My 9/11 Synchronicity
(From my Book: Art & Synchronicity as Daytime Dreams)
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For me the pathway that led to September 11, 2001—and the tragedy that unfolded that day—was both strange and transformative in ways I never could have imagined.
 
It was just a couple of weeks before that horrific morning. I was out refurbishing some signs at our church, The Church of the Open Door, a historic church in downtown Los Angeles that purchased the campus and moved out of its landmark building and moved 26 miles east to the city of Glendora.  The campus sat on 40 acres of land—once an old military school—now slowly decaying but still full of quiet dignity. The campus was a labyrinth of winding roads weaving through dozens of buildings, each marked by multiple signs pointing to specific destinations. I was working on the main sign at the heart of the property when a big white Ford Expedition pulled up.
 
The driver rolled down his window and asked, “What is this place?”
 
I told him it was the grounds of The Church of the Open Door, a beloved congregation with deep roots in Los Angeles’ history. He lit up—genuinely fascinated—and asked about service times, saying he’d love to attend. I reached into my pocket, pulled out one of my freshly printed business cards, and jotted the service schedule on the back it was the first and only time I had given out one of my business cards. He glanced at the front and smiled.
 
“Oh—you work for Bank of America Capital Management? Do you know Ron Bettenhausen?”
 
I did. Ron was one of the kindest, most thoughtful, and genuinely good men I’d ever met—handsome in a quiet way, with a warmth that put everyone at ease. But he walked with a limp, a strange gait. I never knew if it was from some illness eating away at him, or something he was born with. It didn’t matter. He carried it with grace.
 
Little did I know then—how that brief encounter, that fleeting moment of connection, would soon be eclipsed by a day that changed everything.
 
 A week later, I bought Sade concert tickets on eBay for Thursday, September 13, 2001—just two days after the world stopped. I’d arranged to meet the seller in front of a 7-Eleven off Route 66: cash for tickets, quick and simple. He pulled up. I handed him the money. He gave me the tickets. Then he asked, “Need anything else? I can get you into events at Anaheim Stadium.” I pulled out one of my Bank of America Capital Management business cards and for only the second time handed somebody a card, scribbled my home phone number on the back, and handed it over. He took it, and wrote his contact info on the back of one of his own card. That’s when he looked at my card and said: “Wow—you work for Bank of America Capital Management? Do you know Ron Bettenhausen?” I smiled and said yes—the same Ron, kind, thoughtful, with that quiet limp. Then I realized it was the same man-the same one from the church sign. The white Ford Expedition. The same question. The same name.
He didn’t recognize me. I hadn’t recognized him. Two chance meetings. Same stranger. Same card. Same Ron. Very strange, right?
 
My synchronicities with September 11, 2001 actually began two months earlier, in July, when my wife and I set out on an epic road-trip along the East Coast. We started at Niagara Falls, wound through Buffalo, crossed the width of New York State, and somehow got lost near Lake George. A wrong turn took us north into Vermont, then south again through Albany until we reached a fork in the road. The sign was unmistakable: straight ahead lay New York City; turn right and you’d end up in little Lee, Massachusetts. We chose Lee—deciding we’d save Manhattan for another, longer trip—and spent a peaceful night in that quiet New England town. Had we gone left, we would have stood beneath the Twin Towers one last time while they still touched the sky.
A few days later we flew home from Boston Logan—on American Airlines Flight 11 (a direct flight to LAX), with an 8:00 a.m. departure, the very same aircraft that, ten weeks later, would become the first to strike the North Tower.
 
Ten years after that, still carrying the weight of those coincidences, I sold two dusty Cadillac bicycles that had been gathering cobwebs in my garage. The buyer was a soft-spoken man visiting Austin for the inaugural Formula 1 Grand Prix at the brand-new Circuit of the Americas. He’d come to town planning to rent a single bike to ride around the city, but when he spotted both of mine he decided to buy the pair—one for himself and one as a gift for a friend so they could explore Austin together. As we loaded the bikes into his truck he mentioned, almost in passing, that he had lost his wife—a flight attendant—on American Airlines Flight 11 on September 11, 2001. In that moment the circle closed: the same plane that had carried my wife and me safely home one summer morning had, on another morning, taken his wife forever.
 
For a decade, I’d grown used to normal synchronicities—those curious little winks from God. Like if I was painting a purple frog with yellow dots, suddenly I’d see purple spotted frogs on a billboards, or overhear someone mention yellow polkadotted, frogs. Coincidences, yes—but familiar. But now I’m experiencing something I call oddities? They’re different. Rare. Deep. Unsettling. They are synchronicities nested inside synchronicities—events so layered, so precise, that the air around them feels thick with energy. You don’t just notice them. You feel them. And in the two weeks before 9/11, that’s exactly what was happening to me. One after another. No explanation. No pattern I could name. They’re like you’re living within a dream. Just a growing sense that something—something massive—was shifting beneath the surface.
 
I had no idea why. I only knew: This was different than normal synchronicity. 
 
In the middle of the week before the 9/11 event, I heard that you could sync Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon with a specific version of The Wizard of Oz—turn off the movie’s sound and the music would sync perfectly with specific events in the film. So I purchased both on eBay. While browsing, I also noticed a seller offering a rare rock opera CD featuring Roger Waters in collaboration with David Bowie, and I bought that too.
 
On Saturday, September 8, 2001, the Dark Side of the Moon CD arrived. I hadn’t listened to it in years, so on Tuesday morning, September 11, I popped it into my car stereo while driving to work. I was on the 10 Freeway heading into downtown Los Angeles when traffic came to an absolute halt—an overturned truck five miles ahead had shut everything down. Frustrated, I exited at Rosemead Boulevard, turned around, and took the 210 route instead. At that exact moment, the album reached the chaotic public-address section: distorted, overlapping voices saying things like “Live for today, gone tomorrow…” and flight calls.
• The sound builds with a Doppler-shifted engine roar,
• It ends with a loud explosion/crash sound — it sounds like a plane or helicopter hitting something specific.
• The “crash” is followed by a heartbeat fading into “Time.”
It was so loud and obnoxious on a Tuesday morning—and with the intense traffic backup—I turned it off in frustration and switched to the radio.
 
That’s when I heard the eerie words: a plane had just flown into the first World Trade Center building. The newsman said it was a small plane, that the skies were foggy, and that it wasn’t much to see. But a little while later as I was driving near Eagles Nest - still crawling toward work, another plane hit the second tower. That’s when the announcer said the cryptic words: “We are under attack.”
 
When I finally pulled into the parking garage at California Plaza, the morning had already unraveled into something unrecognizable. I hurried up to the 25th floor, still rattled, and dove straight into my cash-same day trades—executing repurchase agreements, rolling commercial paper, for our short-term funds. Everything clicked along on autopilot until, without warning, the trading floor detonated in three simultaneous words:
 
“Oh my God!”
 
The first tower had collapsed. I was standing beside the floor-to-ceiling window that framed all of downtown Los Angeles like a postcard. Far below and to the right sat the old Italian Renaissance husk of the Church of the Open Door—abandoned now, its ornate façade gathering dust—flanked by the gleaming new First Interstate Tower, the tallest building west of the Mississippi. Years later we learned it had been a secondary target that same morning, one plane that never made it to its mark. 
 
Strangely, the entire finance industry had been primed for catastrophe long before any of us ever heard the name al-Qaeda. Eighteen months earlier, the phantom menace of Y2K had loomed: programmers in the 1960s and 70s had lazily coded two-digit years, and the calendar flip from ’99 to ’00 threatened to scramble every mainframe on the planet. Banks, brokerages, and bond desks like ours had spent fortunes stress-testing systems, mirroring data across the Hudson in New Jersey, and issuing every trader a laptop and a cell phone that docked into desktop cradles “just in case.” That preparation turned out to be the silent miracle of September 11. While the smoldering crater in Lower Manhattan swallowed the physical heart of American capital markets, the digital nervous system blinked, rerouted, and kept pulsing. By the time I fought my way back across the 101 Freeway—cell phone pressed to my ear, executing the last trades of the morning from the slow lane—the back-office engines in Hoboken and Jersey City were already humming. Two days later, when the NYSE bell rang again, the plumbing held. Miracle… or meticulous contingency?
 
Now the freakiest thing of all.
Wednesday night, September 12, I couldn’t sleep. The city still smelled like jet fuel and panic, even three thousand miles away. I, dimmed the lights, and finally did what I’d bought the things for: I synced The Dark Side of the Moon to The Wizard of Oz—sound off on the TV, Pink Floyd bleeding through the TV-room speakers.
 
The whole illusion cracked open.
 
It wasn’t just clever editing or “stoner” trivia. It was a mirror.
The album’s heartbeat intro pulses as Dorothy teeters on the fence between black-and-white Kansas and the tornado. “Breathe” swells the moment she opens the farmhouse door and Technicolor explodes—the exact second “Money” kicks in with its cash-register cha-ching. The lyrics sneer “Money, it’s a crime / Share it fairly but don’t take a slice of my pie” while the Munchkins parade in lockstep, banking emeralds that are fake, handed out behind the curtain by a humbug in a hot-air balloon. I rewound three times. Every sync felt surgical:
•  The Scarecrow’s “If I only had a brain” plea lands on the lyric “I’m all right, Jack, keep your hands off my stack.”
•  The Wicked Witch’s sky-written SURRENDER DOROTHY appears as the band chants “Any colour you like, they’re all blue.”
•  The flying monkeys swarm on the distorted screams of “The Great Gig in the Sky.”
But the real gut-punch is the Emerald City itself: mandatory green glasses for every citizen, turning brass and paste into glittering wealth. A fiat trick. A central-bank sleight of hand.
 
L. Frank Baum wrote the original book in 1900, smack in the middle of the free-silver crusade. Populists wanted bimetallism—gold and silver—to loosen the grip of Eastern bankers. Dorothy’s slippers in the novel are silver, not ruby (MGM changed them for Technicolor pop— just another sleight of hand by Hollywood). She walks the yellow brick road—gold standard—with silver shoes, hunting a wizard who promises value but delivers smoke. Then 1912: the Titanic sinks, conveniently drowning three of the richest men on earth—Astor, Guggenheim, Widener—all vocal opponents of the Federal Reserve. A year later, in a shuttered Christmas-week session, Congress births the Fed on Jekyll Island scrip. Gold gets locked in vaults; paper floods the prairie.
 
Fast-forward to 1973. Nixon kills the gold window for good. That same year, Pink Floyd drops Dark Side—an album obsessed with time, madness, and money. Twenty-eight years later, on the morning the towers fall, I’m stuck in traffic while the album rings like a death knell. Coincidence? Art anticipating life? Or something darker—an allegorical breadcrumb trail left by artists who saw the strings?
Watch it yourself. Mute the movie, cue the album at the third MGM lion roar, and tell me the collapse of the Twin Towers—cathedrals of global finance—doesn’t feel like the moment the curtain finally rips, the wizard exposed, the emerald glasses shattered on the marble floor.
 
