Predicting 9-11

When the first plane struck the World Trade Center at 8:48 a.m. on Tuesday, September 11, President Bush was in Florida, lecturing a classroom of second-graders about the importance of reading skills. What was meant to be a run-of-the-mill photo op produced one of the more telling photographs of that awful day.

In it, White House chief of staff Andrew Card is bending down to deliver the news that a second plane had thundered into the second tower. You can see the shock, the dread, on Bush's face. And who can blame him? America had just been wrenched from a sunny weekday morning into a cataclysmic war, and it seemed no one was prepared for such an event -- not the CIA, not the FBI, not the State Department, and certainly not the president himself.

"I'm trying to absorb that knowledge," Bush said, recalling the moment in a recent Newsweek interview. "I'm the commander in chief, and the country has just come under attack."

Not everybody, however, was as flabbergasted by the news as the president. In fact, there were a few Americans who responded to the terrorist attacks with a resounding "Told you so."

In June 2000, Lynne Palmer, a 69-year-old Las Vegas resident, published her Astrological Almanac for 2001 (Star Bright Publishers). On page 95 of the book, buried among advice on the best days to go to the movies and worst days to lend people money, Palmer had written, in an odd combination of the obvious and the prophetic: "Avoid terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001."

Palmer wasn't the only astrologer to see trouble brewing in the fall of 2001. Apparently, the sky has been heaving with a confluence of terrible portents lately -- a Perfect Storm of clashing, menacing astrological signs. But no one had divined upcoming events with the acuity of the Dolly Parton–haired author of Is Your Name Lucky for You? (Star Bright Publishers, 1999) and Astro-Guide to Nutrition and Vitamins (American Federation of Astrologers, 1993). "Only one person predicted the date of the attacks, and that was Lynne Palmer," says veteran astrologer Robert Hand, a relatively highbrow practitioner of the art. "I don't know how she did it. Things looked chaotic, but I could not have foreseen September 11. I looked and looked and I don't know how anyone could have predicted it to the day."

Palmer, meanwhile, remains unfazed by her astrological coup. "There are certain planets that rule certain things," she says, "and those planets were in alignment." In fact, Palmer didn't even know the attacks had occurred until a friend told her. "I don't look at the news much," she says. "My friend called me. I looked in my [2001] almanac and I had it. I make all sorts of predictions and I forget about them. But I had 'Watch for danger falling from above,' 'Avoid fire.' It was eerie."

Eerie, yes, but not unique. Following September 11, stargazers all over the country pored through their prior predictions to see if they, too, had foreseen America's so-called New War. Hand was one of the astrologers who came up trumps. In an article posted in the August edition of the Mountain Astrologer online magazine, Hand wrote a long, lyrical essay foretelling "restrictions on our freedom of movement," the "ruthless energy of change," and "unrest in the Middle East."

Though Hand's dates were not as specific as Palmer's -- he saw strife occurring between August 5, 2001, and May 26, 2002 -- his predictions were nonetheless chillingly prescient: "Things pass away and then something new comes into being. We have times when things seem to reach a period of stability and permanence; then there is a period of decay, when they begin to break down and go wrong.... It is as though we were driving down a well-defined road with a clear objective, and either something we did not anticipate is forcing us onto another road or the road itself is being transformed."