Foreboding ads featuring the World Trade Center

Copyranter has been collecting old print advertisements that feature the World Trade Center.

Left: Pakistan International Airlines, 1979. Center: Asbestos Corporation Limited, 1981. Right: World Trade Center, circa 1984.

• [AllThisPaperwork]

  Also, Daniel Pinchbeck writes:

  “The overwhelming anecdotal evidence of shared dreams and shared trips, etc., should have made a dent on the materialist model, but it hasn’t yet. The Global Consciousness Project at Princeton is also discovering evidence for a “noosphere,” a mental envelope around the earth, by documenting fluctuations in random number generators set up at 50 cities around the planet. On days of major world events, they get significant statistical deviations from normal patterns of randomness. On 9/11, these deviations peaked several hours after the planes hit the buildings, but the deviations began an hour or two before the first Tower was hit. The Project may be charting the birth of a global consciousness aware of major events before they actually happen. I suspect, in the new paradigm, we will recognize that human consciousness and the Earth, together, constitute a single sentient and evolving organism.”

• [Anonymous]

  another WTC moment that makes me shudder is in the movie “Someone Like You” starring Ashley Judd and Hugh Jackman. She and her boyfriend (Greg Kinnear) are apartment hunting and the realtor says something like “and the view is gorgeous, you can see right down to the World Trade Center.”

• [Anonymous]

  Pre-9/11, Maker’s Mark ran a particularly ghoulish ad featuring the twin towers. The only image of it I can find on the Internets is unfortunately a poor scan, but the freakiness is unmistakable.

• [Anonymous]

  Late Night with David Letterman used to have an opening where a camera flies through NYC. It began with a shot that flies through a window in the WTC. It was pretty startling to see it in April 2002 in a documentary I saw about catching fish with your bare hands.

• [johnrynne]

  Then there is the Lufthansa ad that appeared in The New Yorker dated 10 September 2001 (and was on the newsstands on that fateful day)

• [Anonymous]

  The scanned pamplet on the right is from my flickr stream. Who knew I’d see it on bb. http://www.flickr.com/photos/consistingofa_z/303228269/

• [RandomConnections]

  John Carpenter’s “Escape from New York” showed Air Force One narrowly missing the twin towers before crashing in Manhattan.

• [Anonymous]

  Don’t forget Jeru the Damaja circa 1984:

  http://images-eu.amazon.com/images/P/B000003R5O.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

• [Schizohedron]

  Does this card from the 1995 Illuminati: New World Order collectible card game count? These aren’t the literal Twin Towers, but they’ve always reminded me of them, especially 2 years after the WTC bombing in ’93:

  Terrorist Nuke

• [Jon Adair]

  There’s more to the Illuminati: New World Order cards than just the twin towers card. The Pentagon card has a smoking fireball in the center of the building. Kinda spooky. Fnord.

• [Readwrite]

  Cpt. Tim above mentions the original cover of Coup’s CD, which came out shortly before 9/11:

  http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2001/09/46771

• [AllThisPaperwork]

  From BoingBoing 9/15/01

  “We’ve all seen the bizarre coincidental cover for The Coup’s latest disc (which depicts the WTC exploding), but this cover for Insekt Angelica’s indie CD is weirdly prescient, showing two planes colliding in front of the Twin Towers. Something about The Current Events appears to have lived in the collective unconscious for years.”

• [alainsane]

  Those are great pictures, but my favorite weird WTC picture is the one featured on the October, 1976 cover of Sesame Street magazine…shown here.

• [Cpt. Tim]

  Anyone see the pilot episode of the lone gunmen? It was a spinoff of the X-files series.

  *cough*religion*cough*

  It aired only a few months before 9-11 and it involved an agency of the US government trying to hack into a passenger jet to crash it into the WTC, to beef up military funding and give the US license to to take down dictators they didn’t like.

  I thought it was interesting that they made such a big deal about the whole coup album cover and some other things, but totally ignored something that actually seemed quite similar.

  I’m not saying its a conspiracy though, just an interesting coincidence.

• [Halloween Jack]

  After watching the movie version of Godspell for the first time in many years, I was startled to realize that the cover of the soundtrack, which shows the cast during “All for the Best”, was shot on top of the WTC as it neared completion.

• [Dave X]

  Personally, I think cityscape scenes showing the “asteroid vs. NYC” damage in Armageddon look awfully close to the 9-11 photos.

• [Elysianartist]

  Pakistan? ISI? 9/11?

