The next afternoon, my photo agent, Kevin Kushel of SLPstock, called me and said, “You know you have a face in your photo. In the smoke.”

My immediate response was “Yea, sure.”

Kushel said, “I’m going to crop it out and e-mail it back to you.”

It was the end of a horrible two days and the last thing I expected to hear.

I had walked from my home to office to transmit photographs. Ash was falling like a nuclear winter on our neighborhood. Andrea had picked up letterhead from World Trade Center companies and burned business cards from individuals off our outdoor deck. We had no idea if the people named on the documents were alive or dead.

To my surprise, when I logged on, there were over 150 messages.

One of the first was from Kevin. I opened the attachment. My first reaction was ‘What the hell is that?’ Then I actually began to shake while I opened the original file to see if it was really there.

It was in the original file.

Another e-mail had the front page of The News Journal in Wilmington, Delaware, attached to it. The face was huge. It began to dominate the image. I could not look at the photograph without immediately seeing “the face.”

As I opened more of the e-mails, I was struck by their message. More and more of them just asked, “Is it Real?” I didn’t know how to respond.

Andrea was covering the disaster for the New York Post. When she returned from the devastation of Ground Zero, her reaction was the same as mine, incredulousness.

“What is that image?” headlined The Saginaw News on September 13, 2001, with a story by Bryce Hoffman, as they tried to explain the photograph to their readers. Hoffman wrote,

A front-page photograph on more than 13,000 copies of Tuesday’s Saginaw News has prompted some to believe that Satan himself presided over terrorist attacks on the United States.

The image dominated the front page in the fourth and fifth editions of The News — about one-fifth of the 56,535 newspapers printed in six editions that day.

“It popped right out at me,” said 17-year-old Brad Witt of Merrill. “It’s apparently the face of a demon or the devil. There’s nothing else that it could be. I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

Witt was among scores of people who called to inquire whether staff members altered the photograph (they did not) or to ask for reprints.

I now understood what was fueling my email and visitors to my website. As I read Bryce Hoffman’s story, and looked at emails, I began to see that every person was perceiving what they wanted to see in my photograph.

Saginaw News Editor Paul Chaffee, who made the decision to print the image on 18,000 front pages, told Hoffman, “I wanted to ignore (concern over the photograph) because I did not want to trivialize an incomprehensibly tragic event, but I don’t think I can anymore. we’re getting all kinds of calls.”

Hoffman, in his story, included a skeptic, a convert on seeing the image, and a Lutheran pastor who he quoted as saying, “We certainly see Satan’s work in the events (Tuesday), if not in the picture.”

The convert was the one who copied my own reaction as Bryce Hoffman wrote:

Morley Glicken, program director of the department of social work at Central Michigan University and an expert on the psychology of grief, at first offered a similar explanation.

He retracted his remarks within seconds of seeing the picture for himself.

“It’s disturbing,” he said. “It could be just an optical illusion or it could have broader meaning. I’m sort of caught between being rational about it and being concerned about what I saw.”

My photograph felt like a diversion to the horror of what we witnessed. Now I was realizing that everyone was looking for a rational explanation of why anyone would fly planes into the World Trade Center. My image contained what most religions depict as the devil. How it ended up being contained in the first picture I took of the worst day of my life, is impossible to explain.

Media requests started appearing in my email inbox. Radio talk shows, our generations podcasts, began requesting drive time call-ins, so they could hear a first-person description of my photograph. They all wanted to make it about religion, I always turned it to the horror of the day. I will never forget Mayor Rudy Giuliani saying, “The number of casualties will be more than most of us can bear.”

Each day, we learned more of the devastating stories. The Brooklyn Heights promenade with its spectacular view of Manhattan, was now a memorial. Photos of missing loved ones were taped along the wrought iron fence, like a billboard of sadness, while candles flickered beneath, their light inconsequential to the cloud rising from across the river.

AP National Writer Jerry Schwartz wrote in one of the first dispatches during the attack, “Emergency vehicles flooded into lower Manhattan. No one knew what happened; the towers, target of a terrorist bombing in 1993, seemed to be ground zero once again.” The Poynter Institute credits this sentence with the designation as Ground Zero. It would never again be the site of the Twin Towers. Just like that, they were gone.