September 11: 9/11 Flag Lost and Found After Circling the Globe

On September 11, 2001, the World Trade Centers in New York City fell after two commercial airliners hit them in what is now called the 9/11 Terrorist Attacks.
Hours after the twin towers fell 3 NYC firemen (George Johnson, Billy Eisengrein and Dan McWilliams) took an American flag off of a yacht docked in a Lower Manhattan harbor and raised it amongst the rubble in the area now known as Ground Zero. The moment was captured in a photograph by newspaper photographer Thomas E. Franklin and published on front pages and magazine covers around the world. The photo has been compared to Joe Rosenthal’s 1945 picture of six U.S. troops raising an American flag atop Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima. The 9/11 flag disappeared hours after the photo was taken and an alternate flag was signed by the governor of New York George Pataki, and two New York City mayors, Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg and was put on display at various times around the world. After comparisons of the displayed flag to the flag in the famous photograph reveled it to be a fake, a documentary about the flag's disappearance was made.

   In 2014 a man who identified himself only as 'Brian' walked into a fire station in Everett, Washington (nearly 3,000 miles away from New York) saying he saw the documentary and wanted to  hand over a flag he thought to be the famous missing flag. The man, still only known as Brian, said he was a Marine veteran who had been deployed to the Middle East and was told a widow of a 9/11 victim gave the flag to a worker at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who in turn gave the flag to him.

    A forensic materials scientist for the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab conducted tests and determined that Brian's mystery flag was the flag from the famous photo. It is now on display at the National September 11 Memorial Museum, and a second documentary has been made about the flag's recovery.