Personal anecdote: I was in college when 9/11 happened. Back then, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, radio was still a major part of daily life. iPods, iPhones, and streaming didn’t exist yet.
Morning radio shows often did live prank calls to keep things entertaining. DJs would pretend to be the president or do some other ridiculous bit, and it was usually silly / harmless / funny.
I remember driving to class that morning and hearing the first reports on the radio. My initial thought was, “If this is a prank, it’s not funny.” When I got to class and the professor cancelled because of what was happening, only then did I finally realized it was real.
My friend and I discussed that our generation didn't have a thing that we formed a cohort around. He said something like "catastrophe, tomorrow" and I said, probably in NYC and started recording the police/fire frequencies out of NYC. I went to bed sometime around midnight PST on the night of the tenth.
I was at my desk here at work (yes, believe it or not, I still work at the same place I did 25 years ago) and as soon as it happened, all the major newspaper websites got overwhelmed and became unreachable. I ended up getting news from the Times of India's website because it was keeping up with the story but wasn't getting hit as hard as the others.
Same, Drudge Report was one of the only sites that actually loaded consistently for me that morning. I think BBC may have held up a bit better than US news sites too. I remember the first stories trickling in thought it was like a Cessna or something else small that hit, and by the time TV was live and on the scene, the time delta between what you saw on TV versus what was reported online was comically large. Funny how these days it's really not much different, news sites tend to lag social media by a larger amount than I'd expect for 2026, and it's still publishing the same level of speculation and kind of vague, glossed over details (compared to just watching videos of the event semi-realtime)
Same! I remember a co-worker getting a call from a relative about it so I went to cnn.com. ...only to see it time out. Same with usatoday.com and abcnews.com. At that point I knew that something was happening.
I then happened to remember that abcnews.com.au existed and figured Australia's websites weren't getting hit quite as hard as ours, and I was right. It was front page news there.
We all left the office (which was in Center City Philadelphia) a few minutes later.
I was in the car listening to Howard Stern. Someone called in about it. They treated it as a joke at first. As it started playing out they realized that not only was it real but it was more than just a simple accident.
THat's when I flipped over to the news radio station.
Once the event was underway, I recall Howard Stern providing rather good up-to-the-minute reporting about the event, by way of guests calling in. While the mainstream news was floundering around with stale info and generally not really knowing what was going on, you could get pretty decent information from the Stern show. Apart the occasional guest callers just calling in and shouting "baba booey," his coverage was quite good. Helps to remember this was way before Twitter, and there was not much "instant live reporting from the commoners" back then. All live news came from mainstream news behemoths.
This was my experience, too. I learned about it on my commute to work, listing to Howard Stern. And, yeah, at first I thought it was another stupid skit.
One thing that impressed me about Stern's broadcast that day is he kept calling for calm. One quote I'll never forget: "Don't go around beating up cab drivers." Not sure why that made an impact on me.
I too learned about 9/11 on the radio. I was driving to work, had stopped to get breakfast, and when I got back in the car and started it up, my in-dash CD hadn’t re-started yet and NPR was tuned in and the news came on. Was most of the way in, so headed in and read about things online the rest of the morning. There was no decent web video to watch, so only when I got to a TV later did I get the full picture.
I was serving (mandatory) in military in my home european country, guys at our guard platoon desk were listening radio talking about some crashing plane, I just went outside the barracks in my spare time to netcafe to do some surfing and just noticed in news sites talk about some plane crash.
When I came back I've noticed we have suddenly CNN channel instead of our regular local TV station (they switched from regular programming to airing CNN live) with South American telenovelas (the guys watched it for pretty babes, I stayed usually with clerks around computers in captain's office playing games or chitchatting).
Then in the evening came barracks chief (don't remember position, I guess Mayor) telling us we are on high alert (though we didn't understand what have something in US to do with us in small european country, not even in NATO back then), we had to double guarding strategic objects (we were nearby NPP and also ammunition storage in forest).
First night after attacks I've spent on night shift next to fax to receive updates, luckily nothing interesting came and WW3 occured and we just continued with doubled guards for some time, which was actually better for the regular soldiers (not for me - office rat doing clerk work helping professional soldiers in office with paperwork and I had to go actually guarding 24hr shifts instead of sitting at computer and sleeping in our own more comfy clerk room), at least you had someone to talk to while doing your 2 hours round in cold forest. In the end they didn't prolong mandatory conscription (many were afraid they are gonna do it because of this) and we finished on time at the end of next April.
I doubt if I were not serving in military during 9/11 I would remember this day in such detail as European not affected by it (other then annoying heightened airport security later).
