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Tania Head claimed to have survived 9/11 - but she lied.
Helen Hodinott explains how, and tries to find out why...
New York was illuminated overnight as 2,977 drones took to the city's skies in a tribute to those killed in the September 11 attacks.
Titled "2,977 Lights Over New York Harbour", the eye-catching art display featured one drone for each individual who died in the terrorist attacks.
The tribute took place on Wednesday night over New York Harbour, ahead of the 25th anniversary of 9/11.
The glowing white lights slowly rose in a spiral, before coming together to form the outline of the Twin Towers.
Videos shared on social media show the drones rebuilding the familiar night sky, without touching the memorial at Ground Zero.
The installation was developed with victim's family members, survivors and first responders, according to ABC7.
The display originated on Governors Island and appeared next to the annual Tribute of Light - a familiar element of New York's 9/11 remembrance.
Those who shaped the art project include:
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On the 11th of September 2001, a woman named Tanya Head was on the 78th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Centre
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when United Airlines Flight 175 hit. She sustained serious injuries to her arm, battled through smoke and flames, but made it out alive
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As she crawled through the wreckage, she said a dying man gave her his wedding ring to return to his wife
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and she was led to safety by Wells Crowther, a volunteer firefighter who lost his own life that
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day rescuing many others. Six days later she woke up in the burns unit of a hospital and when she
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woke up she found out that her fiancé Dave had been killed in the other tower. Tanya Head was
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one of the most unlikely survivors of the 9-11 attacks. She rose to the presidency of the World
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Trade Centre Survivors Network and gained access to attention and power because of her extraordinary
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tale, which happened to be a complete fabrication, all of it. So how did this happen? How did Tanya
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Head manage to carry off such an elaborate ruse for so many years and why did she do it? Aaron
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Zimmerman ran creative writing workshops for people affected by 9-11 and met Tanya Head
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through them. I do tell people this story sometimes because it's just so extraordinary
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It's like one of the, you know, strangest things that's ever happened to me. And the most striking
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time that I remember is the her kind of writing something, breaking down emotionally and having
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to leave the room with the, there was a woman there who was a therapist and having to go to
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the other room to get comforted when she was writing about, you know, her, her fake dead
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husband or fiance at that time because her story changed over time, I believe. But yeah, that was
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maybe the most striking thing that I remember. But she also was a really good writer and she
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participated in events with us. She read her work publicly. We published her work in a little book
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from the Survivors Network that we made. So yeah, she was a very active member of the group and very
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active with the Survivors Network. When Tanya would talk about her experiences
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you know, she wouldn't, it wasn't lighthearted, let put it that way you know it was very serious So her demeanor was you know to me one of someone who been through something Although you know she didn break down when she was telling me it And I met her you know quite a few maybe I don remember the year but like at least four or five years after 9
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And so, you know, some time had passed. So people were able to talk about their experiences
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So it wasn't like she was hysterically crying or anything. But, you know, it was it was powerful to hear her story
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The motive behind her deception doesn't appear to have been financial. There's no suggestion Tanya made any money from her advocacy work
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Instead, she even donated her own cash to the Survivors Network. work. Aaron said she came across as a regular person, friendly, and it didn't occur to him
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to question her story. Not for a second. Why, you know, it's just like, why would anyone make that up, you know
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for what purpose? And it was so dramatic. I do remember, you know, only afterwards piecing
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things together, like little things make sense that, you know, she had made it up. But in
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the moment, you know, like I said, the first reaction is like, oh my God, that's so terrible
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You know, it's compassion. It's just pure compassion. It's not suspicion. From what I understand, there were people closer to her who had suspicions
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but, you know, that's a pretty big thing. So I'm not sure how, you know, what they did with
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those suspicions, maybe talked amongst themselves or not. I wasn't really involved in that, but I
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I think she got away with it because, you know, she was public, but not that public
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Right. So, you know, people in Spain would not have heard of her most likely, you know, people who could debunk her
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She was known in the New York, like 9-11 community. She was, you know, she did tours. She did these different things
