A new documentary from TMZ, set to premiere on Fox on Monday night, claims that there may have been a fifth airplane with terrorists on board who were not able to act on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.
The report, “TMZ Investigates: 9/11: The Fifth Plane,” cites the captain of a United Airlines flight, Tom Mannello, who believes there were hijackers on his plane that were part of the coordinated terrorist attack.
“There is a good chance that somebody was plotting to try to use our airplane as a weapon of mass destruction,” Mannello said.
According to TMZ, which said it spent six months investigating the allegations, there were “suspicious and alarming activities” aboard Flight 23, which was scheduled to leave JFK Airport for LA at 9 a.m., but never took off.
Mannello makes several claims in the documentary, one of which is that the plane next to his had two box cutters discovered in first-class seat pockets. The plane had a tail number one digit off from his, and he thinks someone put them in the wrong plane by accident.
“If somebody was on the ground cooperating with them, they just simply made a mistake and put the box cutters on the wrong airplane,” Mannello said.
He continued, alleging that it “wouldn’t be the hardest thing in the world” to have someone plant the weapons at that time, with airport security being much more relaxed, according to The New York Post.
The report is an hourlong and also features interviews with flight attendants, like Sandy Thorngren, who was aboard the plane that day, sharing that they had four people seated in first class who seemed suspicious. This included two men, a child, and a person dressed in a hijab, whom crew members thought was a man pretending to be a woman. They also noted a fifth man in business class profusely sweating throughout the preflight measures.
“It was odd because it was 8 o’clock in the morning, and airplanes are cold anyway, but it was a cool morning,” Thorngren said of the man’s alleged sweating.
Thorngren details a confrontation with the passengers in first class throughout the documentary, claiming that there was an issue with the meal they were being offered.
“I could hear them say, ‘We do not want to eat. We don’t need food. We want to take off. We don’t need food. We just want to go,'” Thorngren claims they said.
However, even if the men were a part of the attacks that claimed the lives of almost 3,000 Americans, they were never given the chance to execute any potential plans, as Mannello shared that he was never cleared for take-off with flights being grounded across the country after American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m.
Other flights hijacked on 9/11 included United Airlines Flight 175, which struck the South Tower 20 minutes after the first plane hit; American Airlines Flight 77, which struck the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m.; and United Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania en route to likely another high profile target.
Now, the crew of Flight 23 claims that they could have suffered a similar fate had they taken to the sky that day.
“I definitely think that Flight 23 from JFK to LAX was the fifth plane,” Thorngren says in the doc. “And that’s what scares, haunts me to this day.”
The documentary will air on Monday at 9 p.m. EST.
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