A Star Trek Conspiracy?

I haven't been duplicating post subjects between my (mostly moribund) personal blog and here, but I'm making an exception in this case. This is big. Really big. Well, maybe not.

I just know that at least Chris has been watching Star Trek: 2.0 on G4, and last night they aired the last episode of the second season, "Assignment: Earth." I've been sitting on a potentially explosive bit of trivia about this episode for around ten years now, and when the trivia crawl from G4 didn't come through I knew I had to finally go public with what I know.

This episode has a strange double coincidence with real-life events. Spock mentions that the same day the US is launching an orbital nuclear warhead platform there will also be an important assassination. The missile shown in the episode is actually stock footage of the launch of Apollo 4, the first unmanned test of a Saturn V. Less than a week after the episode's first airing Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated the same day as the launch of Apollo 6, the second unmanned test of a Saturn V. Spock's other "prediction" of a government coup in Asia did not happen that day.

I discovered this around ten years ago when researching the source of the famous inter-stage separation footage from Saturn V flights. Its appearance in this Star Trek episode nails Apollo 4 as one of the sources, since it was the only Saturn V flight to predate this.

Am I the only person to ever notice this? I looked around a lot when I was correcting the Wikipedia entry on Apollo 6 a while back and could find no other references, but I still didn't have the nerve to come forward. Others have noticed the King assassination closely followed the episode's original airdate, but as far as I know my observation of the Saturn V coincidence has been unpublished (other than in my own e-mails to skeptical, er, unimpressed friends). Until now.

I'm adding it to Wikipedia. Then it will turn up everywhere....