lost media, memory, and morbid fascination
my struggle to quit the search for LOL Superman, a video that doesn't exist
* I don’t link to anything visually gory in this post, but I do describe some NSFL videos. *
For a year now, I have been obsessed with an internet lost media mystery called LOL Superman. Some people on the internet claim that, around 2006, they saw a close-up video of 9/11 jumpers1 the hitting the ground in the World Trade Center plaza. But no one can prove that the video exists.
People say they saw the video on YouTube, on Ogrish, or on a site called Heaven666. They describe grainy footage of multiple bodies landing in front of the cameraman in the plaza between the two towers. The most convincing accounts describe the cameraman’s path down a set of stairs and toward the plaza’s stage. Some people say they saw the clip overlaid with Arabic chanting. Some recall the phrase, “We’re gonna have to blur that out.”
People have FOIA requested the FBI and the 911 Memorial & Museum, only to receive vaguely worded replies. They have harassed purported cameramen, including Jack Taliercio, one of the only people known to have recorded video from inside the plaza during the attacks. They have scoured old servers and vintage hard drives, occasionally surfacing a link or a file that turns out to be a dead end.
The most credible evidence of LSM’s existence comes from Werner Herzog, who said, in a 2009 interview about Grizzly Man, “Video was shot during the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and some amateur footage is in existence where people jump out of the 106th floor and crash to their deaths right at the feet of the person who filmed it, and nobody, nobody has ever shown it, and rightly so. You just do not show that, period.”
I have suspected for a while that LSM is a collective misremembering, a product of the Mandela effect. The conspiratorial question, “Why are there so few videos of 9/11 jumpers hitting the ground, and none from close up?” has a simple explanation. It was 2001. There were no smartphones. The only people capable of recording video were broadcast news professionals and those who happened to have camcorders. It is hard for me, having grown up in the era of live-streamed mass shootings, to really understand this, and I think that my generation’s overfamiliarity with gore accounts for a lot of the mystique surrounding this video among people my age.
By the time journalists from the big broadcasters in Midtown could get to Lower Manhattan, both towers had been struck, and the WTC plaza was an active crime scene, cordoned off by police. The inaccessibility of the plaza after the second plane hit (along with some other data points that I just typed out but deleted once I realized that the depth of my knowledge about this probably nonexistent video is making me sound literally insane) has led people to assume that LSM, if it exists, was shot in the 19 minutes between the two impacts. The cameraman had to have been nearby when the first plane hit.
There are three famous videos taken at or near plaza during this time period. One was recorded by the French filmmaker Jules Naudet, who happened to have been making a documentary about the New York City Fire Department with his brother, Gédéon, when he captured the only known video of the first plane hitting the North Tower. Jules Naudet rode to the scene with FDNY’s Chief Pfeifer and followed him into 1 WTC. Naudet’s footage from inside the tower is punctuated with loud bangs that conspiracy theorists would have you believe were bombs. They were people.2
Other known footage comes from Guy Rosbrook, who was staying in the WTC Marriott when the planes hit. Rosbrook’s footage, taken in his hotel room, shows several people falling from the North Tower. It shows the moment that one person’s body hits the stage in the plaza, and it shows several jumpers’ remains. But the footage is taken from a distance. To appreciate the horror of the scene, you have to know what to look for.
The third and most haunting footage comes from Jack Taliercio. Taliercio was a cameraman for a Fox affiliate, and his tape includes the eerie sound of Muzak still playing from the South Tower’s lobby while the North Tower burned.3 He filmed one person trying to rappel down the side of the tower before losing his footing and falling. There is a closeness to the footage that makes it very difficult to watch. In terms of emotional impact, it is as close to LSM as it gets.
