Culture news This series had anticipated September 11 barely 6 months before the tragedy that struck New York: the creators suffered a lot
In 2001, an X-Files spinoff series predicted the September 11 attacks, which occurred a few months later.
It’s a strangely recurring phenomenon: these television series which predict the future with disconcerting precision. In this quasi-supernatural category, we obviously think of The Simpsons, almost unbeatable on the subject. Of more than 600 episodes, some are more notable than others for their astonishing sequences: one of them predicts Lady Gaga’s show during the Superbowl halftime show, another predicts the meat scandal horse when yet another shows Donald Trump president of the Republic with a huge lead. The animated series also predicted the technological future, illustrating in one of its 1995 episodes a connected watch, then, five years later, a virtual reality headset. However, there are TV shows that make predictions that are much more disconcerting and much less fun. This is particularly the case of The Lone Gunmen, a series derived from the X-Files phenomenon (available on Disney+) which, in March 2001, predicted the September 11 attacks six months in advance.
An X-Files spin-off that predicts an attack?
It is an article published in 2006 in Le Temps, then relayed recently, which recalls the sordid anecdote. The Lone Gunmen, or “At the Heart of the Plot” in France, told the rather comical daily life of three of Mulder’s friends, the “lone bandits” as they are called (recurring, much-loved characters in the X-Files series): Frohike, Langly and Byers, nerds who edit a small magazine and follow small government conspiracies. They live cloistered in their apartment full of computer equipment and work to foil a whole bunch of highly secret plans.
The Lone Gunmen, pilot episode
It is the pilot episode that interests us in particular. Called Phantom Pilot and directed by Rob Bowman, it was broadcast on March 4, 2001 in the United States. It focuses on the character of Byers who, during an investigation, discovers that his father is still alive and that the country’s military-industrial complex is planning to organize an attack to restart the sale of arms. A sequence then shows a hacker hijacking an airliner with the intention of it crashing into the World Trade Center. Precisely.
The images then show the plane coming dangerously close to the twin towers before the trio of amateur investigators manage to stop the disaster. The series was quickly canceled after the first season despite positive reviews and viewers did not immediately make the connection once the real attack occurred, but the executive producer remembered it very well. “I woke up on 9/11, saw it on TV and the first thing I thought of was The Lone Gunmen.”, said Frank Spotnitz, who was also a co-writer of the series. He will add: “What bothers me is that as a fiction writer we say that if we can imagine this scenario, then the people in power in the government, who are there to imagine disaster scenarios , can also imagine it“Obviously, this is all just a terrible coincidence, but it’s still chilling.