According to this list, the only children who died were on the airplanes.

He was late? Seems like an fishy, irrelevant detail. I mean, either he was there when the first plane hit or he wasn't. He didn't show up late for the field trip and then just join up with his surviving classmates hiding in the store.

He's probably an FBI agent in deep cover, fishing for terrorist sympathizers.

I agree with Joe. I'm not blowing my cover, especially after having just finished LeCarre's "Absolute Friends" last night, which broke my heart.

It always astounds me that someone can tell a story like that so vividly and yet it's not true.

How old is he, out of curiosity?

Since my brother used to work directly for the Lakers and Kings (and now works for a contractor, but same job), he used to get all this swag, including old warm-ups, sweats, jackets, etc.

I had this Laker jacket on one day here in Oregon, and an elderly woman on the street complimented me on it and asked me where I got it. I said that, although she probably had never heard of me, I was on the team for a brief while (12th man, but still).

She ate this up, wanting to know more and I was maybe about 3 sentences into the lie when I came to my senses and told her I was kidding.

It taught me how easy it is to lie, when there is no investment in it.

So what do you do in a situation like this: show him the link JanetLand posted and call him out or just let it slide?

He's in college, probably early 20s, kind of strikes me as a little flakey. I am just going to watch and see if he says anything else weird, and check to make sure his paper isn't plagiarized. I'm not a psychologist, and I don't think my saying anything would change him.

It's especially fishy given the planes hit before 9am. The viewing platform wasn't open. I've never heard anything about tourists dying.

Time to go read that recent Mefi thread on pathological liars.

No - this isn't a true story.

But you have to wonder how much traction he's gotten out of it. And what it does for him that he tells it. And what other parts of his life are similarly not reality-based.

Years ago, when I was 11, a boy in my class was hit by a train while crossing the tracks to get to a ball field. Within days, a girl in our class (who had a rough home life and was probably looking for attention) claimed that she had seen him, and tried to grab his hand to get him out of the way. I knew it was a lie, but I just nodded my head and "Oh, WOW"'d her. Attention is the only thing I can gather that this young man gets from his story. The feeling that people are shocked and saddended for him ("Oh, you poor thing! HOw did you feel?") makes him feel important, perhaps makes him feel like "somebody". It's a shame; he'll probably use this or other similar stories for the rest of his life.

Snopes calls this sort of thing a sort of Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Also, WRT redvixen's example above, that sounds very much like what James Frey included in his pseudomemoir, A Million Little Pieces, concerning a classmate that had been hit by a train.

He's in college, probably early 20s

My goodness, I thought you were talking about elementary school kids!

That is very strange. I believe I've mentioned my former roommate who had a habit of telling stories/lies to get attention/sound cool, but this is 100x bigger than anything I've ever heard him say.

He's in college, probably early 20s

My goodness, I thought you were talking about elementary school kids!

Well...if he's in his early 20's, then the class trip would have been while they were elementary students...or middle school. Still young enough to have been listed as "children". Also, given the sheer volume of coverage, if half a class of visiting kids had died...there would have been a ton of news coverage about it.