Michael Prescott's Blog

A paranormal mystery

Recently I've become somewhat addicted to mystery fiction from the early part of the 20th century. I started with locked-room mysteries, which were very popular at that time. The first locked-room mystery ever written is the famous Edgar Allen Poe short story "Murders in the Rue Morgue."

One of the most famous of all locked-room mysteries is a unique short story called "The Problem of Cell 13, written by Jacques Futrelle. I say it's unique because it involves no actual crime. Futrelle's protagonist is a wizened scientist whose international reputation as a savant has earned him the popular nickname The Thinking Machine; his actual name is Augustus S.F.X. Van Dusen, Ph.D., LL.D., F.R.S., M.D., M.D.S. , etc. In this story, The Thinking Machine simply accepts a bet that he can escape from a locked prison cell within a week using only his wits, or as he would say, using the power of logic.

The story has been anthologized many times and is well worth a read. Futrelle, knowing a good thing when he had it, wrote many more stories featuring Dr. Van Dusen and and his sidekick, intrepid reporter Hutchinson Hatch. They do not quite measure up to Holmes and Watson, but they do make a good team, and many of the stories are quite ingenious. I've been working my way through a more-or-less complete compendium of them. Though remembered only by mystery buffs today, Futrelle still has a following and even an official website.

 

Jacques Futrelle

 

When I got to one of the last stories in the collection, "The Tragedy of the Life Raft," I found something that surprised me and suggested a possible paranormal element – specifically, precognition. The story concerns a miserly usurer haunted by a vision of a life raft at sea. The vision appears three times in the story.

For many minutes Peter Ordway sat with dull, lusterless eyes, gazing through the window into the void of a leaden sky. Slowly, as he looked, the sky became a lashing, mist-covered sea, a titanic chaos of water; and upon its troubled bosom rode a life raft to which three persons were clinging. Now the frail craft was lifted up, up to the dizzy height of a giant wave; now it shot down sickeningly into the hissing trough beyond; again, for minutes it seemed altogether lost in the far-plunging spume. Peter Ordway shuddered and closed his eyes.

... a lashing, mist-covered sea; a titanic chaos of water, and upon its troubled bosom rode a life raft to which three persons were clinging ... [This description is repeated verbatim a little later.]

What struck me about these passages will become immediately obvious when I explain the denouement of Futrelle's life. He and his wife Lily had been traveling abroad and decided to return to America on the maiden voyage of a luxury liner. This was in April, 1912, and the liner was the RMS Titanic. As the ship was going down, Futrelle frantically implored his wife to board a lifeboat and eventually succeeded in making her do so. He himself refused to board one of the boats and gallantly went down with the ship.

You can see why “The Tragedy of the Life Raft” got my attention. As we learn in the unraveling of the mystery:

The tale began with the foundering of the steamship Neptune, Liverpool to Boston, ninety-one passengers and crew, some thirty-two years ago. In mid-ocean she was smashed to bits by a gale, and went down. Of those aboard only nine persons reached shore alive.

So we have an ocean liner that sinks, a life raft (close enough to a lifeboat) carrying a handful of survivors, and to top it all off, the repeated use of the adjective “titanic.” Moreover, a character in the story is obsessed with this memory and keeps returning to it as an almost mystical vision. I wondered if Futrell had actually anticipated his own death, at least on a subconscious level.

It would be interesting to think so. But when I looked into the matter a little further, a more prosaic explanation presented itself. The story was first published in August, 1912, in a publication that called itself, rather immodestly, The Popular Magazine. Note that the Titanic went down in April, 1912, so this publication was posthumous. In fact, the magazine cover announces “the last stories of Jacques Futrelle,” a slight exaggeration, since, as far as I can tell, there is only Futrelle story in the issue.

 

August 1912 issue of The Popular Magazine. Cover art by N.C. Wyeth

 

Bearing all this in mind, we can see what may have happened. It’s entirely possible that an enterprising editor, seeking to remind readers of Futrelle’s tragic and highly newsworthy death, inserted the adjective “titanic” into the narrative, using it three times to call attention to it. “A titanic chaos of water” is not an obvious choice of words, and the adjective may well have been added to the manuscript by another hand.

This would still leave the other elements of the story that presage Futrelle’s death: the sinking of an ocean liner, survivors on a life raft, etc. But without the word “titanic,” the connection is much less obvious. Futrelle wrote a lot of stories – he cranked them out month after month from 1905 to 1912 – and the idea of a ship lost at sea is hardly original.

