[NOTE: Please read the ADDENDUM at the end of this post for some additional information I’ve seen that tends to support Trump’s account rather than the 2004 Time article. The information has to do with the timing of a video interview of Trump, and also a contradictory account in another print interview.]

Donald Trump has told a number of stories about what he saw on 9/11, and you may recall that some of these stories became controversial and people doubted their veracity (more about that later). But one basic constant has always been that on the morning of 9/11 he watched the burning towers from his midtown Manhattan apartment, and as far as I know that has never been disputed.

Let me say at the outset that I have no idea where Donald Trump was that morning, and he might be telling the absolute truth about having been in New York in his apartment. I certainly had always assumed he was telling the truth about that part of it, and would have had no reason to doubt him.

But this evening I happened across this article about skyscrapers that appeared in Time magazine on December 20, 2004, long before Trump’s location on 9/11 had much relevance to anything except his own memories. I have no idea whether the following is true, but I’d certainly like to find out:

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Adrian D. Smith, a well-known architect in the Chicago office of Skidmore Owings & Merrill, was in a meeting with Donald Trump. The hyperbolic New York City developer was in Chicago to go over the design of a proposed Trump residential tower in that city that he had decided should be ”” what else? ”” the tallest building in the world, around 2,000 ft. In the midst of their meeting, the two men got word of the first plane that hit the World Trade Center. “When the second plane hit, we all rushed to the television to see what was happening,” says Smith. “That was the end of the meeting.” And also the end of the 2,000-ft. tower. A few weeks later, Trump’s people came back with a revised proposal ”” at 900 ft. or so.

The author of the article, Richard Lacayo, is still at Time magazine, and architect Adrian D. Smith is still alive, as well.

Most people retain vivid memories of where they were on 9/11 and can tell the tale accurately. I am going to assume that, because the Time article was written a mere three years after 9/11, the facts in it are based on much fresher memories than today’s recollections would be. Furthermore, it is often said that memories of where a person was when learning of enormous and shocking crises like 9/11 don’t tend to fade or to change; they remain fairly constant. There actually has been research done on the question of the accuracy of 9/11 memories, and the findings were that the memory of where a person was when hearing about it was one of the most stable types of memory of the events of 9/11. When answers at one week later were compared to memories one year and then three years later, the consistency of people’s answers were 89% and 83%, respectively. I don’t know the researchers’ definition of “accuracy” in terms of how exactly similar a story had to be to be judged accurate. But a difference as enormous as being in one’s apartment in New York watching in real life, versus being in a Chicago office having a meeting with an architect and then watching on TV, would certainly qualify as an extremely wide disparity. One of these stories—either Trump’s or the one in Time—is true, but they cannot both be true.

NOTE: To recap the other controversies around Trump’s personal 9/11 narrative—his first suspect story was about watching “thousands and thousands” of Arabs in New Jersey celebrating on 9/11. Diligent fact-checking revealed that, although there indeed were some small celebrations reported there, nothing of that magnitude occurred (the largest seems to have been about 30 people), and nothing was shown on TV except for some large celebrations in Palestine. So the consensus was that perhaps Trump had conflated the two. Memory can do that.

The second Trump story about 9/11 that has been questioned was that he could see people jumping from the WTC the morning as he watched from his midtown apartment, which is four miles away. Is such keen eyesight even possible? Some experts doubt it.

The third suspect story is Trump’s more recent claim of having lost “hundreds” of friends in the 9/11 attack on the WTC. The Daily Beast reported at length on the problems with Trump’s claim (estimating it would have meant he’d been friends with close to one in ten of the 9/11 victims), and stated that as of the time they wrote the story (2/17), Trump had not answered requests to name even a single friend he lost on 9/11.

[ADDENDUM: After writing this post I found two interviews that Trump gave very shortly after 9/11. One appeared in print on September 18, 2001, and the other is labeled on YouTube as having been videotaped on September 13, 2001. Part of the video is in German, and I don’t see or hear any corroboration of the 9/13 date (or anything about the date at all), but I don’t speak German, so it’s possible there is one.

Neither the article nor the video sheds any light on the question of where Trump might have been on 9/11, although if he’d been in Chicago on 9/11 it probably wouldn’t have been easy for him to return to NY in time for that video—if in fact that interview was taped some time on 9/13. We know that the airports were closed for a while after 9/11. This article says flights resumed on 9/13, however, so it seems it could have been possible. It would certainly be helpful to know when private planes were first allowed to fly after 9/11, but I haven’t been able to locate that information so far. The subject matter of each interview was Trump’s opinion on rebuilding on the WTC site, from the viewpoint of a real estate developer.

Also, and even more importantly, an article written in 2002 by Charles Shaw that conflicts with the Time account has been brought to my attention. It says:

Adrian Smith recalls where he was on the morning of 9/11. In what can only be described as sickening irony, he was with representatives of Donald Trump, preparing to go live with a press conference to unveil his new design for Trump Chicago…

Time says that Trump himself was in Chicago, but Shaw says it was “representatives.” Again, someone got it wrong, but there’s no way to tell for certain who it was. But putting all this additional information together, (the video said to be taken on 9/13, and the conflicting article), I’m now very strongly leaning towards saying Trump is much more likely to be telling the truth about being in his apartment and that the Time article is more likely to have been mistaken. Probably it was either the architect who misremembered exactly who was there, when being interviewed three years later, or the article’s author had misunderstood him and thought he said Trump himself was there rather than just the representatives.]