hijacked Boeing into the WTC six months before 9/11!

"They're going to crash the plane

plot to fly a hijacked airplane into the World Trade Center towers ."

"The pilot episode, which first aired on March 4, 2001 , concerned a terrorist

TV spinoff The Lone Gunmen comes to DVD with its prescient 9/11 episode "The Lone Gunmen, the Complete Series (Fox) - Back in 2001, when The X-Files was breathing its last prime-time gasp, this oddball spinoff series hit the airwaves for 13 episodes. The three unlikely conspiracy investigators built their own little cult following with the show, still shot in Vancouver after the original fled to sunny California. The most remarkable episode ... aired just a few months before 9/11 with an incredibly prescient plot about terrorists hijacking an airliner and threatening to crash it into the World Trade Center. Except, in this plot, the terrorists were a cabal within the U.S. government itself . On the episode's commentary track, the creators themselves cannot believe the irony. They recall how, in the immediate hours after the event when it wasn't known who was responsible, they feared their story might have inspired the real terrorists ." -Canada.com (03/28/05)

Code named Operation Northwoods , the plans reportedly included the possible assassination of Cuban émigrés, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas, hijacking planes , blowing up a U.S. ship, and even orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities ." -ABC (5/01/01)

"In the early 1960s, America's top military leaders reportedly drafted plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Cuba.

► " Exactly two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, a federal report warned the executive branch that Osama bin Laden's terrorists might hijack an airliner and dive bomb it into the Pentagon or other government building." -CBS (05/17/02)

► "In the two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, the North American Aerospace Defense Command conducted exercises simulating what the White House says was unimaginable at the time: hijacked airliners used as weapons to crash into targets and cause mass casualties. One of the imagined targets was the World Trade Center . In a third scenario, the target was the Pentagon ..." -USA Today (4/18/04)

" On March 4, 2001 , during Season 8 of “The X-Files,” the three spun off in a seriocomic series of their own, created by “X” producers Chris Carter, Frank Spotnitz, Vince Gilligan and John Shiban, and co-starring Zuleikha Robinson (“Hidalgo”) and Stephen Snedden (“Coyote Ugly”). Despite the concern of some fans, the pilot of “The Lone Gunmen” is indeed part of the boxed set. This would seem like a no-brainer — until you realize that the central conspiracy in the episode involved the high-tech electronic hijacking of a commercial airliner with the intent of crashing it into the World Trade Center . Although the episode was conceived and shot in 2000 and aired six months before the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001 , the eerie coincidence sent shockwaves through cast and producers. “I'll never forget that,” says Spotnitz, calling in from the set of the pilot for his remake of “Kolchak: The Night Stalker.” “That was such a disturbing thing. It was very upsetting. As I say in the DVD featurette, you write something like that, and you assume that if you can think of it, being a Hollywood writer, then somebody in the government has thought about it already . “Obviously that wasn't the case. Just the idea that a plane could fly into a building, and the building would be unprotected was just … anyway, it was upsetting.” Although their scenario involved using sophisticated electronics to remotely control the plane and had nothing to do with suicidal terrorists, Spotnitz had some long moments on the fateful September morning . “I was directing an episode of ‘The X-Files' when that happened,” he recalls, “so I woke up a little late because we'd been shooting the night before. It was the first thing I saw on TV, one of the trade towers burning. The first thing that went through my head was, ‘I hope this doesn't have anything to do with what we did, that it wasn't somehow inspired by anything we did.' “Nobody knew who had done it or what had happened, but we knew it was an airplane. It became obvious that it didn't have any connection to what we did.” Haglund, a frequent guest at sci-fi conventions, had noted a brisk business in “Gunmen” bootlegs over the years. He attributes some of that to the pilot. “ Once the pilot and the 9/11 thing came together ,” Haglund says, “ all the conspiracy theorists started passing around that pilot at conventions and UFO conventions and started propelling that forward. These guys are all asking questions about, ‘How much did we know?' ‘Who wrote the script?' — that kind of thing. “Other than small, middling details, what's odd about that ‘Gunmen' pilot is the larger details they got right. I assume somebody will look through the rest of the episodes and see what other details may be right. I can assure you, I don't think there is a legion of super-smart military chimps out there.” -Kansas City Star (03/21/05)

'Gunmen' from left to right: