For starters, this flag was 5 feet by 8 feet.
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When an official was sent to pick up the original flag a week or so after 9/11, he apparently received a larger flag which was flown at subsequent events, the film’s director said.
The mystery of what happened to the ground zero flag was the subject of a 2013 CNN film “The Flag”.
Shirley Dreifus, center, the original owner of the American flag, left, that firefighters hoisted at ground zero in the hours after the 9/11 terror attacks, hold interviews at the Sept. 11 museum, Thursday Sept. 8, 2016, in NY. But it turned out the flag – which was signed by Gov. George Pataki and Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, among others – was not the right one.
In November of 2014, a man who wished to remain anonymous dropped off the flag at the Everett Fire Station #1, in Everett, Washington, saying that it was the original flag from the award-winning photograph. Their insurance company reimbursed them, after the flag was taken by the firefighters on September 11, and subsequently lost.
The flag’s whereabouts was not known until late 2014 after the mystery was featured on the first episode of “Brad Meltzer’s Lost History”, which was broadcast on H2, a spinoff of the History Channel. Three men raising a flag paled in comparison to thousands of people dying and two buildings falling to the ground. He said video footage from the area taken five hours later shows it was not on the flagpole.
To this day, New York City has no leads, nor does the FDNY.
The forensic experts compared the dust on the returned flag to samples from ground zero, and found the same “fingerprint” of concrete, glass fibers, plastic, molten metal and asbestos. Others guess it may have been used to cover the body of a slain first responder and therefore could be stored in a morgue.
The flag’s absence, he said, “just felt like a hole in the history of this site”. Even then, Dreifus said, the couple was so focused on recovering from the tragedy that they didn’t immediately care.
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He’s talking of course about the flag that three firefighters raised at Ground Zero on September 11; the picture is heartbreakingly historic, but the flag was gone within days, its disappearance a national mystery and the subject of documentary on the History channel. That story has been called questionable. It has been donated to the 9/11 Memorial Museum.
