06-04-2023, 09:44 PM
In the spring of 2001 I was walking to the whirlpool spa at our community pool for my evening dip in the hot tub...When I got to the end of my driveway I noticed a mid-sized smallish car driving by with two dark-complected individuals with strange expressions on their faces...The car may have been a red Pontiac Grand Prix, I'm not really sure...From their look and expressions the first thought that came to my mind is "those guys look like arab terrorists"...You had to be there to catch the frozen moment of the vibe that was translated to me from seeing those guys as they drove by...At that time of the year the setting sun comes down my street just perfectly so the inside of the car and them were lit up in a particularly illuminating way that only added to the experience...I pondered the weirdness of it and kept walking to the hot tub...When I got a few houses further down the street an Audi (or similar french make) appeared with two men in tan trench coats in the front seats...If you were to make a movie where you were trying to dress two spooks in trench coats to make them look like classic spies that is what these guys looked like...I looked at them and they were zoned on the two guys in the car ahead of them in a strange sort of a trance...The sun was evening lighting directly down the street so it went deep in to their eyes and lighted the inside of the car in a way that only enhanced the effect...The two spooks did not take their eyes off the car ahead once in the whole time they passed me...They were strongly transfixed on that car...The two greying men were in their early 60's which makes me think these were senior Intel agents, the type who would be trusted with the highest level assignments...Of course I didn't think that as they passed...All I thought at the time was "Those guys are definitely tracking those two other guys and I definitely just witnessed something strange"...I shrugged my shoulders and went to the hot tub for a relaxing whirlpool...On September 11th I was sleeping late and woke to the phone ringing...My parents were driving on their way to a visit in New York and were somewhere around Baltimore...They called me to find out if I had heard about the attack...I shook off my drowsiness and turned on CNN on the little kitchen TV...I immediately thought to myself that the 1993 terrorists had "finished the job"...Over the course of that day photos of the terrorists started appearing in the media...I can't remember how long it took for it to come back to me but that one suicide pilot Mohammed Atta had a particularly unique "Frankenstein" look to his face...It was bugging me that I had seen it somewhere before and eventually it came back to me that he was the guy driving that first car that I saw when I got to the end of the driveway...I think the passenger was Shehhi...I didn't get as good a look at the passenger but he was definitely one of his cohorts...This is not as crazy as it sounds because the light airport where they trained in Cessna's is only 30 miles from here...I have never made this public because I didn't want to get killed or be taken as a nut...But there is no doubt that Atta and maybe Shehhi were well on the radar of some government's Intelligence agency months before the attack...