Overall, then, I’m inclined to think that, like Dr. Van Dusen, I’ve been able to apply logic to solve the problem of Futrelle’s last story. As The Thinking Machine likes to say, "Two and two make four — not sometimes, but all the time."

But I could be wrong. Maybe an editor didn’t add the word “titanic.” Maybe it was in the manuscript from the start. I suppose we’ll never know.

Sad news

I'm sorry to say that our longtime commenter Bruce Siegel passed away this week. 

As I understand it, Bruce, who was in his seventies, had suffered from serious cardiovascular problems since at least 2016. 

Though I never met Bruce, I got to know him online through his many comments here and through occasional emails. After his book on precognitive dreams came out, we sometimes exchanged stories of possibly precognitive dreams we'd had. Most of mine, for some reason, involved animals — scary ones, like sharks.

I reviewed Bruce's book here. Bruce also maintained a blog of his own.

One of his last emails to me touched on the work of Stanislav Grof, who had influenced Bruce profoundly. He quoted Grof in The Cosmic Game: "The divine does not create something outside of itself, but rather by subdivisions and transformations within the field of its own being ... The various manifestations of evil are expressions of the energy that makes the split-off units of consciousness feel separate from each other. Since the divine play is unimaginable without individual protagonists, the existence of evil is absolutely essential.”

Then he added:

I love that last insight! It’s really all we need to know about suffering: without the dark side, there is no separation, no individual actors. You and I go back to Oneness. Ecstatic, but after a while, boring (evidently).

Good luck, Bruce, in the next phase of your adventure. I'm sorry we won't have you with us anymore. 

 

 

Dream a little dream

Here’s some big news: our own longtime commenter Bruce Siegel has written a book – and it’s a good one!

The book is Dreaming the Future: How Our Dreams Prove Psychic Ability is Real, and Why It Matters, and it recounts Bruce's longtime experiment in precognitive dreaming. (The printed book is available now, and a Kindle edition will be out on July 15.) 

Bruce begins by explaining that until he was in his mid-forties he was a knee-jerk skeptic, though not of the militant variety. He simply dismissed all talk of the paranormal as irritating nonsense. But in the early 1990s, his worldview started to change. He writes:

I found myself becoming interested in certain ideas, experiences, and phenomena I had long dismissed, even ridiculed.

For one thing, I began to pay attention to the fact that some of my dreams seemed to correlate with later events in ways that were difficult to explain .…

But despite my newfound openness, I wasn’t blind to the laws of probability. I reasoned that given a large number of dreams and the potential for matching them with an even larger pool of waking events, striking similarities were bound to occur from time to time.

Inspired by J.W. Dunne’s famous 1927 book An Experiment with Time, Bruce decided to document his dreams and see how well they matched up with future events. Ultimately he logged 241 dreams. Remarkably enough, approximately one in four of them came true – “usually within hours.” Some came true almost immediately after waking. This success rate is far above random chance, especially considering the decidedly out-of-the-ordinary subject matter in many of these dreams.

A large part of the book concerns the methods Bruce used to remember his dreams and record them in detail, and the ways in which he improved his methodology. For example, he found that a dream, in order to be worth recording, had to involve something specific and unusual. A dream about eating breakfast had no value in his experiment, because he ate breakfast every day. Recurrent dreams were not helpful, because it could be assumed that, if he dreamed of the same thing over and over, eventually it would have to correlate with something in real life, if only by chance. He also developed precise criteria for distinguishing among dreams of no precognitive value, dreams that might or might not have had precognitive value, and dreams that were definite hits. He explains how he tabulated the statistical results, and how the results might vary if different criteria were applied.

Though Bruce describes a number of his dreams and the real-life observations that correlated with them, he recognizes that the reader is not likely to be completely convinced by someone else’s experience. That’s why the main focus of the book is to encourage us to carry out the experiment for ourselves. He provides a great deal of useful advice on how to get started.

The book inspired me to begin my own experiment. So far, I can’t claim results as good as one in four. I would say I’ve had one likely hit, one "maybe," and the rest have been duds. But I haven’t been doing it for very long, and I’m not yet skilled at remembering my dreams.