Even though I know, logically, that a video of 9/11 could not be fully scrubbed from the internet—what would be the motivation? why nix that video, when other, just as horrifying videos are public?—I was not ready to believe that it was a product of the Mandela effect until I experienced a false memory myself. In Taliercio’s footage, the cameraman is accompanied by an unknown man. The guy is obnoxious, but I guess you can’t judge how people act in traumatic situations. He says, “Let's get out there together and take pictures. You never know, you might find a hand.” I could have sworn that he also said, “You’re gonna have to blur that out.” It seemed like the type of thing he would say. But between the first time I watched the video a year ago and my rewatch last week, my obsessive Reddit scrolling must have inserted that phrase into my recollection of the video. He never utters those words.
It should be obvious to anyone who has seen the Naudet, Rosbrook, and Taliercio footage that LSM is a misremembered amalgamation of the three. Psychoanalyst Charles Strozier has documented a similar phenomenon, in which people claimed to have seen TV footage on 9/11 that was far more graphic than anything that actually aired.4 Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has built a career on proving that false memories can be implanted. And this wouldn’t be the first time that people spent years searching for lost media that didn’t exist. There is an entire subreddit of people who claim to remember a version of FarmVille or Stardew Valley in which you play as a man who has killed his wife and has to hide the body from the police. The game turns out to have been a misremembered joke from a podcast. As for Werner Herzog, he could very well have been referring to Taliercio’s footage, which was not released until 2010. His comment might have even sown more false memories.
I keep trying to quit the LSM subreddit. One of the moderators is a literal Nazi, and people keep posting about “organized Jewry.”5 The sub is full of pareidolia, wishful thinking, and some of the dumbest people on the internet. Most recently, people have convinced themselves that a piece of debris visible in the Rosbrook footage is actually a cameraman. I’ll go weeks without looking at the sub, but then I’m overcome with this perverse desire to scare myself, to join in this collective charade, and I can’t figure out why.
I was at the library recently, just strolling the aisles, trying to find a novel to read before school started up again. I picked up White Noise by Don DeLillo. It felt fortuitous. Here I could see that I was not alone in my fascination with disaster:
That night, a Friday, we gathered in front of the set, as was the custom and the rule, with take-out Chinese. There were floods, earthquakes, mud slides, erupting volcanoes. We’d never before been so attentive to our duty, our Friday assembly. Heinrich was sullen, I was not bored. Steffie, brought close to ears by a sitcom husband arguing with his wife, appeared totally absorbed in these documentary clips of calamity and death. Babette tried to switch to a comedy series about a group of racially mixed kids who build their own communications satellite. She was startled by the force of our objection. We were otherwise silent, watching houses slide into the ocean, whole villages crackle and ignite in a mass of advancing lava. Every disaster made us wish for more, for something bigger, grander, more sweeping.6
It reminds me of George Carlin’s joke about enjoying terrible news: “Sirens, flames, smoke, bodies, graves being filled, parents weeping. Exciting shit.” The day before 9/11, Carlin performed a comedy special called “I Kinda Like It When a Lotta People Die,” unreleased until 2016.
White Noise encapsulated so much of what drew me to LSM: the fallibility of memory, the tension between simulation and reality, the academic fascination with the macabre. It suggests that all our morbid inclinations are distractions from our own demise. LSM is really not so different for waiting for a sign from God, or trying to find an answer to what happens when you die. It is the search for something that does not exist. It may be pointless, but so is everything.
Some people fell or were otherwise forced out of the buildings, but “jumpers” is the best term we have.
Naudet entered beneath the canopy that faced West Street, on the other side of the building from the plaza. I have a hard time visualizing the interior of the lobby, and I don’t know whether Naudet was able to view the plaza. I just know that he was in the North Tower as it burned.
Songs included “She’s Always a Woman” and “How Deep Is Your Love,” in case you were curious.
Charles B. Strozier, Until the Fires Stopped Burning: 9/11 and New York City in the Words and Experiences of Survivors and Witnesses (Columbia University Press, 2011), 54–6. I know, I know, I’m in grad school.
When I complained about this to Will, he was like, “Why are you surprised that the people on your 9/11 conspiracy subreddit are Nazis?” And I was like, “It’s not a conspiracy!!!”
Don DeLillo, White Noise (Penguin Books, 1986), 64.