9/11: The Wingdings Prophecies
(Continued from previous page)
When Microsoft introduced its new Webdings font several years later, it only strengthened the convictions of those who believed there were hidden meanings embedded in the software. And no wonder. Here's what "NYC" looks like in Webdings:
NYC = 
How coincidental could that be?
The likeliest explanation I've come across speculates that the designers of Webdings, having learned from experience that people with too much time on their hands would hunt for secret messages, intentionally planted the rebus "I love New York" to taunt them.
The Doomsday Font
The even more bizarre notion that digitized fonts might actually be prophetic first gained currency in 1999, when doomsday predictions of all kinds abounded. Some clever wag discovered that typing out the word "MILLENNIUM" in Wingdings produces this dramatic result:
Disseminated to a doomsday-obsessed, worldwide audience via the Internet, this nugget of trivia was soon being characterized as "eerie," "spooky," and "a weird coincidence." As we know — because, after all, we're still here — millennial doomsayers of every stripe were ultimately proven wrong, but by that time "Fontlore" was already veering away from vague doomsaying toward pure prophecy.
Which brings us, finally, to "Q33NY," which according to email lore was the flight number of one of the airliners that crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. In Wingdings the string of characters looks like this:
Obviously we're supposed to interpret this as a direct reference to the terrorist attack. It's all there — the airplane, the "twin towers" (okay, that's a stretch — they look like symbols for documents to me), a skull and crossbones (symbolizing death, of course) and the Star of David (apparently meant to represent anti-Israeli sentiments on the part of the hijackers).
Problem is, neither of the airliners involved in the attack on the World Trade Center bore the number "Q33NY." The actual flight numbers were as follows:
- American Airlines Flight 11
- United Airlines Flight 175
Nor does the character string "Q33NY" represent the FAA-registered tail number of either aircraft:
- Flight 11 tail number: N334AA
- Flight 175 tail number: N612UA
It's clear, then, that someone carefully fabricated the sequence of numbers and letters in "Q33NY" to achieve the desired effect in Wingdings.
No "spooky prophecy" or "weird coincidence" there — just an Internet hoax.
• Index of September 11 Rumors
Further reading:
ADL: Internet Rumors About Microsoft Wingdings Are False
The Anti-Defamation League pooh-poohs current and past "urban myths" about the Wingdings font.