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To me, there's like a through line somewhere in here between the way truth gets distorted and used for people's own purposes and how prevalent that is now with all the disinformation in our world and all the ways that politicians and public figures manipulate information
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but she didn't benefit in those ways, you know, it didn't give her power, it didn't give her money
4:54
It gave her a little power in the Survivors Network, but that's, you know, that's not power in this world
5:00
And in fact she helped them So yeah I don know It pretty wild The charade came crashing down in September 2007 when reporters for the New York Times were putting together a 9 anniversary piece
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and so were doing some routine fact-checking on Tanya's story. She claimed to have gotten degrees from Harvard and then Stanford University
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but neither had any record of her being there. She also claimed that she had been working for Merrill Lynch at the time of the attack in the South Tower of the World Trade Center
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But the company said they'd never hired anyone called Tanya Head and they didn't even have an office there at the time
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Reporters started ringing around people that she knew. I was at work one day at my desk and I got a call from the New York Times reporter, David Dunlop, who said, you know, we're looking into Tanya Head and we can't confirm this, this, this and this
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And I just thought, one, it's the New York Times. They have the resources to do this kind of fact checking
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But also, it was such a documented event that if they can't confirm it, I was just like, oh, my God, she made it all up
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And I didn't really know what to do with that information. Like, you know, he didn't say that to me, but I knew it immediately for those reasons
6:25
That night, Tanya called me on my cell phone. After I'd sent this email to Janice, Tanya called me on my cell phone and I just, I picked up and I was like, I am talking to a psychopath. Oh my God. It was very disturbing
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name. That was the last time Aaron ever spoke to her. Tanya's real name turned out to be Alicia
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Esteve Head. She came from a wealthy Spanish family which was involved in a 1992 financial
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scandal which her father and brother served prison terms for. She did have injuries on her arm but
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she got them in a car crash and on September the 11th 2001 she had been in graduate school in
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Barcelona? I just thought it was a lot of different feelings. Like one, you feel like an idiot
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you know, like how can someone, you know, how could I not have known this? Not that I even knew
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her that well, but it does feel like, wow, I'm an idiot. But also, you know, then another like
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another layer is like distrust. Like who else do I know whose story is completely made up
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You know, if this was possible, then what else is what's real
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Also it infuriating because what she did to other people that were affected by 9 you know in very very profound deep ways to perpetrate that kind of lie and fraud on them for whatever reason that is infuriating
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That is like hard to reconcile. After being exposed, Tanya declined all requests for interviews and left New York
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She's believed to be living back in Barcelona, but has never explained why she lived a lie for so many years
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This is the big question, right? Why would someone do something like this
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I mean, I think she didn't benefit financially from everything I know
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I think it really was a form of attention, a form of..
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You know, to me, it must come out of some kind of real need for empathy and compassion
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you know, related to some deep, deep wound or deep emptiness, you know, something missing inside her
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that, you know, this filled, like this kind of compassion. So that's the best I can come up with
8:49
You know, why she'd want to be associated with this in this way and, you know, create this entire
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fake life. I don't really know why anyone would do that. Tonya Head is far from the only person to have falsely claimed to have been part of a major tragedy and won't be the last
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George Bonanno is a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Columbia and told us why they might do it
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It's a major event. It's something that happened that other people will immediately recognize, that other people will be immediately drawn to and attend to
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they'll get attention for it. And, and, you know, life, most of us don't have that much
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happening in our lives. And we want to think our lives were in some way significant, in some way
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memorable, in some way, some that we've done something that other people will notice, even
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if it's something horrific like that. It's a there's all, you know, a lot of people were in
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the towers and got out, but not that many. So it's a very select, small number of people
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in terms of the global population. So you are one of those people
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You have something that happened in your life. 25 years on, America is still coming to terms with the events of 9-11
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And whilst many questions have been answered about the tragedy, what remains unclear is why Tanya Head chose to do what she did
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