Pre 9/11 controversy

In The Lone Gunmen’s premiere episode, “Pilot”, which aired March 4, 2001, members of the U.S. government conspire to hijack an airliner, almost hitting the, and blame the act on terrorists to gain support for a new profit-making war. The episode aired six months prior to the.

Pilot
The first episode aired on March 4, 2001. Its title was Pilot. In the show, a computer hacker takes control of a Boeing 727 passenger plane and flies it towards the World Trade Center, with the specific intention of crashing the plane into one of the Twin Towers. It’s only at the very last moment that the Lone Gunmen are able to hack the hacker and avert disaster and death for those aboard the plane and those inside the World Trade Center.

The plot is all the work of a powerful, rogue group buried deep within the world of officialdom. The secret plan, had it worked, was to put the blame for the World Trade Center attacks on one or more foreign dictators who are “begging to be smart-bombed.”

Response
The creators of The Lone Gunmen could not have had advance knowledge of 9/11. The Pilot episode had its premiere broadcast in Australia just thirteen days before the events of September 11 occurred.


 * Christopher Bollyn said: “…rather than being discussed in the media as a prescient warning of the possibility of such an attack, the pilot episode of The Lone Gunmen series seemed to have been quietly forgotten.”


 * Frank Spotnitz, an executive producer of The Lone Gunmen, said: “I woke up on September 11 and saw it on TV and the first thing I thought of was The Lone Gunmen. But then in the weeks and months that followed, almost no one noticed the connection. What’s disturbing about it to me is, you think as a fiction writer that if you can imagine this scenario, then the people in power in the government who are there to imagine disaster scenarios can imagine it, too.”


 * Robert McLachlan, director of photography on The Lone Gunmen, said: “It was odd that nobody referenced it. In the ensuing press nobody mentioned that [9-11] echoed something that had been seen before.”

In the news
Daily Star Sunday, X-Files spin-off show 'predicted hijacked plane hitting Twin Towers' 6 months before 9/11, by Harry Kemble / Published 9th September 2016