Tourist guy
Encyclopedia
He is also called numerous other names, including the "accidental tourist" (a reference to the novel and film The Accidental Tourist
The Accidental Tourist
The Accidental Tourist is a 1985 novel by Anne Tyler that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction...
), "Waldo" (a reference to Where's Waldo?), the "WTC Guy," and the "tourist of death."
Origin
Shortly after 9/11, an image surfaced on the internet, purportedly from a camera found in the debris of the World Trade CenterWorld Trade Center
The original World Trade Center was a complex with seven buildings featuring landmark twin towers in Lower Manhattan, New York City, United States. The complex opened on April 4, 1973, and was destroyed in 2001 during the September 11 attacks. The site is currently being rebuilt with five new...
. The image showed a man, dressed in a wool cap, heavy jacket, and backpack, standing on the observation deck of the World Trade Center. Below him a jet plane can be seen flying towards the building. Because of its closeness and low altitude, it seems certain to collide with the tower. The picture purported to be one taken mere moments before the attacks on the World Trade Center began.
Inconsistencies
Hoaxapedia from Museum of HoaxesMuseum of Hoaxes
The Museum of Hoaxes is a website created by Alex Boese in 1997 in San Diego, California as a resource for reporting and discussing hoaxes and urban legends, both past and present....
's online encyclopedia listed some of the inconsistencies that ultimately confirmed that the photograph was a hoax
Hoax
A hoax is a deliberately fabricated falsehood made to masquerade as truth. It is distinguishable from errors in observation or judgment, or rumors, urban legends, pseudosciences or April Fools' Day events that are passed along in good faith by believers or as jokes.-Definition:The British...
.
Later appearances
The picture became one of the most widely known examples of Internet humorInternet humor
The Internet has long been a resource for the circulation of humorous ideas and jokes. Countless web-sites are devoted to the collection of Internet humor, and every day e-mail crosses the world, containing the text of humorous articles, or jokes about current events."Internet humor" is...
. As its fame spread, other people started to use the same tourist for other pictures. They included the tourist present at the sinking of the RMS Titanic, at the John F. Kennedy assassination
John F. Kennedy assassination
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the thirty-fifth President of the United States, was assassinated at 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time on Friday, November 22, 1963, in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas...
, the destruction of Air France Flight 4590
Air France Flight 4590
Air France Flight 4590 was a Concorde flight operated by Air France which was scheduled to run from Charles de Gaulle International Airport near Paris, to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City. On 2000, it crashed in Gonesse, France. All one hundred passengers and nine crew...
and at the Hindenburg disaster. In one version, the aircraft has been replaced with a Melbourne tram. Other pictures show him present at disastrous events in movies, like the destruction of the White House
White House
The White House is the official residence and principal workplace of the president of the United States. Located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., the house was designed by Irish-born James Hoban, and built between 1792 and 1800 of white-painted Aquia sandstone in the Neoclassical...
in Independence Day
Independence Day (film)
Independence Day is a 1996 science fiction film about an alien invasion of Earth, focusing on a disparate group of individuals and families as they converge in the Nevada desert and, along with the rest of the human population, participate in a last-chance counterattack on July 4 – the same...
or as the bus driver in Speed. There are also pictures of him together with people from other famous photoshopped pictures, such as Bert or a man holding a huge cat. There even appeared a picture of the Yalta conference
Yalta Conference
The Yalta Conference, sometimes called the Crimea Conference and codenamed the Argonaut Conference, held February 4–11, 1945, was the wartime meeting of the heads of government of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union, represented by President Franklin D...
where Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
is replaced by the man with the cat, with the tourist and Bert on the background.
Identity
The first person who claimed to be the tourist was the BrazilBrazil
Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...
ian businessman José Roberto Penteado. When Peanteado started to get media attention, including an offer to be in a Volkswagen
Volkswagen
Volkswagen is a German automobile manufacturer and is the original and biggest-selling marque of the Volkswagen Group, which now also owns the Audi, Bentley, Bugatti, Lamborghini, SEAT, and Škoda marques and the truck manufacturer Scania.Volkswagen means "people's car" in German, where it is...
commercial, a 25 year old Hungarian
Hungary
Hungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...
man named Péter Guzli came forward as the real tourist. Guzli says, however, that he does not want publicity and did not originally release his last name.
Guzli took the photo on November 28, 1997, and was also responsible for the initial edit. He edited the image for a few friends, not realizing it would spread so quickly across the Internet. He first provided the original undoctored photo and several other photos from the same series as proof to a Hungarian newspaper. Later on, the show Wired News
Wired News
Wired News is an online technology news website, formerly known as HotWired, that split off from Wired magazine when the magazine was purchased by Condé Nast Publishing in the 1990s. Wired News was owned by Lycos not long after the split, until Condé Nast purchased Wired News on July 11, 2006...
examined the evidence and confirmed that Guzli was the real Tourist guy.