Mysterious news reports of other incidents on 9/11/2001

Factual Questions
1

I was just reliving the horrible morning of September 11, 2001, by re-reading the Straight Dope thread started by Living Dead Girl at 9:02 am that morning as soon as she heard the news of the first plane crashing into the World Trade Center. That was how I learned the news. I had just gotten to work and the first thing I did was look at the SDMB and saw that thread the minute she started it.

Lots of Dopers posted breaking news to the same thread as they heard it, preserving feverish bits of news reports which have otherwise disappeared from history.

09:46 AM
“old executive building behind the White House is also on fire…THe White House itself might be on fire.”

09:47 AM
“Fire in the Washington mall too.”

09:48 AM
"We also are getting reports of an incident at the Old Executive Office Building in DC. "

09:50 AM
“A third plane is reported to be on the way by Reuteurs”

10:01 AM
“A third plane just went through the south tower. It’s collapsed”

10:02 AM
“another blast at some mall…”

10:02 AM
“Cnn just said the Treasury building is on fire”

10:12 AM
“Explosion at the CAPITAL OH.MY.GOD…”

10:17 AM
“another attack on the capitol…”

10:17 AM
“Fires on the Mall and at the Old Executive building.”

10:24 AM
“An explosion was reported at the Capitol Building”

10:25 AM
“Car bomb outside State Department”

10:30 AM
“a carbomb went off in front of the state building…”

10:30 AM
“Capitol Hill explosions are definely confirmed”

10:45 AM
“There is something going on at Dulles Airport, but I can’t find out what it is.”

10:48 AM
“there is also a fire at the state department. – and a car bomb exploded outside at 10-30 eastern time.”

11:14 AM
“According to CNN, there’s been another explosion in NYC, they think from a car bomb.”

02:18 PM
“Camp David was attacked”

03:50 PM
“An aircraft crashed into the U.S. presidential retreat at Camp David, Maryland, on Tuesday, CBS television reported.” … "Several other federal buildings in Washington were also attacked. "

Also, I remember people at work that morning repeating rumors they’d heard on the news that “a plane is circling Dulles Airport.” This was after all flights had been grounded. It was worrying: what was that anomalous plane doing circling Dulles? I lived near Dulles, so had cause for concern. Nothing more was heard about it, so I never found out what was up with that. What is the explanation for these incidents? The Old Executive Office Building? The State Department? The Mall? The Treasury? Did anything really happen in these places, and if not, why were they reported? A third plane hitting the WTC? WTF?

2

Everything was being reported as soon as possible.

I dimly recall hearing that the “Car bomb outside the State Department” went to air on the strength of a reporter hearing a report of an explosion over a police scanner. It may have been any number of things. Loud noises happen. People were terrified. Hell, I was terrified, and I was nowhere near New York or D.C. So someone called the cops to report an “explosion” when they may or may not have the day before, and it went to air immediately.

People panicked a bit. Little wonder.

3

I was in working in DC about a half mile from the capitol on that morning. I listened to the local news radio station and they were flying fast and furious with the reports. It seems that they were reporting stuff as it came off the wire without verifying any of it - at least within the first couple of hours. By 1200 the false reports dropped considerably and the situation was little changed during the rest of the day.

I suspect that most of the reports of things being on fire in DC were just WAGs. The smoke from the Pentagon fire - depending on where you were standing - looked like it might have come from Crystal City and Rosslyn (hence the reports of the CNN building on fire), or the mall, treasury, etc.,

The Camp David attack report were probably due to the fourth plane that crashed in PA not too far away from Camp David.

I do remember hearing at least one sonic boom as military fighters took to the air to cover the city which sounds similiar to an explosion (of the non sonic type). I believe those were the 1000 explosions at the Capital.

I also believe that there were military command and control planes (not fighter jets) that took off from Andrews AFB that morning.

4

Confusion, chaos, panic, etc. I think every building in Washington was reported to be on fire at some point. I’m sure if any of these incidents really happened, they would have been well-known once the dust settled (literally.)

