An astonishingly clear clip, which is almost nine minutes long, was shared on YouTube by Kevin Westley decades later, the first new moving image capturing the attack from a never-before-seen perspective
A mysterious 9/11 video that captured the attacks emerged on YouTube 20 years after the atrocity.
In the years that followed the attack on September 11, 2001, thousands of pictures and videos circulated – snapshots that preserved the horrors of a morning when almost 3,000 people lost their lives. For two decades, the world became accustomed to seeing what was believed to be an exhausted list of pictures and footage from the day.
However, an astonishingly clear clip, which is almost nine minutes long, was shared on YouTube by Kevin Westley decades later, the first new moving image capturing the attack from a never-before-seen perspective. It shows a previously unseen angle of the second plane hitting the World Trade Center’s South Tower, seventeen minutes after the North Tower was hit by American Airlines flight 11.
Captured from a boat, the camera looks up towards the towers from amongst a crowd of shocked onlookers. Initially, the video focuses on the fire in the north tower, zooming on sheets of paper dancing in the updraught of the flames. Two minutes into the video, the camera pans around in time to capture the second plane flying in over the water before colliding with the South Tower. Screams of horror can be heard from the crowd in the background.
In a post alongside the video, uploader Kevin Westley explained: “I posted this video in the 2000s but accidentally left it private for until now. I noticed the video was private and made it public.” In the long post, Kevin shared his thoughts about witnessing the awful attack on 9/11 and spoke poignantly of his subsequent tour of duty in the 2003 Iraq war as an aircraft commander flying combat missions.
“In an instant, I saw 2,763 die. 25,000 injured,” he said, recalling the horror of the New York attacks. As I was caught in the dust cloud of the collapse, I remember seeing a picture of a child (and am now wondering) if I now was looking at an orphan.”
