People Are Remembering Wild And Newsworthy Events That Happened In 2001 But Were Forgotten Because Of 9/11

This year will mark the 23rd anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Some of us, like myself, have lived in a post-9/11 world longer than we did in a pre-one. However, there are also now a lot of adults who were either too young or not even born when 9/11 happened. The impact of that day might be hard to put into context for them, but if I were to try to make a somewhat modern comparison, it would be like if all of COVID happened in a day.

Because of the magnitude of 9/11, other newsworthy events that happened, were happening, or happened afterward literally fell out of public consciousness. An example that I vividly remember, and that gets brought up within this post, is the complete media frenzy that surrounded Congressman Gary Condit and the disappearance of Chandra Levy the entire summer of 2001. After the attacks, the story completely disappeared from the media and people's minds.

Recently, Reddit user NightNo423 brought up the topic of those forgotten events and news stories when they asked : "What crazy stuff happened in the year 2001 that got overshadowed by 9/11?"

The thread went viral and received over 6.6K comments, and if you were old enough in 2001, you'll probably remember many of them. Below are the top and most-often repeated events that were overshadowed by 9/11:

1. " American Airlines Flight 587 . It was an Airbus A300 that crashed in Queens, NY, two months after 9/11. It was the second-deadliest aviation accident in US history, and not well remembered."

2. " Air Transat Flight 236 . The plane was flying from Toronto to Lisbon, ran out of fuel in the middle of the Atlantic, and glided 75 miles to an airport in the Azores and safely landed. The longest glide of a passenger airliner. It happened three weeks before 9/11."

3. "George W. Bush issued an executive order banning federal funding for research on any new embryonic stem cell lines going forward. He interrupted evening TV and gave a live address to the nation to announce it on August 9th. His next address to the nation was on September 11th."

4. "Congressman Gary Condit admitted to having an affair with Chandra Levy , a 24-year-old intern, who had gone missing and was later found murdered."

5. "A paraglider accidentally entangled himself on the torch of the Statue of Liberty."

6. "A huge investigation revealed that the McDonald's Monopoly game promotion had been rigged since 1995 and had almost no legitimate winners for the big prizes. Jerry Jacobson — who was head of security for the company that printed the Monopoly game pieces and was in charge of securing and delivering the most valuable ones to McDonald’s packaging plants — was giving winning pieces to friends and family, and later the mafia. Jacobson was arrested in a sting operation that summer and the trial for him and his co-conspirators started on Sept. 10, 2001."

7. "I lived where the anthrax hit in 2001, just days after 9/11. They had to close down our post office, and for weeks, there was no mail, then finally, bills came radiated and in plastic bags. You couldn’t open any of the mail — it was just stuck together. And this was back in the days before you could pay bills online."

8. "In Feb. 2001, FBI agent Robert Hanssen was arrested for selling classified info to Soviet and Russian intelligence agencies. He’d been conducting this espionage since 1985. I feel like it was big news for like a month, then died down once he was thrown into a federal supermax prison. I always sort of linked the two, his arrest and 9/11, since they happened the same year."

9. "The Hainan Island incident in April 2001. A Chinese jet clipped a US Navy EP-3 surveillance plane off the coast of China. The jet crashed in the sea, and the US plane made an unauthorized emergency landing in China. It was the first major geopolitical mess of George W. Bush's presidency. Gave the world a somewhat major incident. I got briefly concerned as a teenager."

10. "The Nepalese royal massacre on June 1, 2001. Nine members of the royal family were killed in the royal palace, including the King. It was the Crown Prince, who died three days later after being in a coma and being crowned the new king, who was responsible."

11. "On Sept. 6, 2001, the US government announced that it would not break up Microsoft as a monopoly."

12. "In the summer of 2001, Fox aired a documentary-styled murder mystery reality show called Murder In Small Town X . The finale aired just a week before 9/11. The winner of the first and only season, Angel Juarbe Jr. , was a firefighter, and he was one of the first responders at the World Trade Center and died. With so much else that happened on 9/11, one of the victims, being a reality TV star, was surprisingly rarely brought up."

13. "The movie Zoolander flopped , relatively speaking, at the box office because it came out right after 9/11."

14. "Not 'crazy' by any stretch, but I remember that the first time after 9/11 that the top story on the news wasn't in any way related to it was the death of George Harrison in November."

15. "Cantor Fitzgerald, who had offices in the World Trade Center, represented the single largest loss among any single organization in the attacks."

16. "The OG iPod launched in October."

17. "The Boston Globe had all the information ready to release, uncovering the rampant sex abuse being covered up by the Catholic Church. After 9/11, they decided to wait to release it."

18. "Thuy Trang (the Yellow Power Ranger from Might Morphin' Power Rangers ) passed away in a car accident on Sept. 3, 2001. I was a big MMPR fan, and I don’t remember hearing about that."

19. "There were several shark attacks in the US that summer, leading Time magazin e to dub it the 'Summer of the Shark.' There was a ton of news coverage about it."

20. "There were investigative articles about Bernie Madoff in 2001, that questioned how legitimate his assets were. They were ignored, which allowed him to further commit fraud until the Great Recession."

21. "Aaliyah died on Aug. 25, 2001. I feel like we didn’t even get to grieve her, and then 9/11 happened."

22. "Michael Jackson released an album [his last] two weeks earlier. Actually, now that I think about it — Michael was supposed to be in one of the towers that day for a meeting but overslept."

23. And lastly, "The original teaser trailer for the first Raimi Spider-Man was quickly buried for showing a helicopter trapped in a web between the two towers."

Sony/ JoBlo Superheroes / Via youtube.com

— hobbes_shot_first

You can read the original thread on Reddit .

Note: Some responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.