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For me, Tuesday, September 11, 2001 is a day that's frozen in crystal clear focus. I can tell you what the sky was like as I drove into to work at the TV station: pre-dawn blueish purple streaked with rosy pink and the fading twinkle of stars. Air was warm but cooler than the day before. I can tell you that I dropped my car keys in a shrub as I was leaving my apartment, annoyed that I might get stuck in traffic because of the delay.

I can tell you what I wore: tan Ralph Lauren mini skirt, two-tone pink striped quarter length Liz Claiborne scoop neck top, oxblood and tan weave Etienne Aigner slide on shoes. Gold hoop earrings in my bottom holes and emerald gold studs in my top. Pink diamond ear cuff. Pink diamond heart gold pendant necklace.

can tell you what I had for breakfast: a bagel with cream cheese and half a cup of "decent" coffee.

I remember being annoyed to find out that I was one of the few staff members in that day. Everyone else was out supporting Penn State as the university participated in the United Way's Day of Caring. I remember picking up my overnight faxes from the receptionist. Going to my office suite to find that my staff assistant, Nancy, already had the early morning's AP reports waiting on my desk, spit out by an old, decrepit dot-matrix printer. She even had the daily news feed requests sent to Master Control where we had one Broadcast Op on duty and a handful of camera operators and audio people waiting for later morning when I was going to cut some news segments for later that week. I remember I called a friend and had them drop off "good coffee" from Dunkin Donuts for Nancy and me - picking them up off the loading dock so no one would see me since we had a coffee contract with another coffee company.

But I see all of those things as if I'm on the outside of my life looking in at a scene of me. Standing frozen in my office as Good Morning America flashes the first photos of black smoke pouring from the North Tower just as my mom calls me from across campus. Flipping the channels on the TVs in my office trying to get a better sense of what was happening, as I had been trained to do in college as a "news person." The horrible flashback to a late February day in 1993 as my then-boyfriend, John, and I went to get a late lunch in Penn State's HUB Building only to find out that someone had detonated a bomb inside the North Tower of the WTC. The horror of seeing the South Tower hit. The rapid fire emails I exchanged that September day with my mom that morning as we tried to locate my brother who was out painting boundary lines for the Army Corps of Engineers somewhere in "south central Pennsylvania" just after a call from my friend Patrick who said that another plane had gone down somewhere in that area.

However, the first thing I really remember as if seeing things through my own eyes was the sky outside my office window. Crystal clear. Aqua blue but yet somehow not quite. More like a color of blue I'd never seen before. Bright. So sharp that I don't ever remember a similar sky in the weeks and months that followed. The kind of sky we never get here in Central Pennsylvania in early September. A sky free of haze with a single, almost perfectly formed white cloud off to the right. Unmoving. Just there.

After that? The world moved in a rush, but everything still just as clear. On instinct, I went to Master Control to start seeing what I could record. I had no idea what was going on, but I knew that whatever I was seeing? It was terrible on a scale I couldn't comprehend. I went into Production Control. Had the studio crew bring up audio and video. Late morning production wasn't happening. I needed to see what was happening in real time.

Then the call came. Penn State's Office of the President. The FCC, upon official request, had reviewed who had the most downlinks available on the East Coast. My station came up the winner with 46 - as long as I worked with Penn State's Office of Telecommunications. The request? Downlink and record every signal that I could find across any satellite. Three minutes later, two men that I knew in passing showed up. They were FBI and they had NDAs that I and the crew needed to sign, along with codes to unscramble the embargoed signals. Turns out I wouldn't need those long anyway, but I had them. They also gave me a "request" - watch everything, no matter how terrible. Make live-time logs of what I saw. Decide what should be embargoed from public consumption. Hand off to AccuWeather if necessary but stay in Master Control as long as I could. And never, ever tell a single soul what I saw on those video feeds.

This request? Wasn't a request. It was an order and one I and my crew couldn't say no to either. One by one, we signed the NDAs. Accepted the codes and got to work. I was given a satellite phone programmed to one number in case I found more broadcast signals than we had tape machines. We did. The only other downlink site in the area was brough into this - AccuWeather. I can only assume they received the same instructions I did. We set up a phone link between us. I directed everything, only handing off to their staff when I needed a short break.

More coffee appeared later in the morning and again in the early afternoon. More bagels. I went outside to breathe. The clearest thing I remember? That same clear blue sky. A second cloud now joining the first.

Eventually, other sites across the East Coast came online to do recordings. The early morning panic that I had lived through eased. The FBI came back. New request. Over the next month, I was to log everything as "official record" that would be turned over to "the proper people" when the time came. Again, it wasn't really a request.

Finally, at 6pm, I was "relieved of duty" and to "return tomorrow at 5am." No talking. No telling anyone what I saw. I still can't. Even now. I can say that people were jumping from the towers long before anyone ever knew it. But that's about it.

Driving home? The sky was still that perfect blue. It had never faded with the tragedy of the day. That's stuck with me all of these years.

I went home to an answering machine filled with messages from my college friends. Each asking the other if we had heard from specific people. One asking if I knew anything about a boy I'd grown up with in my little hometown. In the case of three of them? No one heard from them again.

Marc - lost on United Flight 93 so near to where our mutual friend Patrick was that day on US Route 30, only 4 miles from the field at Shanksville.

KJ - lost from Cantor Fitzgerald in the North Tower in a way I still can't comprehend, let alone mention.

Joey, my hometown friend - an NYC Firefighter last seen heading up Stairwell B and presumed lost in the South Tower after rescuers found his PASS system and nothing else.

Three months later, under supervision, I loaded up crates and crates of the videotapes I recorded that day and escorted them to Iron Mountain, a salt-mine storage facility near Harrisburg, PA, where some of the country's most precious treasures are kept. I signed them over. I can still feel the weight of the FBI agent's eyes on me as I stated that my crew and I that day were the only ones who ever saw them.

I can say there was no conspiracy, at least from what I saw. I saw the pain and shock and horror. It was all too real. It wasn't faked.



I remember it. All of it. And I can't talk about it. At least not much and not right now. That NDA only expires when it comes my turn to pass away. I've kept a journal these last 25 years. They can be read when I'm no longer here.

But for me? When I close my eyes after thinking about that day, the first thing I see is the color of the sky. And after all this time, I still can't put a name to that specific color of blue. It was a color I'd never seen before and I've never seen since. Pretty sure I won't ever see it again in my lifetime either.