As to the spider itself, it’s an optical illusion. All that fancy spirograph looking lines that make it harder to forge (nicknamed cobwebs) are what cause the effect. Well, that and the border line the spider is sitting on. If you look at the pattern and follow the arcs of the lines, you’ll see the spider is nothing more than the end/edge of part of the design having been visually cut off from the rest of the cobweb by the border line.

Short version of this is easy, your eyes are playing tricks on you.

Now if you really want to see something unexpected, get a really strong magnifier and check out the upper parts (lintel?) of the washington monument on an older $5 bill. In the office, we had an old microfiche machine we used for that. You might be surprised at the tiny writing on that bill. Just a note, the new $5s have it much larger and you don’t even need a magnifier to read it.

Have fun, and stop jumping on the conspiracy bandwagon. 99% of the time, it’s just somebodies paranoid imagination running away with them. (Oh yes, the 9/11 thing, it looks far more like male genitalia than the twin towers, with or without smoke… Though my first impression was a tree by picasso. Just my opinion.)

“And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.”

coincidence? :-}

I usually like your blog but this post is poorly-written and irresponsible. It has the substance and references of a 7th grader’s history class essay, as if the author simply googled “dollar bill conspiracy” and cited the top 10 links. There are many interesting stories behind the imagery on currency. Twenty minutes of research in legitimate academic resources would provide enough of a variety to make this an interesting and substantiative survey of current theories.

Also you misspelled “pluribus” (as “pliribus”) in the last sentence.