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A great deal of What if? soul-searching and hand-wringing follows in the wake of any disaster. Should we have foreseen it coming? Would lives and property have been saved if we had taken preventive measures? Did we miss signs we should have noticed, or ignore signs we should have heeded? In the case of the September 11 hijackings, some signs were definitely noticed, if not heeded. News reports indicate that at least some of the 19 hijackers who took over four flights on September 11 made dry runs several weeks in advance, taking trips on cross-country flights headed for San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego from east coast departure points such as Boston's Logan Airport: A tale which quickly spread after the hijackings was that actor James Woods had noticed four men of Middle Eastern appearance acting strangely on a flight he made from Boston to Los Angeles a week before the hijackings, but when he reported his suspicions, they were not taken seriously: That Woods noticed unusual behavior and reported it to authorities was true, although some of the details in the initial news reports were wrong. Woods' Boston-to-Los Angeles flight actually took place the previous month, in August 2001, not one week before the World Trade Center attacks: Whether the four airline passengers reported by Woods were in fact determined to have been connected to the 9/11 attacks is something that, as far as we know, the FBI has not disclosed. But Woods himself said that he identified two of the men he saw as hijackers who took part in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and that he unofficially heard through other sources that all four men he observed were indeed involved with the airline hijackings on 11 September 2001:
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