Storyful
Newly unearthed footage shows an unseen view of the moment the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center in New York City collapsed after being struck with passenger aircraft on September 11, 2001.Kei Sugimoto was living on St Marks Place in the East Village in 2001 when planes struck the World Trade Center in the deadliest terror attack on record.Nearly 3,000 people were killed on September 11, including 2,750 people at the World Trade Center, 184 at the Pentagon, and 44 people on United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.Sugimoto told Storyful he started filming, on a Sony VX2000 with teleconverter, just after he saw the second aircraft hit the building.And as for why he’s only now released the footage in 2024?“YouTube didn’t exist at the time and getting a video out to the public was not as simple as today. Therefore the footage just slept in my closet,” Sugimoto said.Sugimoto posted versions of this footage on YouTube on July 22, 25, and 26, 2024. He told Storyful he received many comments, including “nasty accusations” and “conspiracy theories,” on his post and decided to make the video private.Before he did so, Sugimoto said he offered this explanation to users in the comments:“To those who ask me why I did not immediately submit the video to ‘competent authorities’ or get the word out, please remember that 2001 was a very different world from today. There were no smart phones, and internet access was mainly through dial up 56kbps connections using AOL or Earthlink. Google Search / Google maps / Uber didn’t exist. After 9/11, public transportation was shut down and phone service was unreliable, the information available was mainly through the radio or word of mouth, and it was difficult to know what was true.“There were talks of someone hearing that the Empire State Building would be next, and that all access in and out of Manhattan was blocked. I flipped through a physical phone book to figure out what precinct to go to and then Rollerbladed, as there was no other method of transportation. Upon arriving at the precinct, the staff had much more immediate tasks, and my offer to give them a videotape fell on deaf ears. I hope the people asking why I ’didn’t just take the video to competent authorities’ understand that 2001 was not like today where anyone can just use their iPhone to search where to go, what the hours of operation are, and how to get there.” Credit: Kei Sugimoto via Storyful
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