I’ve got a VHS tape from 5/19/95, the day the O.K. City Federal Building was destroyed, and a lot of the reporters’ comments seem quite bizarre in retrospect. Especially the description of the “suspects” (middle-aged Mideastern males, of course – I think they actually arrested someone and gave out their names at one point, or at least it was reported as such) and of course, later, the mythological “John Doe No. 2”.

5

Yeah, I remember the day in 1998 when that nut Weston shot up the Capitol and killed two Capitol Police officers. I was following the news live on washingtonpost.com as it happened, and one of the initial reports said there were two gunmen shooting there. I wish I had saved or printed that screen, because the mysterious second gunman vanished from subsequent reports as though he had never even existed. What happened to him? What bothers me about these phantom reports is that they’re just left hanging and there’s no closure, the other shoe never drops, we’re just left wondering.

6

I remember that day fairly clearly because I had the local public radio station on in my office. My coworkers were listening to various other sources (radio, web, etc). They kept calling out all these wild things, like the number of dead being in the tens of thousands, the additional planes, the bombs on Washington Mall, etc etc,. I never heard any of this sort of thing (except for them calling it out, or the stuff on the threads here), and I was never the first to “break” any news to the rest of the office.

Later on it became clear that public radio, or at least the station I was listening to, wasn’t slow–just careful. They waited on a lot of stories that other stations and outlets went with, a number of which turned out to be wrong.

It made a big impression on me.

7

Someone asked a similar question a while back.:smiley:

8

I wasn’t aware he was mythological. I thought there were recently renewed questions about the handling of the McVeigh case because the accounts of him being with someone are so pervasive.

9

The Daily Show recently ran a hilarious piece about how reporters stationed across the street from the courthouse in which Martha Stewart was being tried just getting the verdicts wrong and totally bollixing up the results.

Why? Because they didn’t want to wait even the 60 seconds it might take for their interns to run across the street with the news. They relied on signals like waving towels (literally) and rushed to air with what they thought was happening.

If the rush to be first to report, and the need to have something to say to fill up every second of air time, can produce nonsense about something as simple as guilty/not guilty verdicts why it is so hard to imagine that on 9/11 with half the world trying to guess what was happening and trying to cope with a million people yelling the first things that came into their heads, that some - many, most - of them might not simply be wrong?

Nobody likes to admit mistakes, and nobody spends as much time correcting mistakes as they do making them in the first place. That you didn’t hear somebody repeatedly saying, “the Capitol wasn’t hit after all”, probably means absolutely nothing except that people are all too human.

10

The mysterious other gunman did indeed never exist. And there is closure because they caught the one gunman who did it. They sent him to the looney bin IIRC. None of the other witnesses or evidence have suggested a second gunman. That pretty much sounds like closure to me.

The music stations in DC pretty much suck so I listen usually to the news radio. I seem to remember that they correct the reports when more information is known. If something was reported incorrectly after a while they stop saying “It was reported earlier that …” and just report what they now know.

11

Just to pipe in here,

I was in class (College) durring the Attacks, and I heard about a"car bomb" in Pa … It was the only ‘other’ attack I heard about, and I soon wondered what happened with it…

12

I was a first-hand witness to the sort of wild rumor mongering that can happen in an alarming situation. On August 27, 1999, I was in a taxi heading for O’Hare airport when some jerk who decided he couldn’t wait for the (shorter pre-9/11 ) security lines simply ran past the checkers. Two concourses were shut down and everyone in them was forced to go stand outside on the sidewalks while the buildings were searched.
My taxi drove up to a scene of thousands of people milling around in front of the terminal with a dozen or so police cars out front with their flashers going. We apparently arrived very shortly after the incident, because there had been no word on the hack’s radio before we arrived.

So as we drove past the first two concourses and the police cars, my cabbie gets on his radio to the dispatcher to announce that there is a serious traffic snarl at O’Hare. All fine and well. So what does the cabbie tell the dispatcher? “There has been a shooting at O’Hare and the airport is closed down.”

