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A newly resurfaced video has gone viral in which actor James Woods recalled telling Bill O’Reilly that he believed he was on a flight that was a dry run for 9/11 a month before the attacks
In the clip, which has been viewed more than 779,000 times on X , the Oscar-nominated actor — for Salvador (1986) and Ghosts of Mississippi (1996) — said he became suspicious of four individuals while aboard an August 2001 flight from Boston to Los Angeles.
“Without going into the details of what made me suspicious of these four men, although it would have been blatantly obvious to the most casual observer, I took it upon myself to go to the flight attendant and ask to speak to the pilot of the plane,” Woods said during his appearance on O’Reilly’s Fox News show on Feb. 15, 2002. “I reported to him that I felt that the four men … (were) going to hijack this plane … Their behaviour was such that I felt they were going to hijack the plane.”
Woods told O’Reilly that he didn’t take saying the word “hijack” lightly and that he later found out that the crew made a report of his suspicions to the FAA.
When 9/11 happened, Woods recalled the flight — and the four passengers — and called his local FBI office.
The next morning agents were outside his house. “I said, ‘How do you know where I live?’ and they said, ‘You know, we’re the FBI.'”
Woods went on to say that after the identities of the 19 hijackers were revealed, he had identified “for sure” two of them — one who was aboard Flight 175, which crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center, and another aboard Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon.
“One was on Flight 175 and one was on Flight 77, and I’ve been told unofficially that … all four of them were terrorists involved,” Woods said.
“So it was basically a rehearsal?” O’Reilly asked.
“What’s significant about this is it was a rehearsal with four men,” Woods said, contradicting statements from Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged “20th hijacker,” who was arrested in August 2001 after his suspicious efforts to obtain flight training.
“The fact that these two people were identified by myself and other people, and ended up dying on two of the four flights on September 11th shows that there was (planning),” Woods said.
Woods revealed how he suspected four men might be hijackers
Woods told O’Reilly that his first instinct that something was amiss with the four was that they boarded the plane with no hand luggage.
“I notice behaviour because I’m an actor; I just kind of observe people,” he said. “When the flight attendant came up to them, they ignored her like she didn’t exist, which is kind of a Taliban idea of womanhood … their disrespect for women is so extraordinary.”
The four also didn’t order alcohol. “I thought they were four law enforcement officers or four terrorists,” he said.
Many people probably don’t know this story related to 9/11:
— Alex Boge (@alexboge) September 8, 2026
On August 1, 2001, actor James Woods was on a flight from Boston to Los Angeles when four men in first class made him uneasy enough that he alerted the flight crew. Woods thought their behavior looked less like ordinary…
Woods also cleared up the rumours that he told the FBI in advance and that they had ignored his warnings.
“One thing I must clear up that has been sort of misreported in the press. I did not report this to the FBI before September 11,” he said. “They’ll say, ‘Oh, you told the FBI and they didn’t do anything.’ That’s completely and utterly wrong.”
A week after the attacks, ABC News reported that the flight appeared to have been a dry run for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, in which hijackers seized and crashed four commercial planes, including one flying the same Boston-to-Los Angeles route.
The attacks killed nearly 3,000 innocent Americans and international citizens. Twenty-five years later, a shocking 9,677 first responders and survivors have died of illnesses tied to 9/11, the New York Post reported.
Mark Wahlberg made controversial 9/11 claim
Woods wasn’t the only famous actor to later discuss a connection to one of the 9/11 flights.
Mark Wahlberg was initially scheduled to fly on one of the ill-fated planes, but he made a “fortuitous decision to fly to Toronto.”
In an interview with Men’s Journal, Wahlberg said if he had been aboard Flight 93, it wouldn’t have crashed. “If I was on that plane with my kids, it wouldn’t have went down like it did… there would have been a lot of blood in that first-class cabin and then me saying, ‘Okay, we’re going to land somewhere safely, don’t worry,’” he said.
He later apologized, telling TMZ , “To suggest I would have done anything differently than the passengers on that plane was irresponsible.”
mdaniell@postmedia.com
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