With the recent 24th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks coordinated by Al-Qaeda against the United States, we spotted a claim that has recently resurfaced on social media.
The supposed evidence comes from a 1997 episode from season 9 of the show, The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson. In one scene, Bart holds up a magazine advertising a $9 bus trip to New York. Behind the price, the Twin Towers appear in silhouette. When placed side by side, the $9 and the towers resemble “9/11”.
In the aftermath of the 2001 attacks, screenshots of this moment began circulating online. For conspiracy theorists, this image was too precise to be mere coincidence. It became part of a larger theory of “predictive programming”, the belief that governments and corporations seed hidden warnings about future events in popular culture. The Simpsons, with its reputation for uncanny foresight, has been a particular target of such claims with Black Dot Research having previously investigated claims that the show had predicted the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and the Baltimore Bridge disaster.
However, the evidence doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. The still is a genuine frame from the 1997 episode — further analysis with AI detection tools showed that the image had not been doctored or digitally manipulated. Al Jean, the showrunner who has been writing for the show since it first aired in 1989, stressed in an interview with the BBC that the prediction was pure coincidence, no doubt supplemented by the sheer number of episodes of the show, with 790 episodes having aired at the time of writing.
Psychologists say this is a classic example of apophenia, or the human tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things. Once tragedy strikes, people often search backwards for signs they missed, giving otherwise ordinary images a prophetic quality.
The claim that The Simpsons predicted the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center is false. There is no credible evidence that the creators of The Simpsons had any knowledge of the September 11 attacks before they occurred.
