9/11 Photographer Hounded by Conspiracy Nuts

Little Green Footballs points us to an incredible story of a Pennsylvania woman who happened to snap just about the only picture that was taken in the immediate aftermath of the crash of Flight 93 in Shanksville, PA.

It was a remarkable shot that produced a one-of-a-kind image: a green pasture, red barns in the distance and, against a brilliant blue and cloudless sky, a lone mushroom cloud of dark gray smoke.

Taken the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, seconds after United Airlines Flight 93 plunged into a nearby field, the eerie photo was, and still is, according to the FBI, the closest thing it's got to an image of the crash itself.

Val McClatchey snapped the single picture with her new digital camera. The wife and mother had been sitting on the edge of her sofa, clutching her second cup of coffee and watching the smoking towers of the World Trade Center on TV, when she heard the sudden surge of a plane engine, followed by a violent, house-shaking boom. Mrs. McClatchey grabbed the camera and ran onto the front porch of her house along Indian Lake.

"I didn't even aim. I was just like, 'Oh, my God,' " she said. She dropped the camera, jolting the battery loose, then tried in vain to call her husband, son and daughter. She had no idea what she'd captured until the state police put a call out to people in the area, asking for photos, debris and other evidence. She took a printout of her photo to the police, she said, and, within an hour, FBI agents were at her house.

You'd think a snapshot by an amateur photographer taken in the heat of the moment wouldn't engender much controversy, but the 9/11 conspiracy nuts can find villians wherever they look:

But Mrs. McClatchey's fame has recently taken a sour turn. The real estate agent has recently become a target of bloggers calling themselves "9-11 researchers," who are seeking to prove that the U.S. government was complicit in the attacks that brought down the Twin Towers, pierced the Pentagon and crashed United Airlines Flight 93. "The End of Serenity" has turned out to be their smoking gun.

The smoke plume doesn't line up right, they say. It is too large in the frame. The smoke is characteristic of an ordnance blast, not a jet fuel fire, further evidence that the government shot down Flight 93. They analyze wind direction, debris patterns and camera trajectories, all in the service of the theory that the crash was faked.

They have visited Mrs. McClatchey's office and called her at home, posting satellite maps of her property and accusing her of digitally altering her photo to insert a fake smoke plume. The bloggers have picked apart her story, highlighting inconsistencies in different news accounts and questioning her motives. Others have described her as "surly," "hostile," "irate" and "defensive." People have called her at home, accusing her of being anti-American and of "holding the photo hostage."

On a simple Google search, Mrs. McClatchey's name now pops up in the same sentence as "total fraud."

The recent photo shenanigans by the Reuter's stringer in Lebanon might give credence to the idea that this image could have been faked, but where's the motivation on the part of Mrs. McClatchey? The Reuter's photographer clearly had a political motivation to do as much damage as possible to the Israeli war effort by making his pictures as graphic as possible. He also had plenty of time to set-up and work his shots the way he wanted them.

Mrs. McClatchey's photos were in the hands of the FBI within a short time after the crash, and given her amateur status as a photographer, and her lack of photo editing software and knowledge, it's just silly to think she's trying to perpetrate some kind of fraud.