Found this yesterday in my dad's Fortean Times (Great magazine btw) and just thought it was weird enough to spread about a bit


The Lone Gunmen

Having just finished your article on 9/11 conspiracy theories, I thought I'd share with you my own peculiar relationship between the conspiracies and the events. I was one of the lead actors on a short-lived television series that aired on the Fox network in the US. It was called The Lone Gunmen and intended as a spin-off from the popular Fox series The X-Files. The so-called Lone Gunmen are three conspiracy geeks who publish an underground newspaper named The Lone Gunmen (hence our show title).

Although our series aired in the spring of 2001, we had shot the pilot episode in March 2000. The plot was fiarly simple: the Lone Gunmen uncover and defeat a covernment conspiracy to fly a commercial jet plane into one of the towers of the World Trade Center via ground-based computer control of the jet's auto-pilot. THe intention was to blame a foreign, 'terrorist' nation for the bombing, and thus encourage the US to enter into a war against it - all to guarantee weapons sales for the US military-industrial complex. In the TV episode, of course, our characters save the day in the nick of time, regaining control of teh plane just as it soars over the towers.

We shot 12 more episodes over the winter of 2000-2001, and they all aired on Fox that spring, but in the end our series was not renewed for a second season. I continued to work on The X-Files, and I was in Los Angeles on 11 September, having just finished working on an episode of that shot. I was supposed to fly home to Canada that very day. I was woken about 8.30 by a phone call from the limo company contracted to drive me to Los Angeles Airport (LAX). "This is your limo driver," the voice told me. "You won't be flying home today."

"Why not," I asked, groggy from sleep.

"All the airports in the US have been shut down."

It took a moment or two to process this statement. I could believe that LAX had been closed for some reason. But all the airports? In the whole country? "What? Why?"

"Someone has flown a plane into the WTC."

They say that most people thought it was a joke when they first heard of the attack. You can understand why that was my first thought. Luckily I was too sleepy to laugh out loud. (Actually, I thought it was a pretty poor joke.) I can only add that once I learned the truth, I experienced an eerie terror, as if I had seen the future, and not understood until it was too late.

Assuming the idea for flying a plane into the Twin Towers by the remote control of a secret government agency was original to our writers, it had been floating around for a year and a half at least before the actual attack. Not a lot of viewers saw our show (sever million maybe saw the pilot), but I have no doubt taht the idea - or cultural 'meme' - was immediately available once the shock of the attack wore off.

Of course, it also means that the idea of terrorists flying a jet into a New York landmark was not so unthinkable as it seemed in the days afterwards. As far as news items being 'scrubbed,' I think it's safe to say that our pilot, if not our entire series, will never be seen on network televison anywhere. Ever. A strange, awful confluence of pop culture and reality...

Bruce Harwood aka Byers of the Lone Gunmen, Fox Broadcasting, LA

I wrote it all out because I couldn't really see a lot of it to cut out, so sorry if its a bit long! The whole thing is just a little too weird... what do you guys think?