Besides the important contribution Dreaming the Future makes to the literature on precognitive dreaming, the book also offers Bruce’s reflections on the wider meaning of it all. In a chapter titled “The Real Subject Here is Consciousness,” informed in part by his study of near-death experiences and related phenomena, he suggests that

time and consciousness are inseparable. Time, in this view, is actually a dimension of reality created by consciousness within itself, so that we might explore certain kinds of experience.

And the same is true for what we call “space.”

Time and space, in other words, are props devised by Mind for much the same reason that storytellers and game designers devise the rules and frameworks that characterize their creations: to spawn worlds within which epic adventures can unfold .…

[I]n recalling these deeper truths, in discovering that we are more than we think we are, we find reason to trust that the difficulties we face in this life aren’t the whole story.

The book closes with an extensive list of resources for further study and several appendices fleshing out the dreams covered in the main text. Full disclosure: my name crops up a couple of times in the book, once in connection with a precognitive dream described in Chapter 9, which was validated by a comment Bruce read on this blog.

Beyond all the other admirable qualities of Dreaming the Future, the book consistently addresses open-minded skeptics in a friendly, non-confrontational way. Unlike some pro-paranormal writers who stigmatize all skeptics or simply ignore them, Bruce wants to reach out and gently persuade people to open up to the possibility of precognition and try it for themselves. He takes care to consider alternative explanations for the hits he describes, and although he's personally convinced of the validity of his findings, he understands that the whole idea of foreseeing future events may strike some reasonable people as impossible or absurd.

His basic attitude is: see for yourself. He believes there's nothing special about his own precognitive abilities, and that similar results can be obtained by anyone who tries.

I liked this book a lot, both for its content and its tone. I highly recommend Dreaming the Future.

Reconsidering Dannion

Back in 2005 I wrote a post about NDEr Dannion Brinkley, who reported having an apocalyptic vision of the world's fate during his near-death experience. I found that many of the predictions had not come to pass.  

Recently I took a new look at that post. What I found is that some of the predictions now look a little better than they did nine years ago — perhaps an indication of how rocky the last decade has been. 

One thing that remains true is that the dates are mostly wrong. Events that were supposed to occur in the 1990s took place later, or have yet to transpire. Many details are wrong also. Still, Brinkley's disturbing vision is a little bit closer to reality today.

One thing to keep in mind is that Brinkley had his NDE in 1975 but didn't publish a book about it until 1994. As I wrote in the original post, 

1994 is a long time after 1975. Unless there is independent verification of Brinkley's claim that he predicted these events as early as 1975, we are justified in being a bit skeptical … Even so, let's assume that Brinkley did indeed see these visions back in 1975. How accurate are they?

For extensive quotes from Brinkley's various "visions," see the original post. Here I’ll summarize briefly. 

Visions 1 — 3 depicted general malaise in America, growing national debt, and urban violence: riots and drive-bys. An actor with the initials RR became president. 

This is all true, but much of it was in the air by 1975. However, it is fair to say that the national debt has become an even greater concern in recent years, and urban violence has now escalated to the point that big-city police departments are equipped and trained like paramilitary forces. 

Visions 4 and 5 showed the Middle East in turmoil. Jordan ceased to exist. A joint Arab-Israeli police was formed and became known for excessive brutality. Israel became isolated from the world community. The price of oil caused economic shocks, while Syria and China conspired to produce missiles capable of delivering chemical and biological agents. 

Accuracy? Well, Jordan is still around. The Israelis and Palestinians have discussed forming joint police patrols. From 2013: 

Palestinian, Israeli, and Jordanian police chiefs have been quietly meeting for the past 18 months (under the auspices of the U.S.-based Police Executive Research Forum), and ... Israeli and Palestinian police forces may soon begin joint patrols ...

It is true that Israel finds itself increasingly isolated. I don't think Syria and China are trying to build missiles together, and right now Syria (torn by civil war) has other priorities. 

Vision 6. Chernobyl and a second nuclear accident. The USSR collapsed, and the new Russia was dominated by the Georgian mafia. 

Brinkley identifies the second nuclear accident as possibly being in Norway. That’s incorrect, but the 2011 Fukushima accident in Japan could conceivably fit the general description. The USSR did collapse (though not because of Chernobyl), and the Russian mafia is very active in Georgia. 

Vision 7. A Russian strongman on a white horse emerged as a world leader on enviornmentalism. 

Vladimir Putin is hardly known as an environmentalist, but he is a quintessential strongman and has actually been pictured riding bare-chested on a horse as part of a relentless PR campaign to emphasize his macho qualities. 

