During several interviews for a story on the Athens shoot, I encountered an inevitable yet disturbing allusion expected to be included in Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds: images reminiscent of the aftermath of 9/11.

As an eye witness to the flight of the second plane over The Meadowlands that Tuesday morning in 2001 (and later a regular witness to the human agony expressed by survivors for weeks on Pier A in Hoboken - candle-lighting, flower-placing, poster-posting and uncontrollable sobbing - I have great trepidation over the use of similar images planned for some of the scenes in War of the Worlds.

For almost a year after the attack on the World Trade Center, I struggled to do my job as a reporter, interviewing survivors and the family of the slain.

I still can't watch Independence Day.

Intellectually, I realize that no post 9/11 science fiction depicting the end of the world and the massive human tragedy associated with it can avoid the icons of 9/11 - nor can escape the way people mourn their loss, especially posting pictures of loved ones in the desperate hope that some stranger may have seen these faces in the massive human movement Spielberg has planned for some of his scenes.

As a member of a team of reporters whose award-winning coverage depicted the day of the disaster here on the Jersey side of the Hudson River, I understand how necessary these images are to making any futuristic disaster appear real - and Spielberg being such a stickler for detail, cannot possibly avoid these images if he hopes to amass the emotional impact of the moment - as painful as such images will be to see in what most people are calling a summer block buster.

These images, however, are bound to propel him and his film into the heart of heated controversy, because such visions are bound to pull the scabs off of wounds still not fully healed and turn our unfocused outrage (unjustly) in his direction.

I haven't a clue what I could advise him to do, to insert these images or to leave them out, to draw the logical connection between that real invasion and the one he is representing in the film or to sweep the matter under the rug of our subconscious with the hope that we will somehow miss how closely the fictional disaster is to the one that really happened.

I already know that the misty, smoke-filled scenes in Spielberg's film will transport me back to Pier A in Hoboken where I saw each morning for weeks after the attack, staring at the smoldering skyline, trying to make sense of what I saw and the flood of emotion I felt. I know I will again see the bent heads, the tear-stained faces, the mothers with children posting pictures of missing fathers. I will again see the messages scratched into the tiles, last words loved ones hope the wind will carry off to reach the spirits of the lost.

I already know that when I see these scenes on the screen this June, I will not be seeing the faces of extras hired for the film, but of the crying mothers whose sons did not return home, of the frightened Port Authority workers who could not return to their jobs for fear that the attack might happen again.

In the wake of 9/11, many people on Pier A turned to me for answers because they had routinely seen me writing there over the prior years. They mistakenly presumed because I sought to document the moment in words and pictures that I had answers. I did not. I still don't. But I'm certain when War of the Worlds comes out in June, the painful allusions Spielberg paints will turn these same troubled faces in his direction, and incur their wrath when he cannot supply any more answers than I did.