But now one last little kick to the ribs.
Thursday morning, September 13. The city was still holding its breath—flags at half-mast, fighter jets carving contrails overhead, every radio station looping the same grainy footage. I’m driving on the 210 Freeway, windows up, AC off, the rare Roger Waters–David Bowie rock opera finally spinning in the deck. I was passing (once again) the same place I had heard two days before the second tower being hit at the city of Eagles Nest—in the San Gabriel foothills—when the track shifted. A low synth pulse, then Roger Waters sliced through the speakers: 
The prophet reclined On the Golan Heights/Ohhh, the lonely boys/He said, this land is my land To the Shiites/Ooooh, the lonely boys/And Jehova looked up from the sea of Galilee beneath/He said, I see you, you thief/This land is my land/And this sand is my sand/And this band is my band/Oh the lonely boys/Lookin' over their shoulder/Checkin out every boulder in the park/Where the gates are closed from hate/After dark/And the Pope rolled up in his armored van/He fell on his knees and kissed the land/He said something that I did not understand/It was in polish/Then up stepped an aide/He said, I will translate/Here is what His Holiness said:/'I am the Chief Jesuit.'/'This land is Jesus' land.'/'And that is all'?'All that there is to it.'/Hail Mary Mother of God/And in New York City/The business man in his mohair suit/In the world trade center/Puffs on his cheroot/And he said,/Well I don't care who owns the desert/sands/My brief Is with the hydrocarbons underneath/And the sea of battle rages/Around the ancient tombs/And mother nature licks her wounds/And the lonely boys locked in their towers of faith/Who are nervous in the park/When the gates are closed after dark/Ooooh, the lonely boys/In their towers of faith/Ooooh, the lonely boys Locked in their towers of faith.
 
My arms prickled. The hair on my neck stood straight up. Waters took the next verse, cold and theatrical: I nearly swerved into the guardrail. Two days earlier, towers had fallen—literal cathedrals of capital reduced to dust. And here was this obscure rock opera recorded decades before, mocking the indifference of the gods in the penthouse suites with the /timeless struggle brought now to our shores 6000 miles from Jerusalem. I punched the eject button, but the chorus looped in my skull the rest of the drive to work in my tower….here I was the most voluminous U.S. Taxable Bond Trader in the country with 36,000 trades a year and I’m having these words swirl in my ears—Ooooh, the lonely boys Locked in their towers of faith. In this earthly realm what are you going to do with all these words in your head and what’s it all about anyways?
 
For me, the pathway to September 11, 2001, was a tapestry of layered oddities—those rare, dream-thick synchronicities that began with a stranger in a white Expedition asking about my church and my colleague Ron Bettenhausen, reappearing days later at a 7-Eleven parking lot off of route 66 with the same question, the same card, the same name—escalating through the eerie crash of Dark Side of the Moonsyncing with radio reports of planes striking towers, the Wizard of Oz unveiling centuries of monetary illusion under emerald glasses, Y2K’s quiet miracle keeping markets alive amid the rubble, and finally Roger Waters snarling about businessmen in the World Trade Center puffing cheroots while “lonely boys locked in their towers of faith” crumbled to dust, all converging in the shadow of the abandoned Church of the Open Door and the secondary target beside it, leaving me forever convinced that the universe had been whispering, then shouting, a warning I could feel in my bones but never quite translate until the sky itself fell and then wondering what it’s all about.
 
In Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, ordinary people are inexplicably pulled toward Devils Tower, each haunted by the same vision, the same unshakable compulsion. In the late 1990s something eerily similar happened, only the meeting place was the newborn Internet. As soon as most homes had dial-up or DSL, forums exploded with thousands of strangers confessing the same thing: they kept seeing 11:11 (or 1:11, 11.11) on digital clocks, microwaves, VCRs, license plates, receipts—everywhere. It wasn’t just noticing a number; it carried a jolt, a visceral tug, like a silent summons. For the first time in history, a global collective realized they weren’t alone in the feeling. We traded theories on message boards: awakening? angels? premonition? Then, on the morning of September 11, 2001, the skyline of Manhattan displayed two perfect vertical 11s—twin rectangles standing side by side exactly like the digital 11:11 that had been stalking so many of us for years. When the towers fell, the phenomenon vanished almost overnight, as if the signal had reached its destination. Just like in Close Encounters, the obsession dissolved the moment the “mothership” arrived. An entire invisible population had been drawn, without knowing why, to the same terrible appointment.