You reminded me of one of my favorite radio pranks from back then, slightly less 9/11 tier, moreso funny prank.
There's a radio station in Miami that I guess did pranks over the air (I'm from Orlando so I never heard it) and someone animated one of their prank calls. They kept phoning this painter who was Dominican I think, and every time he would say "yes" to the question "Usted es el Pintor?" (Are you the painter?) they would play a clip from a song titled "Pintame" where the artist sings "PINTAMEEEE" and he would get mad, in one call they pretended to speak English just to trick him:
"are you the painter guy?"
"Yes"
"PINTAMEEEEEE"
He knew who it was immediately and went on a rant about how people all around town are yelling at him calling him "El Pintor" it was great, I bet he even got some customers out of it.
Anyway, someone animated it, and you can kind of find it on YouTube , used to be a flash movie. ;) I can't pull up the YouTube video while at work (its kind of locked down) or I would post it, it's mostly Spanish, but still cracks me up. I was showing it to my Mother In Law sometime back, she was busting out laughing.
I read the book (found in a used bookstore) when I was 12 or so. It really creeped me out at the time. Good to know our government is now operating at the level of a 12-year-old.
After watching Disclosure Day with my kids, we had an interesting conversation on the way home - what would it take for you to believe that aliens are real and visting Earth?
With the advancement of image and video generation, I think I'd have to see one in person!
The 4000 out of 700000 number doesn't seem quite right to me. That seems like maybe an average rate being applied to a cohort that doesn't match the average population. It would be more telling to compare deaths that were suspicious and missing persons numbers than all deaths.
That said, I would assume the government would monitor statistics like this as part of standard counter intelligence operations so they could see any patterns of potential issues as they pop up.
Oddly enough this exact topic came in another thread, and CDC mortality tables [1] are kind of eye opening for those who don't realize how brief life is. Take just the 25-44 year old bracket (which is probably conservative here given we're speaking of an older cohort) and the death rate is approximately 140/100k per year. For a sample of 700k people that'd be about 980 per year, around 1800 over 22 months.
Their estimate is more than twice that, but that is probably simply because of a higher age estimation. Mortality rates skyrocket upwards rapidly. At the 35-55 bracket we're already somewhere around 300/100k, which would be around 4k. And that age bracket is probably closer to reality than 25-44. Whatever the exact figure is going to be, 4k is probably a pretty decent ballpark.
And many of those deaths are going to be unusual, because pretty much all deaths at younger ages are unusual. A bit paradoxical given how 'regularly' it happens, when you look at the scale of society.
This article would be more convincing if it focused on debunking the conspiracy instead of spending all but one hand wavy paragraph presenting a new conspiracy.
The single debunking claim says there are 700k "US top secret-cleared aerospace and nuclear workforce" so normal mortality rates should be higher.
Were these people all part of the normal workforce or a smaller category? Are those death rates total deaths or deaths under suspicious circumstances?
Anecdotally, Amy Eskridge went on a podcast and texted friends saying she was at risk and had no intention of killing herself before supposedly killing herself. Will McCasland and others disappeared under strange circumstances and Will was clearly not just part of a 700k person workforce, he was a general who directed a largely classified $4B annual research budget.
I'm not saying there is a broad conspiracy here but it's worth exploring. I miss real journalism. What a waste of an opportunity to write a good story.
Originally meant to be aired on April Fool's day, this hoax documentary's broadcast had be moved to a different date, and, as a consequence, many naive viewers thought it was real.
Now, the hoax has taken a life of its own on the Web, with waves of naive people believing its silly made-up claims about scientists working in certain fields mysteriously disappearing.
This reminds me of a mermaid "documentary"* I watched as a gullible 15 (?) year old. It aired on Animal Planet, if I'm not mistaken. I thought it was absolutely real. _Mermaids are real_. I used to tell everyone to watch it...
Years later, I found out it was completely fake; the end credits even tell you it's fake (I missed that). I had a hard time believing anything after that realization.
Similar thing for Discovery or History channel show about Dragons. It went on about how they could breath fire by eating platinum rich ore from their dens or something. I was very confused - why would an otherwise reputable channel show absolute fiction, and if it was true why wouldn't this be all over the news. Then at the end they said it was fictional. What garbage.
War of the Worlds did it first. A Halloween episode of the radio series The Mercury Theatre on the Air which broadcast live at 8 pm ET on October 30, 1938.
I look forward to Trump demanding that his new 'battleship' be made out of the floating/anti-gravity iron from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look_Around_You (another somewhat later parody, this one from the BBC)
This reminds me of a series of recurring stories from the 2000s. These were decently mainstream stories in the media about the untimely demise of prominent microbiologists hinting at conspiracies involving deep knowledge they held in common that few others shared. I don't know if those stories faded or if I just stopped paying attention.
