Real photo shows aftermath of 1945 Empire State Building plane crash?

Claim:

A viral social media post stating, “In 1945, a plane crashed into the Empire State Building,” was accurate and included an authentic photograph of the incident.

Rating:

What’s True

On July 28, 1945, “a Mitchell bomber en route for Newark in fog crashed into the 78th and 79th storeys of the Empire State Building. Thirteen lives, including the crew, were lost and many others received burns, injuries and shock,” as The Associated Press and other news outlets reported at the time.

What’s False

The image shared along with the claim in social media posts in 2025 did not appear to be authentic despite an abundance of verified accounts, photographs and footage of the event.

Since at least May 2025, internet users have shared a social media post purportedly depicting an airplane that crashed into New York City’s iconic Empire State Building. 

Users across platforms like X (archived) and, particularly, Facebook (archived, archived) posted an allegedly authentic black-and-white image of a crashed airplane leaning against the base of what appeared to be the Empire State Building. 

Most versions of the photo in question include the text, “In 1945, a plane crashed into the Empire State Building.“ Some users (archived) used the image as a way to spout conspiracy theories about the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, while others simply noted surprise that they’d never heard about the alleged incident. 

Riddle me this

How can a B25 bomber crash into the Empire State building in 1945, full of explosives, cause minor structural damage ?

Yet on 9/11…..

Are people still sleepwalking ? pic.twitter.com/mJLtDFRKlX

— Free Gov. From Zionist Infiltration (@MisterMagicTrik) May 15, 2025

A plane did indeed crash into the Empire State Building in 1945 — an event widely covered in the news media at the time — but the image being shared with this claim did not appear to be authentic. However, plenty of genuine photographic and video evidence of the incident was available. 

Due to the factual accuracy of the event that took place combined with the inauthenticity of the image attached to it, we have rated this claim as a mixture of true and false information. 

The crash

On July 28, 1945, a U.S. Air Force Mitchell B-25 bomber crashed into the north side of the Empire State Building at the 78th and 79th floors, killing 13 people (along with one more who perished days later from injuries). 

The day after the crash, The New York Times reported: 

Horror-stricken occupants of the building, alarmed by the roar of engines, ran to the windows just in time to see the plane loom out of the gray mists that swathed the upper floors of the world’s tallest office building. The plane was banked at an angle of about fifteen degrees as Colonel Smith swung it in a curve out of the northeast. It crashed with a terrifying impact midway along the north or Thirty-fourth Street wall of the building. Its wings were sheared off by the impact, but the motors and fuselage ripped a hole eighteen feet wide and twenty feet high in the outer wall of the seventy-eighth and seventy-ninth floors of the structure. Brilliant orange flames shot as high as the observatory on the eighty-sixth floor of the building. 1,050 feet above Fifth Avenue, as the gasoline tanks of the plane exploded. 

(Getty Images)

According to a retrospective feature at NPR, the plane “was flying a routine mission ferrying servicemen from Massachusetts to New York City’s LaGuardia Airport. The day was foggy. Capt. William F. Smith, who had led some of the most dangerous missions in WWII in Europe, was the pilot.“ 

Further accounting of the event on Military.com said that, due to the fog, Smith “was told instead to divert the military plane to Newark, N.J. While following those instructions, though, Smith is believed to have taken an ill-advised route, right through Midtown Manhattan.“

Arthur Weingarten’s 1977 book about the event, “The Sky is Falling,“ featured a diagram (below) of the crash and resulting debris that did not match what appeared in the image circulating on social media.

(“The Sky is Falling“ by Arthur Weingarten)

A person who worked in the building at the time of the crash told NPR in 2008, “I saw crowds of people just looking at each other and I said, ‘What happened? What happened?’ … He pointed up to the 79th floor and I looked up and saw the tail of a B-25 bomber.“

However, extensive authentic photos of the crash are available to view on Getty Images, showing the victims, survivors and the damage done. 

A B-25 Mitchell medium bomber gunship parked on a runway c. 1945 (Getty Images)

A newsreel dated Aug. 16, 1945, available to watch on The Associated Press’ website, depicted footage of the aftermath that matched what is shown in the Getty Images photographs. A search of Newspapers.com for July 29, 1945, turned up a slew of front–page headlines from across the country that covered the event.

The image from the posts

Nothing resembling the image shown in the claims was present in any coverage of the incident at the time. Snopes could not find the source of the image included in the posts, and a reverse-image search on Google yielded only results pointing back to recent social media posts. An additional reverse-image search on TinEye yielded no results at all. 

Additionally, the type of airplane, the location of its wreckage and the apparent damage shown to the building in that image did not align with verified reports or authentic photographic evidence of the event. Further, the aircraft depicted in the photo had no markings identifying it as a U.S. Air Force aircraft.

(Getty Images)

AI-detection platforms like Hive Moderation and Sightengine said the image was unlikely to be generated with artificial intelligence, indicating it could simply be a digitally manipulated photograph rather than an image generated from whole cloth by AI. It’s worth noting, however, that AI content detectors are not always accurate. For instance, the awkward positioning of the aircraft’s wings and the seemingly misaligned windows on the building’s right side suggested possible AI generation. 

Snopes reached out to the Empire State Building’s communications team in search of more information and will update this article if we hear back. 

“The Sky is Falling,” Weingarten’s book about the incident, recounted the series of events that led to the crash in great detail and its author was interviewed for the NPR story mentioned above. 

The book told the stories of those who perished but also those who survived the tragedy — including a woman who survived a “thousand-foot plunge in the elevator“ as a result of the impact and “made what her doctors described as a miraculous recovery in less than eight months.“ 

Sources