Jim Jones Plotted 9/11-Like Attack

◼ Cult leader wanted to crash a plane into San Francisco - Scott James/baycitizen.org

Twenty-five years before the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, a religious extremist plotted to hijack a commercial airliner — filled with 200 or so unsuspecting passengers — and deliberately crash it. The target was San Francisco. And the would-be perpetrator was not a jihadist, but the man who would become one of history’s more infamous villains: the cult leader Jim Jones of the Peoples Temple, whose headquarters was then on Geary Boulevard in San Francisco. With the hijacking plot, described in a coming book and recently confirmed by a former Peoples Temple leader, Jones is said to have wanted to cause death on a scale that the world would not soon forget.... The San Francisco hijacking plot progressed to the point where beginning in 1975, Maria Katsaris, 21, a close associate and lover of Jones, attended the Sierra Academy of Aeronautics in Oakland. Academy records confirm that a church paid her tuition. Katsaris earned a private pilot’s license and began commercial jet training, but church officials instructed her to attend school only long enough to learn how to take the plane’s controls after storming the cockpit and killing the pilots

__________________ Coincidentally, Jim Jones second-in-command-right-hand-man is in the news these days, too: ◼ Woman won't be jailed for feeding bears at her home - Glenda Anderson/Press Democrat via mercury news ◼ Sentencing deferred in bear case - Ukiah Daily Journal