It’s like the conspiracy theorist version of one of the Three-Body problem storylines with those scientists vanishing. I expect theres an entire subreddit for this.
Investigating the disappearances or suspicious deaths of scientists with close ties to nuclear secrets isn't wrong.
The problem is that there are real mysteries that are connected to a bunch of social media bullshit and more than half of the purported "mysterious disappearances" of people are people that aren't even connected to nuclear research. And then people who hate Trump like the media want to make it seem like Trump himself is being duped and is personally directing the investigators. The multiple layers of indirection here is the real problem, let the investigators do their jobs because at least a few of them need to be investigated properly.
> And then people who hate Trump like the media want to make it seem like Trump himself is being duped and is personally directing the investigators.
It sure sounds like Trump himself is being duped:
"On April 15, a question about the missing or dead individuals came up at a White House press briefing and by the next day Trump said he had met with advisers and the issue was being investigated. FBI Director Kash Patel reiterated the importance of looking for connections in these cases Sunday on Fox News. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is conducting its own investigation."
Personal anecdote: I was in college when 9/11 happened. Back then, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, radio was still a major part of daily life. iPods, iPhones, and streaming didn’t exist yet.
Morning radio shows often did live prank calls to keep things entertaining. DJs would pretend to be the president or do some other ridiculous bit, and it was usually silly / harmless / funny.
I remember driving to class that morning and hearing the first reports on the radio. My initial thought was, “If this is a prank, it’s not funny.” When I got to class and the professor cancelled because of what was happening, only then did I finally realized it was real.
My friend and I discussed that our generation didn't have a thing that we formed a cohort around. He said something like "catastrophe, tomorrow" and I said, probably in NYC and started recording the police/fire frequencies out of NYC. I went to bed sometime around midnight PST on the night of the tenth.
So I have the entire thing on police radio.
Just as a fluke.
There's a snippet on my SoundCloud.
I was at my desk here at work (yes, believe it or not, I still work at the same place I did 25 years ago) and as soon as it happened, all the major newspaper websites got overwhelmed and became unreachable. I ended up getting news from the Times of India's website because it was keeping up with the story but wasn't getting hit as hard as the others.
Same, Drudge Report was one of the only sites that actually loaded consistently for me that morning. I think BBC may have held up a bit better than US news sites too. I remember the first stories trickling in thought it was like a Cessna or something else small that hit, and by the time TV was live and on the scene, the time delta between what you saw on TV versus what was reported online was comically large. Funny how these days it's really not much different, news sites tend to lag social media by a larger amount than I'd expect for 2026, and it's still publishing the same level of speculation and kind of vague, glossed over details (compared to just watching videos of the event semi-realtime)
Same! I remember a co-worker getting a call from a relative about it so I went to cnn.com. ...only to see it time out. Same with usatoday.com and abcnews.com. At that point I knew that something was happening.
I then happened to remember that abcnews.com.au existed and figured Australia's websites weren't getting hit quite as hard as ours, and I was right. It was front page news there.
We all left the office (which was in Center City Philadelphia) a few minutes later.
I remember trying to reach CNN.com on a school library computer. Eventually CNN put up a lightweight version that scaled better.
CNN Lite is still available. It's amazing how much better the experience is. https://lite.cnn.com/
I recall slashdot briefly becoming more like a scalable citizen journalist site in the middle of its usual news aggregation and performative memes.
Yup, I remember getting the updates from Slashdot while Yahoo was completely unusable due to overwhelming traffic.
I was in the car listening to Howard Stern. Someone called in about it. They treated it as a joke at first. As it started playing out they realized that not only was it real but it was more than just a simple accident.
THat's when I flipped over to the news radio station.
Once the event was underway, I recall Howard Stern providing rather good up-to-the-minute reporting about the event, by way of guests calling in. While the mainstream news was floundering around with stale info and generally not really knowing what was going on, you could get pretty decent information from the Stern show. Apart the occasional guest callers just calling in and shouting "baba booey," his coverage was quite good. Helps to remember this was way before Twitter, and there was not much "instant live reporting from the commoners" back then. All live news came from mainstream news behemoths.
Tangent but I recall /. being one of the only sites that could withstand the onslaught of people trying to follow the news online.
Which is weird because writing this comment made me go glance at /. and it's sad what it ultimately became.
Yes, I was in college and it took me a while to realize I needed to actually turn on the news, because all the mainstream websites were wrong.
