The Conspiracy Podcast

For twenty-five years, one man spent his career warning the government about a threat almost nobody wanted to take seriously.
Days before September 11th, he started a brand new job — one with an irony he couldn't have scripted himself.
Part of the 9/11 Stories series from The Conspiracy Podcast, marking 25 years since the attacks.

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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

A flight attendant on American Flight 11 spent the last 23 minutes of her life on the phone, calmly telling American Airlines everything she could about the hijacking underway around her — including actual audio from that call. Part of the 9/11 Stories series from The Conspiracy Podcast, marking 25 years since the attacks.

This is the true story of Paige Farley-Hackel and Ruth and Juliana McCourt.
In the pre-dawn dark at Logan Airport, two best friends say goodbye before boarding two different flights to the same reunion in California. A simple decision — a handful of frequent flyer miles — is the only thing that separates them that morning. What happens next unfolds across two towers, seventeen minutes apart.

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Twenty-five years later, The Conspiracy Podcast is finally tackling it. "9/11: Unanswered" kicks off with the day itself — minute by minute, four flights, one morning that changed everything.
It starts like any other Tuesday. Nineteen men move through four different airports — Portland, Boston, Newark, Washington Dulles — carrying box cutters and knives with blades under four inches, which was perfectly legal at the time. Ten of them get flagged by CAPPS, the era's passenger screening system, before they even board. Flagged, and let through anyway. Hosts Eric , Sean and Jorge pull apart exactly how that happened, working straight from the 9/11 Commission Report to keep the timeline accurate rather than relying on secondhand retellings.
From there it's real time. Flight attendants Betty Ong and Amy Sweeney calling it in from the air as it's happening. Daniel Lewin, a former Israeli special forces officer, trying to stop his own hijacker before anyone on the ground even knows what's unfolding. The first plane hits the North Tower and the world assumes it's an accident — until the second one hits live on television, and there's no more room for that assumption. Then the Pentagon. Then United 93, where the passengers find out, mid-flight, exactly what happened to the other three planes and make a decision most of them never get the chance to think twice about.
The episode also follows President Bush's morning at a Florida elementary school — the seven minutes in that classroom people are still arguing about twenty-five years later — through Air Force One and into the address that ended up shaping the next two decades of American foreign policy.
This one ran long. Long enough that the hosts split it into two parts rather than cut corners on any of it. Part 2 picks up exactly where this one leaves off. Later episodes in the series get into what's still unresolved after twenty-five years — the Commission's own gaps, the disputed collapse of Building 7, and the questions around the Pentagon that never fully went away.
New episodes of "9/11: Unanswered" drop every Tuesday through September 28th. Patreon members get early access to every episode in the series plus the full, extended After Hours cut. www.patreon.com/theconspiracypodcast