But it’s also just really weird to hear people talking so clearly the moment after it happens. It’s preserved a slightly surreal moment of shock quite well.
However, I can also see there being an element of trauma and just not wanting to revisit the footage on purpose. I know I have some pictures I never want to look at again, although nothing on this scale.
People who weren't alive or were otherwise busy that morning don't remember the uncertainty after the first plane. Everyone thought it was an accident.
No one could conceive it was a deliberate strike. Everyone knew terrorists hijacked airplanes to fly to third world countries, not to commit suicide into buildings.
That cognitive dissonance all collapsed in a single instant as the second plane hit. And that's a lot to process all at once. I still can't watch video footage without crying.
If I'd been the videographer, you'd better believe I'd have locked this in my attic and forgotten about it.
* There was nothing beautiful about the attack, obviously, but the day itself was a perfect late summer New York day with a totally cloudless sky. So you'd look in one direction and see smoke and devastation, you'd face the other direction and see nothing but pure crystalline blue skies. It was quite surreal.
It’s also surprisingly good quality too. I really was surprised at the zoom and focus on early into it. Gives me a distinct impression it was shot on what was probably quite a good portable video camera for the period.
Plenty of children and sibling’s children around to find this and convince to post it
Much like photos the U.S. soldiers took in Europe while liberating the death camps. Most of them just went into their attics until they died and their kids were cleaning out their stuff.
Whereas you all got yanked into this different awful reality that happens out of nowhere watching this extreme insane next level thing happen on live TV, it’s quite a different thing to growing up with a low level sense that it is normal that someone might want to do something bad to you purely because you live in a particular place in a particular country. I think thats what I was getting at; that my life experience would have meant that when the second one hit it was a feeling of resignation and deep sadness, because I was used to the idea that terror attacks happen. But coming literally out of the blue for you guys it must have been a different emotion, truly shocking especially given how extreme these attacks were and how they played out in full view of everyone instead of in grimy tunnels and smokey pubs like all the stuff that happened when I was a child. Because it was such a shock for Americans I was pretty scared about how you were going to react, I remember seriously discussing with friends wether we thought you would use nukes or if we were all going to end up conscripted to fight with you in some huge war to exact revenge on whoever had done it seems far fetched now but there have definitely been serious global consequences.
This whole Ukraine thing has really reminded me of the nuclear war nightmares I used to have in the 80’s as well. I feel an impending sense of doom about this also. I hope I’m wrong.
Yeah, it feels similar to reading the first Usenet threads about Chernobyl, AIDS, etc.: http://www.eightyeightynine.com/culture/80susenet.html
Caveat: some of the channel's owners seem to be conspiratorial, but the majority of the videos are unedited. You'll be surprised how specific some of the footage is.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZFlhobtX9IHvXM0h1LcqaA/fea...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdfqEYITTm8
[2] https://www.youtube.com/c/WTCFOIAVideos
[3] https://www.youtube.com/c/MrKoenig1985/videos
[4] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEpgWCL0UfhN1gwxAWpAo5A/vid...
[5] https://www.reddit.com/r/TwinTowersInPhotos/
The Internet Archive also has an extensive collection of televised news footage from ‑‑09‑11 and the following weeks; I'm often reminded by its prominent placement in the 'Video' section of their navbar. Ironically, both their original 9/11 web collection (assembled by the Library of Congress shortly after the event) and the related Pew reports on internet use following 9/11 are lost to time; remnants can only be found in the Wayback Machine [0]. For whatever reason, it was replaced with one apparently curated by the September 11 Museum around 2008 [1].
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20011014012316/http://september1...
[1] https://www.archive-it.org/collections/1029
[a] an aside: I find the archived sites of schools (of all kinds) from the time particularly captivating. Perhaps the abridgement of time enhances their liminal nature. Or maybe it's the feeling of sincerity in guestbook messages and the personal homepages of students and staff.
The word "terrorism" has been in constant use in the media since the 1970s.
Second plane
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-structural-e...
> The four sides of each building formed a tube with window slots This tube was designed to carry the weight of the building and its contents directly downward to the foundations. The walls acted as vertical beams, wide and tall as the buildings, that bent to the side to absorb wind loads.
https://science.howstuffworks.com/engineering/structural/wor...
> Prior to the construction of the Twin Towers, skyscrapers were designed to support themselves through large internal columns spaced about 30 feet (9 meters) apart, which interrupted the flow of interior space. For this project however, the engineers came up with a different solution -- the exterior walls themselves would support the bulk of the structure, and they would get a boost from one single column of beams in the center.
Make a big hole in the primary support structure and things go badly.
(And before parroting the "jet fuel doesn't melt steel beams" thing as a follow-up, watch this excellent and short video from a blacksmith: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzF1KySHmUA)
The attack? No
So I'll say this: if you believe AI is advanced, then in 2022 it's not possible to take this video for granted and you have to take into account that all evidence surfacing from now may be deepfakes. I'm not saying they are: I'm saying you have to keep that in mind.
I was in seventh grade when all this went down. It was around the time that they first started putting TVs in classrooms. The teacher flipped the channel to the news when it was announced that an accident occurred and a plane flew into the WTC. Then they kept coming live on TV. In subsequent days I listened to final phone calls between people and their families. The internet was so congested I could barely use it, and a huge part of that was because of services provided out of the WTC.
It is well documented through declassified documents that were written two decades ago that these were Saudi nationals who had moved to America under the guise of learning to fly. They were aided by Al Qaeda and "happenstance" Saudi officials. Osama Bin Laden was a Saudi national, the leader, and one of the founding members of Al Qaeda.
These are barebone facts. Please do not encourage further mythology around 9/11 - the kind of Loose Change-esque rhetoric that is obviously designed more for entertainment than actual productivity. 9/11 happened, everyone saw it, and a new angle isn't anything groundbreaking, therefore there's zero reason to fake it. It won't change our relationship with the Saudis, it won't bring us back into war, etc
FYI, I attended an elementary school that had TVs in all the classrooms back in 1970.
So, given all that and most of those millions of people probably never seeing anything more detailed than Loose Change they have lost all trust in government. This is one of the core elements of our modern day populist uprising.
I had not even been aware of some of the sound explanations I have heard in this thread today. I watched the towers fall live, I watched the hideous war drumming and lying to start the Iraq war, live. In those days (I was 25) as someone who meticulously kept up with all open source material on world events previous, during, and after, I lost any and all faith in government.
Since then, the opioid epidemic has been exposed and was something I lived through as well...all of it. I lost my dad, brother, closest uncle, and my cousin (brother-cuz) to that fucking nightmare.
I know my experience is the tip of the ice berg. I'm smart and I can feel my way through misinformation but it is still tuff to do. I think people greatly misunderstand the impact of these events and how they are still lighting fires to this very day.
It ain't over.