9/11: Unanswered - Part Two - EP 166

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Part two picks up right where "The Day" left off — both towers still standing, the country still trying to figure out what's happening. This episode finishes the story of September 11th, and it's a lot heavier than the headlines usually let it be.

Eric, Sean and Jorge walk through the collapse of both towers minute by minute — what it actually felt like from inside, drawing on The Only Plane in the Sky, the oral history built entirely from witness accounts. But this episode isn't just about the worst parts of that morning. It's about Rick Rescorla, who ignored the "stay put" announcement and personally evacuated nearly 2,700 people from the South Tower while singing through a bullhorn, then went back in and never came out. It's about the 14 people who survived in Stairwell B because a Port Authority employee named Josephine Harris couldn't move fast — and accidentally saved everyone around her. It's about Welles Crowther, the Man in the Red Bandana, and the Coast Guard-led boatlift that moved half a million people off Manhattan by water in under nine hours, a bigger evacuation than Dunkirk.

The episode also follows the chaos in Washington — Cheney in the White House bunker authorizing a shootdown order the 9/11 Commission itself later admitted has "conflicting evidence" about who actually approved it first, Ben Sliney grounding every plane in American airspace on his literal first day on the job, and the military confusion that left fighter jets 150 miles away when the Pentagon was hit.

And it sets up what's coming next — the first mention of Building 7, the 47-story tower that collapsed without being hit by a plane, and a passport that survived a 500-mile-an-hour impact and a raging fire almost too cleanly to believe.

This episode closes out the full account of September 11th before the series turns to what's still unresolved a quarter-century later.

New episodes of "9/11: Unanswered" release every Tuesday through September 28th. Follow The Conspiracy Podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Join the Patreon at patreon.com/theconspiracypodcast for early access and exclusive After Hours content