My favorite thing about the New York article on 9/11 conspiracy theories currently making the rounds on Metafilter? This part:

Does it matter that the pilot for the conspiracy-themed Lone Gunmen (a short-lived Fox knockoff of The X-Files), which aired on March 4, 2001, tells the story of a U.S. government agency’s plot to crash a remote-controlled 727 into the World Trade Center as an excuse to raise the military budget and then blame the attack on a “tin-pot dictator” who was “begging to be smart-bombed”?

Really? Yes, really. What’s most amazing about this isn’t the somewhat eerie similarities between the plot of the pilot (ha ha) episode and what actually happened; what’s most amazing is that despite airing a scant six months before the actual attack, no one seems to remember this part of the episode. I remember the horrible opening of the episode, where the Lone Gunmen rant about the Octium IV; I remember the conversation about Byers’ dad being dead and believing in JFK and Camelot; I remember how apparently the only way to solve the crisis was to talk to some super-hot babe hacker with a penchant for guns. Above all else, I remember thinking how this show was going to suck, hard. But nowhere in that collection of memories do I remember a Plot To Crash Airliners Into the World Trade Center. How the hell did I miss that? And how is it that no one else jumped on this right after the attacks, even while we were finding obscure novels making reference to planes crashing into buildings and boggling at the similarities?

The answer, of course, is that the show was so bad that everyone promptly forgot it existed when it was cancelled. But man, talk about weird.