A never-before-seen video from 9/11 showing the collapse of the Twin Towers has been posted online, 22 years after the attack.
The clip was uploaded to YouTube by a man named Kei Sugimoto on July 23 and has led conspiracy theorists to bizarrely claim that it proves the collapse was a “controlled demolition.”
Sugimoto says he decided to release the video now “for historical purposes only” after finding the footage while cleaning out a closet.
In the harrowing footage, Sugimoto filmed the World Trade Center from the roof of 64 Marks Place in New York City.
In the video, smoke can be seen rising from the towers where the planes crashed into the buildings. Meanwhile, police sirens can be heard blaring from the street as the chaos of the tragic events of that day continues.
Less than a minute into the video, the South Tower collapses and people across the city can be heard screaming in shock.
Sugimoto then captures the immediate moment after the first tower collapses, as a massive, all-consuming cloud of dust envelops the city.
Towards the end of the video, taken with a Sony VX2000 camera, the North Tower collapses, leaving another cloud of dust in its wake.
Sugimoto explained in the YouTube comments section why he posted the footage now: “I was cleaning out my closet and found boxes full of Hi-8, Digital-8, and DV tapes.
‘Upon attempting to play them back, I noticed that about a third of them had become demagnetized over time and were either blank or suffering from major data corruption.
“After doing some research on the internet, I found out that video tapes are not immune to the passage of time, even when stored under ideal conditions, so I started frantically digitizing them. So now I’m uploading the video.”
Although he says he witnessed the second accident, he only started filming after that because he thought it was “not a common accident.”
The clip has since gone viral on social media, garnering more than 650,000 views on YouTube.
Many users have said the video shows a unique and never-before-seen angle of the devastating terrorist attack.
On X one user said: ‘This footage offers a unique perspective that is not seen from the south or the east.
‘You’re seeing these angles for the first time.’
Kei Sugimoto decided to release the video of the collapse of the Twin Towers “for historical purposes only” after finding the footage while cleaning out a closet.
He filmed the World Trade Center from the roof of 64 Marks Place in New York City.
The images have also emboldened conspiracy theorists who claim the footage proves the discredited theory that 9/11 was an inside job.
A user on X claims the images prove the collapse was a “controlled demolition.”
They say that from the angle in Mr Sugimoto’s video, explosive charges can be seen detonating.
This theory has been ruled out as structural engineers say the rapid collapse of the towers was due to a combination of reasons.
These include damage to the buildings’ cores that left them structurally weakened and due to the intense heat of the fires that burned inside the building that reached temperatures of up to 815 degrees Celsius.
On September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda terrorists launched a massive terrorist attack against the United States involving four planes. Two of them crashed into the Twin Towers, a third into the Pentagon, and a fourth into a field in Pennsylvania, killing 2,977 people.
The attack remains the deadliest terrorist attack in history.