Undiscovered footage of World Trade Center collapse emerges over 2 decades after terror attack
The terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were replete with indelible images of unprecedented horror that will forever remain with those who witnessed them, whether in person or through video footage taken that fateful day.
Though it was assumed that every camera angle and vantage point of the destruction had already been seen and comprehensively analyzed during the intervening decades, previously unreleased video has recently emerged that offers a new, yet equally tragic view of the once-majestic World Trade Center towers as they crashed to the ground, as the Daily Mail reports.
Unseen footage debuts
The video sequence at issue was uploaded to YouTube earlier this month by a user named Kei Sugimoto, and it has caused a stir among those who have studied the buildings' collapse.
According to Sugimoto, the video has been posted at this late date “for historical purposes only,” stating that he only recently found the material while emptying a wardrobe.
The footage was shot with a Sony VX2000 camera from the roof of a building located at 64 Marks Place in New York City, and it offers an angle on the devastating scene that has never before been observed in video form.
Like many other videos taken that day, smoke is seen pouring from the landmark skyscrapers while the eerie sound of police sirens coming from all corners of the city can be heard in the background.
Roughly a minute into the footage, the South World Trade tower crumbles to the ground as onlookers scream in utter disbelief, and toward the end of the video, the second tower can be seen suffering the same fate as the first, sending another debris cloud across lower Manhattan and beyond.
Videographer recounts tragic day
The comment section that accompanied the YouTube posting offered reminiscences from Sugimoto that provided some insight into the reason for the film's emergence so far removed in time from the event it depicts.
“I was cleaning my closet and found boxes full of Hi-8, Digital-8 and DV tapes,” he said, suggesting the accidental nature of the discovery.
He went on, “When trying to play them back I noticed that maybe about a 3rd of them had demagnetized over time and were either blank or suffering from major data corruption.”
“After researching online, I learned that video tapes are not immune from age even when stored in ideal conditions, so I frantically started to digitize them. Thus, I'm just uploading the video now,” Sugimoto declared.
Regardless of the reason for their delayed release, the images on YouTube serve to reinforce to a new generation of Americans the catastrophic scale of destruction the terror attack brought to our shores and the continued need for vigilance to ensure that nothing similar is permitted to happen again.
