Patriots' Day. The Boston Marathon. I foresaw this, it appears.
As many of you recall, on September 17, 2012,
Dangerous Minds published "
Copycat Effect: Meet The Man Who Predicted The Aurora Shooting" by British writer Thomas McGrath. You may wish to read it, if you haven't yet. I detailed a bit of the background to McGrath's article in my piece, "
The Man Who Predicted The Aurora Shooting."
Because one of the final questions McGrath asked was about other predictions, I addressed his inquiry by posting "
Ten Predictions: Ten Hits."
Now, as it turns out, thanks to an alert reader of this blog, I've been reminded that, indeed, I, Loren Coleman, did foretell the
Patriots' Day Boston Marathon terrorist bombing - eight years ago.
I didn't go looking for this, so you can imagine my surprise when I found someone had "discovered" in my past writings that I had "predicted" the Marathon bombings. I had literally forgotten that I had written what was pointed out to me.
On April 25th, I began receiving messages from a reader, Carol J., saying
"I decided to randomly browse posts from past years and see that you accurately 'predicted' this [Boston Marathon event] in 2005."
I asked her a little more about how this happened and Carol J. shared, "It was very eerie when I came across it. I felt like I wanted to read something from the past to get my mind off the present and my finger was hovering over 2006 and then it was almost like my finger felt kind of 'pulled' to 2005....For real! Synchromysticism and following intuition at its best."
What Carol J. had found was a long posting I had written on September 10, 2005. In that blog entry, I wrote of the importance of being aware of the special significance of numbers, dates, and special days, in relationship to future acts of terrorism. I penned these
words:
...what about the dates? This Bush administration's little known badly named Patriot Day (9/11) may or may not be that important to al Qaeda, as I think they have their own number, date, and name game agenda. They might wish to go for the real Patriots Day, in April, in Maine, or the Patriots Day in Massachusetts, at the Boston Marathon, for example. Thousands of people there. Of course, this is not an invitation, but we have to see that we might not see what they see....
And...
Well, then, truth be told, I live in Portland, Maine, where 9/11 all began for Mohammed Atta, who picked Flight 11, so needless to say, I'm not letting my guard down on 9/11/05. Or 11/9/05. Or 11/11 (Veteran's Day). Or on next April's Patriots Day 2006, 2007, 2008, and so forth. Atta, the leader of the operations wing of 9/11, historically, was tied into those elevens. Afterall, the first mastermind of the 1993 Twin Towers attack was Ramzi Yousef, and he used parts of Bonjinka, a plan to place bombs on 11 planes in the Phillippines, for the eventual 9/11 attacks. Yousef's test run for Bonjinka occurred on, you guessed it, another eleven, December 11, 1994. Sometime, look up the 1970 origins of the naming of the group 'Black September,' whose kidnapping of Israeli athletes attending the Munich Olympics (which was scheduled to end on September 11, 1972), ended in the death of 11 of those athletes. Certainly, 9/11 hits very close to home. And lives on. Mysteries remain that may be hidden in numbers and places.
Clearly, the combination of Patriots Day and the Boston Marathon was too tempting for the terrorists who would conduct the first major attack at a public event, post-9/11.
The scope of the Boston Marathon bombing is enormous. Five deaths resulted: three people from the April 15th bombing, one police officer from the firefight on April 18th, and one suspect from shooting on April 19th. A total of 299 people were injured, with 282 of them from the initial bombs on April 15th, 16 police officers from the firefight on April 19th, and one suspect from shooting on April 19th. The injuries to the victims of the bombings were severe, involving limbs lost at the bomb sites or due to amputations to save their lives.
It was a terrible and horrible series of events in Boston on Patriots' Day. Let us wish and pray that other terrorists will not see what occurred in Boston as a roadmap for future copycat incidents. That is certainly my fear, based on what I know of behavior contagion. It does make me sad to be able to "see" this coming. I take no delight in being close in my predictions.
My hope is that someday, somewhen, predicting behavior patterning is developed to such a level that violent and fatal events can be prevented.
My ideas and insights about "predicting" such events are in my 2004 book,
a work that the media never wants you to read.
(NY: Simon and Schuster, 2004)
Never forget, remember...
