For those who don’t know about this 9/11 mystery, let me explain (or read about it here, or here in more detail):

This man is called Earnest Armstead.

Armstead worked as an EMS worker at ground zero during the September 11 attacks, triaging. In the decades since, Armstead has claimed to have come across a severely mangled woman. As he went to place the black tag (the deceased tag) on what he assumed was a corpse, he alleges that he was startled to find that she was alive and begged him not to put the black tag on her, despite the fact that he knew she was going to die shortly after anyway due to the condition of her body. He claims that when he found her, she was only a head and a torso (in some accounts, he also claims that she was just head, Shoulders and a bit of lung), and he theorised that she was in such a mangled state due to falling from such a tall height (which would make sense, if that amount of damage had been done to her body, as that’s what falling from such a height would (or could) do to a human body).

However, there’s just one issue: it’s not physically possible to survive that much bodily damage. Had she really only been a head and a torso, she would either have not survived the impact, or she would’ve bled out rapidly before the triage team could arrive. Investigators of the case therefore find his claim dubious, suggesting that he may have misremembered what he was seeing, though the account seems too graphic to have been something misremembered. Moreover, the woman in question has never been identified, and despite combing through footage of all different angles and shots of the area on that day, nobody has ever seen the woman, or even Armstead interacting with anyone even remotely like the suggestion.

One alternative theory that has been proposed is that this woman was not mangled, but actually had been hit by a falling mangled body (perhaps from the plane) which may explain why Armstead mistook her for such, presumably in a panicked state, though it wouldn’t explain the other dubious aspects of the claim, like the fact that that nobody else saw such a thing, etc.