Visions 8,9. Russia and China clashed along their border.

Happily this hasn’t happened yet. 

Visions 10, 11. Economic collapse worldwide. Devastating earthquakes in the US. Iran and Iraq obtained nukes and wmd. Wars in the Middle East. A chemical attack on the water supply of France. Riots in Egypt put religious fanatics in power. 

There were riots in Egypt that led to the collapse of the Mubarak regime and the temporary rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, who certainly qualify as religious fanatics. The Brotherhood's time in the spotlight was short lived; they were quickly ousted by the Egyptian military. Iran is apparently on the verge of obtaining nuclear weapons. There has been no terrorist attack on the French water supply and no worldwide economic collapse, though there have been escalating terrorist attacks in general and mounting economic problems around the world. The financial crash of 2008-2009 roiled markets and led to huge anxiety, even panic, in the US. 

Vision 12. A brilliant biological engineer developed a virus that could manufacture computer chips, which became ubiquitous and eventually were implanted in virtually all humans, with dystopian sci-fi consequences. 

No such developments have occurred, though some bio-engineers are working on "biochips," and implantable nanotechnology is very likely in the near future. 

Vision 13 advised that these dire outcomes could still be changed if people made better choices. 

In summary, the dates were clearly wrong, and many of the details are wrong, but Brinkley's forecast appears marginally more accurate than it did in 2005.

Again, we need to remember that the book came out in 1994, meaning that many of these “predictions” could have been made after the fact. But if we assume that Brinkley really did foresee these developments in 1975, and if we grant him considerable leeway on the timetable, then there is some truth in what he said. How much of it is explainable as logical extrapolation from what was already happening, or as generalized disaster scenarios that could occur to almost anyone, is debatable.

Certainly it's not correct to claim that Brinkley's predictions were uncannily accurate, as some enthusiastic proponents have said. But they do look a little less far-fetched today, and nine years after my original post, I find it harder to dispute the claim that the world is headed very much in the wrong direction. 

It's also worth noting that there are questions about Brinkley's medical condition at the time of his NDE, and questions about his biographical claims. There's a long, balanced discussion of Brinkley here. 

But ... how?

My post on Michael Shermer's anomalous experience has prompted the question: how can "the other side" possibly coordinate such episodes? What is the method?

I don't pretend to have any kind of definitive answer to this question. But I can hazard a couple of guesses, at least in regard to an experience of my own.

Shortly after my mother passed away, I was talking to myself out loud – a habit of mine – and I said (paraphrasing from memory), "I think life after death can be proven by the standards of civil court, even if not by the standards of criminal court. In other words, it can be proven by a preponderance of the evidence, even if not beyond reasonable doubt."

A couple of hours later, I had to change the batteries in my TV's remote control. To see if the new batteries worked, I used the remote to turn on the TV. I had no idea what channel would come on or what programming might be scheduled for that time of day. The show that appeared was a soap opera, and the first words I heard were those of an actor portraying an attorney. He was telling his client that there's a difference between the standards of evidence in civil and criminal cases. In civil cases, you need to prove your case only by a preponderance of the evidence, while in criminal court, you must prove your case beyond a reasonable doubt …

Although this could, of course, be dismissed as a chance coincidence, I found it very meaningful. Other anomalous events occurred during the same period.

But how could it possibly work? Are we supposed to believe that the "spirits" arranged for the television show to feature that particular dialogue exchange at precisely that moment?

Well, here are two notions about how it might have happened. The first does not involve "spirits" at all. It's simply a matter of psi – in this case, premonition. If I had a subconscious premonition that I was going to see that dialogue exchange in a couple of hours, it might have filtered through my subconscious and emerged as a thought about life after death, a subject that was very much on my mind anyway.

The second possible explanation is similar, but it involves "the other side." Here we have to assume that those who have crossed over can see at least a little bit into the future. Personally, I think that our whole idea of the "present moment" needs to be revised somewhat. It appears that most people have at least a subliminal impression of events that will happen one or two seconds in the future. What we think of as "the present" may be a somewhat elastic bubble of time encompassing the immediate past and the immediate future – perhaps a total of two or three seconds in all. Though we are consciously aware only of this immediate split second, on an unconscious or subliminal level we seem to be aware of more than that.