Mind you, the only information that cabbie had was the same view that I had: lots of people on the sidewalk and several police cars in the drive. There was no evidence of a shooting (since there had been no shooting)–no ambulances or flak jackets in sight, for example. The only source for the “shooting” story was the hyperactive imagination of one not-too-bright cabbie.
I often wondered how far the “shooting” report circulated before it was finally quashed.

13

On the rare occasions when I have had direct knowledge of events that later got reported by the media, the reporting has, more often than not, contained substantial errors of fact. With big events like 9/11, subsequent reporting and analysis usually serves to correct any wrong facts (either by self-reported corrections or by dropping a story when every other news outlet reports something contradictory.) But for one-shot stories like a local crime, there is usually no subsequent correction. I’m very skeptical of the things I see in local media on stories like that, and I’m sure that things get reported all the time that make the actual witnesses wonder whether the reporter is smoking crack.

The OP reminds me of when Reagan was shot and Dan Rather solemnly informed America that Jim Brady was dead. He even gave a little eulogy-type speech about Brady leaving a wife and kids. Then there was the time he was calling Elizabeth Dole “Libby” when her nickname is actually “Liddy”. I must admit I enjoyed seeing him squirm as he later corrected himself.

14

Actually it was Frank Reynolds of ABC who mistakenly reported Jim Brady’s death, not Rather.

Reynolds later reported a correction and was quite upset at everyone for giving him that erroneous report.

15

Back around 1990 or so, when Atlanta’s winning bid to host the 1996 Olympic Games was announced, the former Olympic Chief Juan Antonio Samaranch mispronounced the name of the city as At-uh-lanta, giving it an extra syllable. Then, several years later when he announced that Sydney had won the 2000 games, he dropped the ‘d’, pronouncing it Synney. Yet if you asked any Australian at the time of the 2000 Games, “Hey, remember back when Samaranch mangled the city’s name?”, guaranteed every single person would say, “Heh. Yeah, he said Syd-uh-nee!!” Local stand-up comedians made fun of Syd-uh-nee, TV shows joked about it, it became part of the local lore, yet he didn’t say it. I tried telling people (a broad selection of them), “He said At-uh-lanta once, but he NEVER said Syd-uh-nee. It was *Synney.”

“No mate, I remember it. Definitely Syd-uh-nee.”

The collective memory is a strange thing. It wasn’t some breaking news report coming hot off the wire. It was a lavish, staged international presentation beamed live into every living room. Everybody heard Synney on the news, yet only a few years later it had changed in everyone’s mind.

16

I was going to post this one until I saw you had. I remember watching the news as that happened.

I also remember reporters talking of “parachutes” seen right after the Challenger explosion. I remember one going so far as to ask a Nasa official “who was able to parachute out safely?” because everyone was talking about how some people in boats has seen parachutes dropping.

17

Well, this particular statistic was well within reason, considering the time of day and capacity (50,000+) of the buildings. I still think it’s a bloomin’ miracle that the final death toll was less than 3,000 – indeed, most of the people who died in the WTC were those trapped above the burning floors and couldn’t get out.

As for John Doe #2…maybe he was Keyzer Soze? :smiley:

18

It was definately a miracle.

I watched it all live on TV. Reporters were hysterical at first, then settled down as better observations came about. My parents have a reprinted front page from the Columbia, SC, The State newspaper that mentions the car bomb at the State Department, even though it never happened.

When the planes crashed in Pennsylvania and The Pentagon, I was skeptical because other reports had been false, then there was video and live reports.

19

Also, what happened to Vix?

20

I remember the media hysteria. At one point, the guys on the radio were reporting at least a half-dozen explosions and fires in DC. The Pentagon; the car bomb at the State Deptment; Explosions on the Mall; the Treasury Building was on fire, as was the Old Executive Building and the Capitol.

At my workplace we were all scared shitless. It sounded like an army of terrorists was systematically razing our nation’s capitol.

And then it all disappeared except for the Pentagon, and the WTC in New York.