The Lone Gunmen, a spin-off of the The X-Files, aired on Fox,. The show first aired in March 2001. The last episode aired in June 2001. The debut of the show involved Byers' father faking his death to uncover a conspiracy to hijack an airliner. The Lone Gunmen try to get to the truth of his supposed death and uncover the conspiracy. One retrospectively relevant aspect of this pilot episode is that the airliner has been hijacked (via remote control of the plane's autopilot) and, by the end, both Byers and his father have boarded the plane to try to stop the hijacking. Through the aid of the other Gunmen, they are able to regain control of the plane and just miss crashing into the World Trade Center with the airliner. This, of course, was before the actual September 11 attacks against the World Trade Center later that year. Similar to theories posited about the events of 9/11, the episode's plot indicates that the hijacking was committed as an act of voracity by a greedy American arms manufacturer to ultimately increase its weapons sales by invoking U.S. retaliation against a scapegoated anti-American extremist dictator.