Conceivably, those who have crossed over have an expanded bubble of time and can see an hour or two into the future. I doubt they can see much further; long-term projections made by those on the other side seem to be generally inaccurate. But shorter term predictions may be more reliable. After all, there is no shortage of people who say that they received a supernatural nudge or warning that saved them from danger a few seconds, a few minutes, or even a couple of hours later. As just one example, the writer Dean Koontz has said* that he received a mysterious phone call the day before his mentally ill father attacked him with a kitchen knife. The phone call consisted of the warning "Be careful of your father," and the voice on the line sounded like that of his dead mother.

If we assume that those on the other side can see a little bit into the future, then we might imagine that somebody knew I was going to overhear those particular lines of dialogue on the soap opera later that day. Then it would be, perhaps, not an impossible task to subtly inject the same line of thought into my subconscious and prod it in the direction of conscious awareness.

Notice that in neither of these cases would it be necessary to actually affect the content of the television show itself. It's a matter of anticipating that I would happen to see that part of the show, and then using this random event as the basis for a synchronicity.

I realize that this conjecture does not answer the question of how Michael Shermer's radio could have suddenly started playing when it was apparently completely inoperable. Truthfully, I have no idea. I do recall reading an account of an EVP researcher who disabled a radio for a public demonstration and then received apparent communications over it, even though the device should have been rendered useless. But I haven't been able to track down the story online. And even if I could find it, it wouldn't explain the mechanism that was used. Conceivably, some kind of ability to directly influence the electromagnetic spectrum (as may have been the case in Koontz's phone call and other "phone calls from the dead") could be involved.

===

* The relevant comments by Koontz are found in the fourth-to-last paragraph of the linked article.

A weblog and a wig lady

Longtime commenter Bruce Siegel now has a blog of his own. Check it out! 

Bruce seems to have attracted one or two hostile commenters already. The only explanation I can think of is that his blog's title, which includes the term "militant skeptic," has raised some hackles. Anyway, he is handling those comments with his usual class and patience. 

----

Here's a small premonition, of no importance in itself, but interesting as an example of how these things seem to work (at least for me). 

Yesterday I was relaxing in an armchair in a half-awake state of mind. My thoughts ran, for no obvious reason, to an episode of the old TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The villain in that episode was an older woman known as the Wig Lady, because of the obvious wig she wore. It turned out that the wig concealed a hideous demonic creature that emerged from the top of her head and ate people. Ewww. 

Anyway, as I say, there was no obvious reason for me to think of this. The series has been off the air for ten years. I haven't seen an episode of it in a long time, and that particular episode was not one my of favorites. 

A couple of hours later, I was making dinner. My habit these days is to work my way through the complete episodes of a sitcom, either on DVD or Netflix streaming video, while working in the kitchen. (I find this much less stressful than watching the news.) At the moment I'm watching How I Met Your Mother via Netflix. I played the next episode in the queue. 

And there she was - the Wig Lady! Well, the same actress, anyway, playing a small role in this episode. I don't think she appears in any other episodes; it was just a walk-on bit. I might not have even recognized her if I hadn't been thinking of the Wig Lady on Buffy just a couple of hours earlier.

Coincidence? I doubt it. These things happen to me too often, and with too much specificity, to be explained away so easily. They nearly always involve a dreamy, almost hypnagogic state in which free associations take place. And they are almost always trivial in nature, often involving TV shows and other mundanities.

My guess is that when the mind is sufficiently relaxed, it is open to some degree of "information leakage" from what I call N-space (the information matrix that may underlie our perception of physical reality). This leakage generally is random - hence its triviality. In some cases the leakage does seem to carry a message or a meaning; in those instances I would guess that either our own consciousness can explore N-space and pick out the needed data, or some other consciousness (e.g., a spirit guide) can find the data and impress it on our mind. 

By the way, I just looked up the actress. She's Pat Crawford Brown. The HIMYM episode was "Three Days of Snow." The Buffy episode was "Doublemeat Palace." 

Up, up, and away

I thought this was funny. It's from the opening paragraph of an article called "Stupid Parents + Reality TV = Kids at Risk," by Kate Ward, in the current (Oct. 30) issue of Entertainment Weekly:

On the 100th episode of Wife Swap, self-described psychic Sheree Silver stood in front of Richard Heene and warned him, "You are leading your family into a science experiment that's going to blow up in your face." Maybe it's time we started believing in clairvoyance.

Actually, if any psychic talent was involved in Sheree Silver's statement, it would be precognition, not clairvoyance.