Oddly enough, neither of my classes were cancelled, despite being only a little over 2 hours down 95 from NYC.
It did! Once I confirmed it was real I wound up bouncing between the two. Such a surreal experience
This was my experience, too. I learned about it on my commute to work, listing to Howard Stern. And, yeah, at first I thought it was another stupid skit.
One thing that impressed me about Stern's broadcast that day is he kept calling for calm. One quote I'll never forget: "Don't go around beating up cab drivers." Not sure why that made an impact on me.
I too learned about 9/11 on the radio. I was driving to work, had stopped to get breakfast, and when I got back in the car and started it up, my in-dash CD hadn’t re-started yet and NPR was tuned in and the news came on. Was most of the way in, so headed in and read about things online the rest of the morning. There was no decent web video to watch, so only when I got to a TV later did I get the full picture.
I was serving (mandatory) in military in my home european country, guys at our guard platoon desk were listening radio talking about some crashing plane, I just went outside the barracks in my spare time to netcafe to do some surfing and just noticed in news sites talk about some plane crash.
When I came back I've noticed we have suddenly CNN channel instead of our regular local TV station (they switched from regular programming to airing CNN live) with South American telenovelas (the guys watched it for pretty babes, I stayed usually with clerks around computers in captain's office playing games or chitchatting).
Then in the evening came barracks chief (don't remember position, I guess Mayor) telling us we are on high alert (though we didn't understand what have something in US to do with us in small european country, not even in NATO back then), we had to double guarding strategic objects (we were nearby NPP and also ammunition storage in forest).
First night after attacks I've spent on night shift next to fax to receive updates, luckily nothing interesting came and WW3 occured and we just continued with doubled guards for some time, which was actually better for the regular soldiers (not for me - office rat doing clerk work helping professional soldiers in office with paperwork and I had to go actually guarding 24hr shifts instead of sitting at computer and sleeping in our own more comfy clerk room), at least you had someone to talk to while doing your 2 hours round in cold forest. In the end they didn't prolong mandatory conscription (many were afraid they are gonna do it because of this) and we finished on time at the end of next April.
I doubt if I were not serving in military during 9/11 I would remember this day in such detail as European not affected by it (other then annoying heightened airport security later).
You reminded me of one of my favorite radio pranks from back then, slightly less 9/11 tier, moreso funny prank.
There's a radio station in Miami that I guess did pranks over the air (I'm from Orlando so I never heard it) and someone animated one of their prank calls. They kept phoning this painter who was Dominican I think, and every time he would say "yes" to the question "Usted es el Pintor?" (Are you the painter?) they would play a clip from a song titled "Pintame" where the artist sings "PINTAMEEEE" and he would get mad, in one call they pretended to speak English just to trick him:
"are you the painter guy?"
"Yes"
"PINTAMEEEEEE"
He knew who it was immediately and went on a rant about how people all around town are yelling at him calling him "El Pintor" it was great, I bet he even got some customers out of it.
Anyway, someone animated it, and you can kind of find it on YouTube , used to be a flash movie. ;) I can't pull up the YouTube video while at work (its kind of locked down) or I would post it, it's mostly Spanish, but still cracks me up. I was showing it to my Mother In Law sometime back, she was busting out laughing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%ADntame_(song)
I read the book (found in a used bookstore) when I was 12 or so. It really creeped me out at the time. Good to know our government is now operating at the level of a 12-year-old.
After watching Disclosure Day with my kids, we had an interesting conversation on the way home - what would it take for you to believe that aliens are real and visting Earth?
With the advancement of image and video generation, I think I'd have to see one in person!
The 4000 out of 700000 number doesn't seem quite right to me. That seems like maybe an average rate being applied to a cohort that doesn't match the average population. It would be more telling to compare deaths that were suspicious and missing persons numbers than all deaths.
That said, I would assume the government would monitor statistics like this as part of standard counter intelligence operations so they could see any patterns of potential issues as they pop up.
Oddly enough this exact topic came in another thread, and CDC mortality tables [1] are kind of eye opening for those who don't realize how brief life is. Take just the 25-44 year old bracket (which is probably conservative here given we're speaking of an older cohort) and the death rate is approximately 140/100k per year. For a sample of 700k people that'd be about 980 per year, around 1800 over 22 months.
Their estimate is more than twice that, but that is probably simply because of a higher age estimation. Mortality rates skyrocket upwards rapidly. At the 35-55 bracket we're already somewhere around 300/100k, which would be around 4k. And that age bracket is probably closer to reality than 25-44. Whatever the exact figure is going to be, 4k is probably a pretty decent ballpark.
