Twice this weekend, Donald Trump claimed to have watched as, immediately following the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, thousands of Arabs and Arab-Americans across the Hudson River, in Jersey City, New Jersey, cheered as the Twin Towers collapsed.

“Hey, I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering,” he said on Saturday, at a rally in Birmingham, Alabama.

“So something’s going on,” he continued, by way of defending his plan to institute a national registry for Muslims. “We’ve got to find out what it is.”

On Sunday, in an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, Trump reiterated his claim. “There were people that were cheering on the other side of New Jersey where you have large Arab populations, he said. “There were people over in New Jersey that were watching it, a heavy Arab population that were cheering as the buildings came down. Not good.”

“I know it might be not politically correct for you to talk about it, but there were people cheering as that building came down,” Trump said Sunday. “That tells you something.”

“It was well covered at the time, George. Now, I know they don’t like to talk about it, but it was well covered at the time.”

Actually, it wasn’t: according to both the Associated Press and the New York Times, there are no accounts of such demonstrations taking place in contemporary news reports.

Trump is “either mistaken or he’s lying,” the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ national communications director, Ibrahim Hooper, told BuzzFeed News.

ABC News reports that police discounted rumors at the time of Muslims in Paterson, New Jersey celebrating the attacks.

Photo via AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.