Investigators suggested she may have been pushed back toward the building by a wind gust. A safety fence had been installed after a spate of suicides throughout 1947, but she somehow climbed past it while guards weren't looking.

Although the story of Ms. Adams is routinely featured in lists of "Amazing Facts" about the Empire State Building, her jump and the outcome is not as uncommon as it seems. An original news story from the time mentioned a similar suicidal jumper two years earlier who was saved in a similar way after landing on the platform below the observation deck, but seemingly that tourist from Hawaii two years earlier didn't receive the same attention or generate the folk tales of being saved by a divine gust of wind.