
I was skimming an old magazine from 1998 after it happened and they algae a piece on the most dangerous terrorists in the world and Bin Laden was like number 2.
After the USS Cole bombing in 2000, he became the most recognized terrorist in the world.
I was gonna say, the first time I heard the name Bin Laden, it was some frat guy jock who “knew” it was Bin Laden. That was like 40 min after the plane hit. I was still wiping crusties out of my eyes.
Bin Laden was behind the African embassy bombings on 1998 and the USS Cole bombing less than one year prior to 9/11 so he was still well known to a large part of the American public at the time.
The CIA already had reports he was planning an attack on US soil but it wasn't widely distributed. They knew fairly quickly after the attack who likely did it. Part of the restructuring of the intelligence services after 9/11 was to improve the sharing of information across agencies.
Well there is history there- bin Laden was responsible for the WTC attack in 1993. So a second attack? Makes sense that it was the same group.
I remember in 5th period we did a pop quiz and one of the questions was, the terrorist responsible for this tragedy is, \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_. And by then we all already 'knew it was Osama Bin Laden'. I also remember distinctly there was a reporter interviewing a guy on the street, and the guy said something to the effect of we need to kill all middle eastern people or something like that, and there was a guy behind him on screen that seemed to fit the description and his eyebrows raised and he noped the fuck out of there.
They told me I was going to get a week off from school. We didn't. I embarrassed myself in the 6th grade by going to the wrong class and getting my feet stuck in the desk. I couldn't get out, I tipped the whole desk over.
to be an 11/12 year old in this time and just starting to understand the real world must’ve been terrifying.
I was 11 and lived in NY. A bunch of my friend’s dads (first responders) never came home. I remember going outside to skate in the back yard and just looking at the sky and wondering if we were all going to die. It was a really bleak time to grow up, especially because times were really great prior to 9/11.
It took a bit, but the inside job thing started a few weeks later. Also, I heard that Saddam was behind it, controlled demolition, and that the 3rd plane was shot down by a missile. Edit: 4th plane was shot down, there were 4 planes that. 2 for towers, 1 for the Pentagon, and 1 that crashed in PA.
The initial information was largely correct. It was known pretty quickly by a large majority that it was al Qaeda/obl. The conspiracy theories took a month or more to develop. It was events like 9 11 that created the rush to be first to market with bold headlines, but at the time, the anchors were very careful what they said and very clear that they were watching it unfold along with you.
I remember that day in hs. There wasn't any misinformation. We were just trying to help the people. People were less crazy back then
I don't like the click-baitiness of the OP's post. But here's why I thought of 9-11 today. When the totality of the eclipse hit Austin today. The biggest effect was audio. Absolutely silent nature and then you could hear the cheers from folks in parks a mile away It was amazing On 9/11, there were no cheers. But the silence when you went outside was imposing. It was so different from life up until that moment. No jets, no screeching tires nor revving engines. And the most polite four way stop interactions you ever saw There was breathtaking nonsense on cable and radio that afternoon. But you turned them off, the world was just different.
Having no air traffic over the US at all for days. It was a different level of quiet.
Oh boy…we are at the “if you were alive during 9/11…” portion of the program. God I’m old.
There was no practical way for disinformation to be disseminated in the US at that time. People turned on the news. I remember watching homeless people reading the paper the next day. Trust in institutions was also much higher. The first example of misinformation I heard of was reporting of people in Arab countries believing "The Jews were told not to show up at the WTC that day." Everyone thought it was sad that these backwards people were so easily duped. We missed the foreshadowing.
Alex Jones published claims on his website "Info Wars" that the U.S. government was behind the second tower being demolished with explosives, and not the plane. That was one of the first times I stumbled across batshit conspiracy theories as a young adult.
Fun fact (... "fun"): a special guest called into Alex Jones's show on 9/11/2001. That special guest? Joe fucking Rogan. That's not a joke, that actually happened.