  “”Also noticeably missing from the Report is Richard Armitage’s close relationship to the Pakistani funders of 9/11. The Report incredibly states that discovering the funding for 9/11 is “of little practical significance.” However, the FBI, the Wall Street Journal, and the Times of India have all acknowledged that Pakistani ISI Chief Mahmood Ahmad wired $100,000 to Mohamed Atta on 9/10/01.”"

  http://community.livejournal.com/osama_bin_bush

• [Cpt. Tim]

  i would like to see a detailed conspiracy theory on how 9-11 was a big “i told you so” revenge plot by asbestos.

• [claud9999]

  Before we devolve into 9/11 conspiracy theories…

  I ran across the snopes.com article on the ill-fated Starbucks ad, entitled “Collapse into Cool”. I’ll leave it up to y’all to find it. I actually found one of the posters on eBay and bought it cheap. It’s hanging in my office. :^)

• [Keneke]

  Neato: the asbestos one is a double entendre of irony.

  There needs to be a word made for that.

• [Umbriel]

  I also remember the towers getting blown away in Meteor, Dave X.
  http://www.coolcinematrash.com/movies/meteor.htm
  My conspiracy theory is that they were constructed with some sort of secret asteroid-attracting alloy.

• [anthropomorphictoast]

  Diplotendronia, maybe…?

  The asbestos one takes the cake. O_o;

• [mindysan33]

  Interesting. I love those. The first one is from Pakistan, huh? Hmmmm…

  I had totally forgotten about the Pilot of the Lone Gunmen, Cpt. Tim. Thanks so much for posting about it.

  Mindysan

• [neuralien]

  how ’bout “birony”?

• [Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator]

  The WTC got nailed a lot in disaster films because it’s easy to build the model.

• [certron]

  Aside from the Lone Gunmen episode, there was also an episode of the show Level 9 referred to as either “Through the Looking Glass” or “Terror in the Skies” that involved a computer-controlled plane (and, for plot purposes, stolen codes for controlling it). If the hijacker’s demands are not met, the plane will be ordered to crash. I still really wish I could get the entire show on DVD, but this episode in particular was quite exciting.

  http://www.tv.com/level-9/through-the-looking-glass/episode/4840/summary.html?tag=ep_list;title;2

  Aired November 10, 2000

• [Dave X]

  It’s a little bit off-topic, but does anyone have a scan of a General Electric newspaper advertisement that ran in the few days right after 9/11? It featured a drawing of the Statue of Liberty rolling up her sleeve, and looking mad, as I recall. I should have clipped it then and there, but lost the paper…

  It was a large ad, and I’m pretty sure it was in the NY Times.

  I’d microfilm search it, but my local library doesn’t have these resources.

• [Cpt. Tim]

  i remember something along those lines dave.

  none of those types of ads ever sat right with me.

• [Cpt. Tim]

  Mindysan: no problem. i’m glad someone else watched that. But yeah. the fact few people remember it is probably why it lasted less than a season.

• [luistxo]

  One of Spain’s most popular comics (Mortadelo by Francisco Ibañez) published this image back in 1993, with a place crashing into the WTC in the background:

  http://www.guai.com/gemelas/montadelotorres.htm

• [Tamaryn]

  Kinda makes you wish John Nash had seen these.

• [Anonymous]

  and the Band Squad five O released the album bombs over broadway the year before 9/11… check the cover… http://www.firestream.net/custom/rateimages/639_03_30_2007_1_33_54_bombsoverbroadway.jpg

  bl

• [V]

  Pepe Moreno’s “Rebel,” originally published in Heavy Metal in 1986, showed a partially-demolished tower after a civil war. The heroes of the story took down the remaining tower (used as a headquarters for the neo-fascist state and their cronies) by blowing up an explosives-laden van in the subway tunnels under the remaining tower, ala the 1993 WTC bombing:

  http://desourcesure.com/uploadv3/bdtour11septembre.jpg

  http://desourcesure.com/uploadv3/photopremonition11septembre2.jpg

• [Telecustard]

  “Something about The Current Events appears to have lived in the collective unconscious for years.”

  I wonder how many other warnings about future calamities are contained in seemingly innocuous bits of popular culture, or advertising.

• [Anonymous]

  Another show that made me shudder later, was episode 23 “Pinball Wizard” of the television show “Seven Days” which was shown on 6 October 1999. The opening scene was of a missile flying out over Arlington and then slamming into the Pentagon. Didn’t think about it too much then. But after 9/11…

• [Lazz]

  The cover of a 1970 novel, “Thirty Seconds Over New York” caught my eye in a used bookstore in October of 2001.
  Here’s an old ad for a copy:
  http://cgi.ebay.com/30-SECONDS-OVER-NEW-YORK-Prophetic-September-11-Cover_W0QQitemZ190191513152QQihZ009QQcategoryZ29223QQcmdZViewItem

  –Lazz