Heene, as all the world surely must know, is the eccentric dad who allegedly arranged an elaborate hoax involving his six-year-old son, a UFO-shaped helium balloon, and near-global media coverage. The balloon was supposedly built for a "science experiment,"  the affair certainly involved Heene's "family," and it did "blow up in [his] face." He's now looking at possible criminal charges.

So is Silver's statement "evidential"? Well, probably not. Anybody with normal intuition could likely have foreseen  trouble for the chaotic Heene household, and the dad's penchant for oddball experiments had already placed his family in danger. (Reportedly, he took his young children with him on risky storm-chasing adventures.)

Still, the prediction did come true.

Dreamtime

Here's an incident that's trivial in itself, but suggestive.

Last night I had a vivid dream in which I was at a hotel spa. For some reason the treatment consisted of having dental paste shoved into my mouth. I hadn't expected this, and started to choke. Finally I had to spit out the paste. 

Because the dream had some possible symbolic significance, I wrote it down when I got up, and even described it in an email to a friend. 

Later in the day, I turned on the sitcom The King of Queens on TBS. In the episode, the lead character visits the dentist. The dentist unexpectedly pushes a dental-paste mold into the character's mouth, and he starts to choke on it. The choking scene plays out for more than a minute while other action is taking place in the background.

The parallel between the dream and the episode is pretty close. How often does the subject of choking on dental paste come up?

If this were the only premonitory dream I'd ever had, I might dismiss it as a coincidence. But I've had many others. The difference in this case is that I remembered to write it down, and I even shared it with a friend - before I saw the sitcom episode.

As I said, the premonition was trivial. But the implications aren't. If we can tune in to the future, even in inconsequential ways, when we are asleep and dreaming, then what is the relationship between the present and the future?

J.W. Dunne addresses the same issue in his 1927 book An Experiment with Time, which details the author's precognitive dreaming. 

Doomsday postponed?

In a September post, I pointed to a claim by a futurist outfit called the Arlington Institute that "something very substantial and disruptive is going to happen to the U.S. within the next 60 days or so."

Well, the 60 days are up, and happily the catastrophe - whatever it was supposed to be - did not occur.

Some people might say the credit crunch was the crisis in question. But it seems that something even bigger was anticipated. Here are some excerpts from Arlington's report on the matter, dated October 10, 2008 (PDF format). These are predictions made by various individuals:

The majority of people I have heard from, been in discussion with, or have read, all talk about an "October Surprise," something that will impact the Election in November and may derail it. There is inconsistency as to what, but these people see it as a tragedy that will be a serious setback for our country. The astrologers I read are scratching their heads to try to understand the aspects they see before and during the Election - it's not quite like anything they have observed before. The majority of these people feel this setback will involve one of our candidates or their running mate.

....

The Web Bots see September 22-27, 2008 as precursor dates to the main turning point date of October 7, 2008. Closely watch events during September 22-27, 2008 for hints as to what to expect on October 7, 2008.

Cliff said whenever "it" happens, and whatever "it" turns out to be, "it" will be a date in history you remember like 9/11, we will remember 10/7.

The Web Bots foresee that October 7, 2008 to February 19, 2009 will be filled with emotional intensity, and the length of the release period will be extraordinary. The Web Bots have never picked up any event lasting this long. In comparison, 9/11 length lasted about 10 days. This event will be four months of high emotion.

The Web Bots foresee consumer society collapsing by mid November 2008.

Hmmm. Well, it's not quite mid-November, but society doesn't appear to be collapsing. And I don't remember anything dramatic happening on October 7, nor were there any stunning developments regarding the presidential candidates and their running mates. In fact, the biggest surprise in this election season was that there was no "October surprise" at all.

The Arlington report includes a table summarizing the various predictions. These run the gamut from natural disasters to terrorist attacks to UFO arrivals. All appear to be wrong (or too vague to be meaningful).

One prediction is of an "EMP device detonated in WashDC/NYC. Inside job. Martial Law. Election put on Hold. Holy war starts."  This was to have happened on October 13.

Another prediction: "Martial law, FEMA camps" in Texas and the Southwest on October 8. 

Also on October 8: "Large terrorist attack in the US. Dirty bomb in LA or SFO. Want to stop elections. President declares martial law." 

Luckily, we have escaped all these mishaps and continue to muddle through in our usual way.

Prophecies are easy. Getting them right - well, that's another story.