09/11/2026
In the days before 9/11, someone placed an unusual number of bets that two specific airlines were about to crash. Then the planes those airlines flew were used in the attacks. That’s not a rumor. It’s a question the 9/11 Commission put in the record.
The pattern was specific enough that it triggered a federal inquiry. In the days before the attacks, there was a spike in “put” options on United Airlines and American Airlines, essentially wagers that the stocks would fall. The Commission traced roughly 95% of one day’s United put purchases to a single U.S. institutional investor. The American Airlines activity drew scrutiny too, with unusual volume the investigation worked to explain.
Here’s where the official story lands, and it matters that we state it accurately: the Commission reported it found no connection to the attacks. The investigation concluded the trades had innocent explanations, and that those who placed them had no advance knowledge of 9/11. According to the record, one strategy also involved buying 115,000 American Airlines shares on September 10, a bet the stock would rise, which investigators read as evidence against foreknowledge.
So the record contains both things at once: a genuinely strange trading pattern that alarmed federal investigators, and an official conclusion that it meant nothing. The value isn’t in picking a side from a headline. It’s in reading what the SEC and the Commission actually documented, the interviews, the numbers, the reasoning, and deciding for yourself whether the explanation fits the anomaly.
And there’s more to read now than ever. Webb just added the newly released Mamdani 9/11 records, New York City’s September 11th Document Portal, published by the city’s Law Department for the 25th anniversary this month: 24,400 documents and 173,000 pages. That sits alongside the existing 9/11 FOIA archive of 40,300 documents and 189,100 pages, all searchable together on one canvas, every result cited to the exact page.
Comment “Webb” to learn more. New to Webb? Your first month is $5, full access to every dataset.
thewebb.io