9/11 plot in 1995!

In the months before the 9/11 attacks on the United States, dozens of artists spontaneously started making images, music and films about terrible things happening to the World Trade Center and America at large.

But the latest discovery of 9/11 predictions goes back to 1995, when Steve Jackson Games released its new version of the popular "Illuminati" strategy card game.

What's most disturbing about the images of the Pentagon on fire and dual explosions in the World Trade Center towers is not the accuracy but the motivation.

"Illuminati: New World Order" is all about competing alliances of secret societies controlling (and exterminating) the world population through fake terrorism, manufactured epidemics, media manipulation, "combined disasters," agents provocateurs, phony religious leaders and stage-managed Hegelian contests between idealogies such as Islam vs. Christianity, Communism vs. Capitalism or Left vs. Right.

The game is loosely based on the conspiracies documented in Robert Anton Wilson & Robert Shea's "Illuminatus Trilogy," based on the detailed conspiracy theories sent as letters to the editor when the authors worked for Playboy magazine some three decades ago.

The goal of the game is total world domination, just like in reality.

Synchronicity

The X-Files' spinoff "The Lone Gunmen," for example, started its short life on Fox TV in March 2001 with a pilot episode about a "shadow government" of defense contractors who fly a passenger jet into the World Trade Center in order to start profitable wars against "tin-pot dictators."

Political rappers The Coup finalized the cover of their 2001 CD "Party Music" in June of that year: It shows Coup members Pam the Funkstress and Boots Riley in front of the WTC, with both towers exploding as they actually did a few months later.

Wilco's "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" -- with its eerie sepia cover showing "twin tower" high-rises -- seemed to be a stoned soundtrack to the television news on that day.

The song "Jesus, Etc." was especially brutal with its pre-9/11 lyrics of tall buildings burning with workers trapped inside as "skyscrapers are scraping together."

And Bob Dylan's "Love and Theft," which had its long-planned commercial release on 9/11, was so specific in its descriptions of an American apocalypse run by amoral confidence men that just a week after the attacks the Village Voice demanded, "What did Dylan know and when did he know it?"