Tourist guy
hoax image related to the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center
The "tourist guy" was an internet phenomenon that featured a photograph of a tourist on the observation deck of the World Trade Center digitally altered to show American Airlines Flight 11 about to hit the tower in the background during the September 11 attacks. The photo went viral in the days after the attacks as many manipulated pictures spread online. The man in the photograph was later identified as Hungarian Péter Guzli, who took the photo in 1997. Guzli said he edited the photo as a joke for his friends and did not intend for it to spread across the internet.
He is also called numerous other names, including the "accidental tourist" (a reference to the novel and film The Accidental Tourist), "Waldo" (a reference to Where's Waldo?), the "WTC Guy", and the "tourist of death".
Origin
Shortly after 9/11, the image surfaced on the internet, spreading via spam emails. The emails would claim that the picture was found inside of a camera retrieved from the World Trade Center wreckage, alleging that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had developed the picture for evidence and had recently released it online.
Composition
The image showed a man, dressed in a beanie, heavy jacket, and backpack, standing on the observation deck of the World Trade Center. Below him, Flight 11 can be seen flying towards the building. Because of its closeness and low altitude, it seems certain to collide with the tower.
“Tourist guy” enters the record as hoax image related to the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Tourist, hoax and image can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Tourist guy” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Tourist, hoax and image provides the most credible route into that argument.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3020425. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1997.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Tourist guy” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.