A chilling photo of a tourist atop one of the World Trade Center towers with an incoming airliner about to hit the structure – an image that has made the rounds of thousands of e-mail boxes in recent days – has been determined to be a hoax.
The website snopes.com, which reports on the veracity of urban legends and other rumors, has declared that the photo, which is dated “091101,” is not authentic. Snopes.com features a special page on which it addresses the truthfulness of many post-terrorist attack rumors that have circulated over the Internet in the last two weeks.
Various e-mail messages that have accompanied the photo claim that firefighters (or in some, the FBI) found a camera in the rubble of the World Trade Center, developed the film and discovered the picture.
According to snopes, however, the photo is simply the work of a creative digital-photo manipulator. The site points out that:
- Sept. 11 was warm and sunny, not the type of day on which a tourist would have been decked out in a winter coat and hat;
- The airliner in this picture is approaching from the north and would therefore have been the one which hit the north tower of the World Trade Center (WTC1), but WTC1 did not have an outdoor observation deck. WTC2 (the south tower) included an indoor observation deck on the 107th floor and an outdoor deck above the 110th floor, but WTC1 housed only Windows on the World, an indoor restaurant with a magnificent view of the city but no outdoor deck.
- The operating hours in September for the WTC2 observatories were 9:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m., meaning they opened too late for a tourist to have been present on one before the first plane hit at 8:49 a.m.
- The aircraft shown is a Boeing 757 bearing American Airline markings, but Flight 11, the only American flight to crash into the World Trade Center, was a 767. (The 767 is a wide-body jet; the 757 is a smaller, standard-body craft.)
It is also noted that shadows of different objects don’t correspond to the same light source in the picture and that the date-time stamp on the photo is the wrong type of font.