And many of those deaths are going to be unusual, because pretty much all deaths at younger ages are unusual. A bit paradoxical given how 'regularly' it happens, when you look at the scale of society.
[1] - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/dvs/MortFinal2007_Worktable23r...
You can watch the TV programme here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNR0Q97TtRU
I'm pretty sure I watched this when it was broadcast - when I was 12. It was fairly clear to me at the time it wasn't a real documentary.
This article would be more convincing if it focused on debunking the conspiracy instead of spending all but one hand wavy paragraph presenting a new conspiracy.
The single debunking claim says there are 700k "US top secret-cleared aerospace and nuclear workforce" so normal mortality rates should be higher.
Were these people all part of the normal workforce or a smaller category? Are those death rates total deaths or deaths under suspicious circumstances?
Anecdotally, Amy Eskridge went on a podcast and texted friends saying she was at risk and had no intention of killing herself before supposedly killing herself. Will McCasland and others disappeared under strange circumstances and Will was clearly not just part of a 700k person workforce, he was a general who directed a largely classified $4B annual research budget.
I'm not saying there is a broad conspiracy here but it's worth exploring. I miss real journalism. What a waste of an opportunity to write a good story.
Originally meant to be aired on April Fool's day, this hoax documentary's broadcast had be moved to a different date, and, as a consequence, many naive viewers thought it was real.
Now, the hoax has taken a life of its own on the Web, with waves of naive people believing its silly made-up claims about scientists working in certain fields mysteriously disappearing.
The hoax has even made the HN front page.
Sigh.
In fairness to HN, the debunking made the front page.
This reminds me of a mermaid "documentary"* I watched as a gullible 15 (?) year old. It aired on Animal Planet, if I'm not mistaken. I thought it was absolutely real. _Mermaids are real_. I used to tell everyone to watch it...
Years later, I found out it was completely fake; the end credits even tell you it's fake (I missed that). I had a hard time believing anything after that realization.
* - Mermaids: The Body Found
Similar thing for Discovery or History channel show about Dragons. It went on about how they could breath fire by eating platinum rich ore from their dens or something. I was very confused - why would an otherwise reputable channel show absolute fiction, and if it was true why wouldn't this be all over the news. Then at the end they said it was fictional. What garbage.
* At least 10 people tied to sensitive US research have died or disappeared https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47909942
* Conspiracy about missing/dead scientists from online forums to the White House https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47898228
* Comer and Burlison Seek Information on Missing Nuclear and Rocket Scientists https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47877825
* FBI looks into dead or missing scientists tied to NASA, Blue Origin, SpaceX https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47858246
As far as conspiracies go, the media seems to be working extra to bury this one.
da dum tss
this certainly reinforces "waves of naive people"
War of the Worlds did it first. A Halloween episode of the radio series The Mercury Theatre on the Air which broadcast live at 8 pm ET on October 30, 1938.
I look forward to Trump demanding that his new 'battleship' be made out of the floating/anti-gravity iron from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look_Around_You (another somewhat later parody, this one from the BBC)
I saw the actual news and the TV correspondent sounded very serious about people going missing. I wonder if they do this on purpose.
Scientists disappearing? Isn’t that a dream come true, why would the current administration investigate?
This reminds me of a series of recurring stories from the 2000s. These were decently mainstream stories in the media about the untimely demise of prominent microbiologists hinting at conspiracies involving deep knowledge they held in common that few others shared. I don't know if those stories faded or if I just stopped paying attention.
It’s like the conspiracy theorist version of one of the Three-Body problem storylines with those scientists vanishing. I expect theres an entire subreddit for this.
> UK mockumentary Alternative 3
never heard of it
Well luckily, there's a nice article here that you can read to find out all about it
Investigating the disappearances or suspicious deaths of scientists with close ties to nuclear secrets isn't wrong.
The problem is that there are real mysteries that are connected to a bunch of social media bullshit and more than half of the purported "mysterious disappearances" of people are people that aren't even connected to nuclear research. And then people who hate Trump like the media want to make it seem like Trump himself is being duped and is personally directing the investigators. The multiple layers of indirection here is the real problem, let the investigators do their jobs because at least a few of them need to be investigated properly.
> And then people who hate Trump like the media want to make it seem like Trump himself is being duped and is personally directing the investigators.
It sure sounds like Trump himself is being duped:
"On April 15, a question about the missing or dead individuals came up at a White House press briefing and by the next day Trump said he had met with advisers and the issue was being investigated. FBI Director Kash Patel reiterated the importance of looking for connections in these cases Sunday on Fox News. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is conducting its own investigation."
https://apnews.com/article/scientists-missing-dead-conspirac...