Fact Check: Faked 9/11 video edits out second plane hitting South Tower
Online posts have been sharing digitally-altered footage of the South Tower of New York’s World Trade Center to falsely say that no planes were involved in the attack on Sept. 11, 2001. Commercial airliners were hijacked and crashed into both towers on that day.
United Airlines Flight 175, one of four planes hijacked during the 9/11 attacks, crashed into the South Tower at 9:03 a.m. following an earlier strike on the North Tower by hijacked American Airlines Flight 11. The South Tower collapsed at 9:58 a.m. within 10 seconds.
A post on messaging platform X, formerly known as Twitter, said: “This clip surfaced years later…. No planes just bombs. Wake up please.” The video has edited out the plane and shows the South Tower bursting into flames, apparently without outside intervention, while the North Tower burns.
The same scene is visible in footage of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center on YouTube, which matches the camera angle and audio of the circulating social media clip. The video clearly shows an airplane hitting the South Tower on the left, before bursting into flames and raining down a hail of debris in Manhattan.
The YouTube video is credited to PIX11 Photojournalist Keith Lopez, who in 2021 recounted recording live footage of the attack on the South Tower.
Reuters photos from other camera angles of the moment of the attack are publicly available. They also show a plane flying toward the South Tower while the North Tower burns from the first strike by hijackers.
A live broadcast by CNN at the time from another camera angle also shows the hijacked airplane flying toward the second tower before the building burst into flames.
A final report by the bipartisan National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States titled “The 9/11 Commission Report” detailed the timeline of the attacks, including how officials learned United Airlines Flight 175 struck the South Tower, killing all on board the plane (pages 25-26 of the pdf).
VERDICT
Altered. The same scene is visible in a YouTube video that clearly shows a plane flying toward the South Tower before the building bursts into flames.
This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work.
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