The Falling Man

The unidentified man in the image was trapped on the upper floors of the North Tower, and it is unclear whether he fell while searching for safety or jumped to escape the fire and smoke.

The photograph was widely criticized after publication in international media on September 12, 2001, with readers labeling the image as disturbing, cold-blooded, ghoulish, and sadistic.

[4] A Time magazine retrospective published in 2016 stated: "Falling Man's identity is still unknown, but he is believed to have been an employee at the Windows on the World restaurant, which sat atop the North Tower.

Most of the people who fell from the World Trade Center deliberately jumped to their deaths to escape the smoke, flames, and extreme heat (in some places, estimated at over 2,000 °F (1,090 °C)).

A smaller percentage of the falling deaths were accidents caused by people losing their grip or being knocked off-balance near window ledges, or attempting to climb down to a lower floor below the fire.

Officials could not recover or identify the remains of those forced out of the towers due to the conditions on the ground near the base of the building at the time, prior to their collapse.

The morning of September 11, Richard Drew was on assignment for the Associated Press, photographing a maternity fashion show in Bryant Park.

After happening upon his missing persons poster, Cheney speculated that the man pictured in the photo may have been Norberto Hernandez, a pastry chef at Windows on the World, a restaurant located on the 106th floor of the North Tower.

[18] Cheney decided to publish the article regardless, leaving Hernandez's widow and daughters very upset, primarily because of the Catholic view of suicide as sinful.

[19] After the Globe and Mail story went viral, American journalist Tom Junod spoke to Richard Drew and discovered that the photo was but one in a sequence of twelve, something Cheney did not realize.

It debuted on March 16, 2006, on the British television network Channel 4, later made its North American premiere on Canada's CBC Newsworld on September 6, 2006, and has been broadcast in more than 30 countries.

The artist straps himself into a harness and jumps from an elevated structure in a high visibility area (such as a highway overpass), hanging in the pose of The Falling Man.

In July 2022, GameStop received controversy for allowing a non-fungible token titled Falling Man to be listed on their newly-launched NFT platform.

The digital image depicted an astronaut falling in a pose and background replicating Drew's photograph, and was provided the seller's description "This one probably fell from the MIR station", referencing the 1997 crash of Spektr.