The Accidental Tourist  

Claim:   A photograph captured an unlucky tourist posing on the observation deck of a World Trade Center tower seconds before a hijacked airliner smashed into the building.

Status:   False.

We've seen thousands of pictures concerning the attack. However, this one will make you cringe.

A simple tourist getting himself photographed on the top of the WTC just seconds before the tragedy . . . the camera was found in the rubble!!

  A grim sense of humor and digital photo manipulation skills can produce some interesting results these days: Aside from all the digital imperfections in this image (e.g., shadows of different objects don't correspond to the same light source, the date-time stamp is the wrong type of font), a number of logistical errors make the picture suspect beyond credibility:

September 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. The photograph found on Airliners.net from which the image of the plane used here was probably taken depicts a 757.)

The online world is fraught with clever photo manipulations that often provoke gales of laughter in those who view them, so we speculate that whoever put together this particular bit of imaging did so purely as a lark. However, presumed lighthearted motives or not, the photo provokes sensations of horror in those who view it. It apparently captures the last fraction of a second of this man's life . . . and also of the final moment of normalcy before the universe changed for all of us. In the blink of an eye, a beautiful yet ordinary fall day was transformed into flames and falling bodies, buildings collapsing inwards on themselves, and wave upon wave of terror washing over a populace wholly unprepared for a war beginning in its midst.

The photo ripped away the healing distance brought by the nearly two weeks between the attacks and the appearance of this digital manipulation, leaving the sheer horror of the moment once again raw and bared to the wind. Though the picture wasn't real, the emotions it stirred up were. It is because of these emotions the photo has sped from inbox to inbox with the speed that it has.

Healing takes place in many fashions, and the Accidental Tourist has not only become part of that healing process but has also spawned a iconic genre of Internet lore.  

In November 2001, a 41-year-old Brazilian man named José Roberto Penteado from Campinas, Sao Paulo, stepped forward and claimed that his face was used for the "Accidental Tourist" photo, but his claim later proved to be rather dubious.