Fact check: Transcript of famous call from Flight 93 on 9/11 does not exist

The claim: ''Transcript'' shows Todd Beamer's last words in Flight 93 call on 9/11

Minutes before United Airlines Flight 93 crashed in an empty field in Pennsylvania, passengers and crew members aboard the plane made dozens of phone calls to people on the ground, alerting them that the jetliner was hijacked by terrorists.

Transcripts of some of these calls on 9/11 – which were made using cellphones and GTE Airfones embedded in the back of airplane seats – have been published, but contrived conversations from the flight have also circulated on social media.

An April 15 Facebook post published the supposed full transcript of a call between a passenger on the flight and an Airfone employee. The caller, Todd Beamer, and his final words became famous in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks because the woman he was speaking to said she heard him announce "Let's roll" seconds before passengers mounted a counterattack against the hijackers.

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The post was shared more than 100 times in three days. USA TODAY found similar posts that included the same version of Beamer's final telephone conversation. While some parts of the call likely transpired the way the post claims, the conversation was not taped and a verified transcript of the actual call does not exist.

USA TODAY reached out to the user who shared the post for comment.

9/11 'Let's roll' phone call occurred, details are fuzzy

At approximately 9:43 am on Sept. 11, 2001, Todd Beamer, a passenger on Flight 93 dialed '0' and told an Airfone operator that his flight had been hijacked.

After a few minutes, the operator's supervisor, Lisa Jefferson, took over the call. Their conversation made Beamer a national hero and the phrase "Let's roll" a term of inspiration. That is because, in interviews, Jefferson said she heard Beamer say that as a group of passengers prepared to storm the cockpit.

However, the call was not taped and a legitimate transcript of the call between Beamer and Jefferson does not exist.

Jefferson did give interviews to the media and law enforcement after the plane crashed about her conversation with Beamer, and she told the FBI that she took brief notes during the call on a small Post-it notepad. Those notes are in the FBI's possession.

Although the conversation portrayed in the Facebook post is largely fabricated, it includes several details that are consistent with Jefferson's accounts about the call.

For example, in a CBS interview, Jefferson describes how she and Beamer prayed together, and lines of supposed dialogue in the post portray them doing that. According to Jefferson, Beamer said, "Lisa, would you recite the Lord's Prayer with me?"

Other elements of the imagined conversation in the post jibe with actual events, including the use of boxcutters by the hijackers to take over the plane, threats by the terrorists that there was a bomb onboard and the passengers' plan to use boiling water against the hijackers.

Still, the supposed conversation in the post takes creative license, and many of the details are untrue.

The post claims that Jefferson asked where the hijackers were from. But in the interviews she gave and the official reports about her call with Beamer, there is nothing to indicate that Jefferson posed that question.

The post also includes a moment in which Jefferson tells Beamer about the other hijacked planes. "The World Trade Center is gone," Jefferson purportedly tells Beamer in the post. But there is no evidence this happened.

In fact, Jefferson has said she purposely kept the fate of the other airlines from Beamer. "I wanted him to have hope," she said in the CBS interview.

In addition, the conversation portrayed in the post has Jefferson contacting the FBI and connecting them to the call. But there is no reason to believe Jefferson had any contact with the FBI while she was on the phone with Beamer. Jefferson was, though, interviewed by the FBI after the airliner crashed.

Our rating: Partly False

Based on our research, we rate PARTLY FALSE  a "transcript" of a phone call from Flight 93 on 9/11 that claims to memorialize the actual conversation between Beamer and Jefferson. The conversation was never recorded and an actual transcript does not exist. At the same time, the evidence shows that the contrived transcript in the post does not accurately reflect much of what was said during the call.

Our fact-check sources:

• CBS News, Sept. 21 , 2001, The final call of Flight 93

• History Channel, accessed April 21, The Todd Beamer Story "Let's Roll"

• The Philadelphia Inquirer, Sept. 8, 2021, What happened on United Flight 93?

• National Park Service, accessed April 21, Phone calls from Flight 93

• National Archives Catalog, accessed April 22, Memorandum for the Record (MFR) of the Interview of Lisa Jefferson of the GTE Airphone Conducted by Team 7

• Lead Stories, April 19, Fact Check: NO Known Transcript Exists Of Call Between 9/11 Victim Todd Beamer And Phone Operator

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Fact check: Transcript of call from Flight 93 on 9/11 doesn't exist