AN iconic album cover featuring the Swindon Advertiser is at the centre of one of the strangest 9/11 conspiracy theories yet.

Breakfast in America is the best-known album by Super-tramp, the multi-million selling 1970s rock band whose keyboard player, Rick Davies, grew up in a house at the bottom of Eastcott Hill.

As any self-respecting connoisseur of Swindon rock trivia knows, the back cover of the album shows band members sitting at the counter of a diner, reading their hometown newspapers.

The album’s front cover shows a waitress and a New York skyline constructed entirely of food packaging, crockery and kitchen implements.

Above the scene is the band’s name, and the second and third letters are partially obscured by models of the World Trade Centre’s twin towers. This small part of the cover has set the thriving and peculiar world of online conspiracy theorists abuzz.

Some unnamed person, or perhaps several of them, discovered that if the image is reversed the tops of the letters clearly read as ‘911’.

Some commentators see this as either an omen or an outright hint by powerful, shadowy organisations of the disaster to come in 2001, a little over 22 years after the album was released.

Googling ‘Supertramp 911 conspiracy’ yields an array of oddness.

Among the sites where the image has prompted discussion is one called The Avalon Forum, which is billed as containing “Chronicles of Human Awakening”. One post reads: “The music industry is entirely controlled by the PTW and nobody gets a recording contract with a major record label without first being initiated in a secret society and selling their souls to their new owners.”

The PTW, or Powers That Were, are said by certain conspiracy theorists to be a group of ancient and possibly alien beings who control every aspect of the planet’s destiny.

A writer on a site called Lunatic Outpost quotes from a song by the band called Crime of the Century: “Now they're planning the crime of the century/Well what will it be?/Read all about their schemes and adventuring/Yes, it's well worth a fee.”

The album cover joins a raft of other supposed portents of the terrorist outrage. These include an episode of the Simpsons in which Lisa holds up a travel brochure offering a nine-dollar trip to new York in which the number appears to the left of the twin towers, spelling out ‘911’.

In another example, 10 and 20 dollar bills, if folded in a certain way, are said to show images of the destruction of the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Rick Davies, who now lives in America, seems not to have deemed the matter worthy of comment, and nor has any other band member.