I just spent a good hour mapping events from Lost.
I noticed that Rousseau’s crash happens the same year that Hurley’s crazy friend hears the “4 8 15 16 23 42” broadcast at his listening post. I surmise that these events happen at the same time, AND that this point in time marks one of the “time shifts” on the Island. Which is to say, the various times the Skippers (Sawyer, Juliette, Miles, Charlotte, Faraday, Jin, Locke, Rose, and Bernard) go to while the “record is skipping” are also times where the Island is visible to the outside world.
We know that one of the Time Flashes occurs when the drug smuggler plane crashes (Locke sees it happen) — did the time flash cause the plane to crash?
This then suggests that the other crashes also happen at Time Flashes: Black Rock, Desmond’s sail boat, Henry Gale Balloon, Ajira Air (remember, the plane “flashes” from night time 2008 to daytime 2007 before crash-landing)
The convoluted cause-effect scenarios here are super confusing, but potentially crazy-awesome.
I still have a lot of details to work out, but my prediction is that after the Incident, the folks at the Swan site skip to 2007 on the day of the Ajira crash. Thus, when Jacob says “they’re coming” to Not-Locke moments before he dies, he’s referring to Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Miles, Hurley, Sayid, and Jin, who arrived in 2007 4 days ago and are traveling towards the Statue.
