Soon after 9/11 an email began to circulate claiming that the sixteenth-century astrologer Nostradamus had predicted the terrorist attacks. Some "genuine Nostradamus quatrains" were offered as proof of this claim. There were several different versions of these quatrains that got passed around, but the most popular set read as follows:

More >>>

Poor Richard's Almanac was a yearly almanac that Benjamin Franklin began publishing in 1732. In 1737, five years into the life of the almanac, Franklin included three "enigmatical prophecies" in the almanac. He predicted that:

• A great storm would cause all the major cities of North America to be under water;
• A "great number of vessels fully laden will be taken out of the ports… by a Power with which we are not now at war;"
• and that an "army of 30,000 musketers will land… and sorely annoy the inhabitants."

A year passed and none of the prophecies appeared to come true. But just when Franklin's readers were about to label him a faulty soothsayer, he triumphantly declared that all three prophecies had actually come true. Rain storms had placed every city under water, the power of wind ("a Power with which we are not now at war") had taken fully-laden vessels out of ports, and more than 30,000 musketers (or mosquitoes) had definitely annoyed the inhabitants.

Benjamin Franklin published a highly successful, yearly almanac from 1732 to 1758. He called it Poor Richard’s Almanac, adopting the literary persona of "Poor" Richard Saunders, who was supposedly a hen-pecked, poverty-stricken scholar.

In the first year of its publication, Franklin included a prediction stating that rival almanac-writer Titan Leeds would die on "Oct. 17, 1733, 3:29 P.M., at the very instant of the conjunction of the Sun and Mercury."

The prediction was intended as a joke. Nevertheless, Leeds took offense at it and chastised Saunders (Franklin) for it in his own almanac.

Franklin responded by turning the death of Leeds into a running joke. When the date and time of the prediction arrived, and Leeds did not die, Franklin declared that Leeds actually had died, but that someone had usurped his name and was now using it to falsely publish his almanac.

In the following years Franklin continued to insist Leeds was dead until finally, in 1738, Leeds actually did die. This prompted Franklin to congratulate the men who had usurped Leeds’s name for finally deciding to end their pretense.

Franklin adapted the Titan Leeds hoax from Jonathan Swift’s similar Bickerstaff hoax of 1708.

An almanac released by Isaac Bickerstaff in February 1708 predicted that a rival astrologer, John Partridge, would die on March 29 of that year. On March 31st Bickerstaff released a follow-up pamphlet announcing that his prediction had come true. Partridge was dead.

However, Partridge was actually still very much alive. He was woken on April 1st by a sexton outside his window announcing the news of his death. Isaac Bickerstaff was actually a pseudonym for Jonathan Swift, who would later become famous as the author of Gulliver’s Travels. Swift’s intention was to embarrass and discredit Partridge, apparently because he was annoyed by the astrologer’s attacks upon the church. More >>>

In 1593 reports began to spread of a young boy in Silesia, seven-year-old Christoph Müller, who had grown a golden tooth. Jakob Horst, a professor of medicine at Julius University in Helmstedt, decided to investigate. He found the boy did indeed have a gold tooth set firmly in his jaw. Tests with a touchstone (a small tablet of dark stone on which soft metals such as gold leave a visible trace) confirmed the gold was real, though not as high quality, Horst noted, as Hungarian gold.

Horst wrote a 145-page treatise about the case, De aureo dente maxillari pueri Silesii (Of the Golden Tooth of the Boy from Silesia), in which he attributed the golden tooth to astrological causes. He noted that the boy was born on December 22, 1585, when there was an unusual alignment of the planets that must have increased the heat of the sun, causing the bone in the boy's jaw to turn to gold. He also argued that the tooth was a portent of important events to come: the dawn of a new golden age for the Holy Roman Empire. However, because the tooth was located on the boy's left side, considered to be the sinister side, the golden age would be preceded by many calamities. More >>>

Michel de Notredame (1503-1566), better known as Nostradamus, rose to prominence as an astrologer in sixteenth-century France. He was supported by the patronage of Queen Catherine de Médici, for whom he wrote numerous verses implying the downfall of her rival, Elizabeth I of England. Obviously, these predictions did not come true. His most popular work was The Prophecies, first published in 1555, which has remained in print to this day.

Nostradamus himself cannot properly be regarded as a hoaxer since astrology in his time was a highly respected practice. He believed in the legitimacy of his art. The real deception lies in the uses to which his work has been put since his death.

Nostradamus wrote his prophecies in an ancient form of French worded so ambiguously that it could be interpreted to mean almost anything a reader desired. As a result, his followers have been able to credit him with predicting a wide range of calamities including the great London fire of 1666, the rise of Adolf Hitler, the Iranian revolution of 1979, and the events of September 11, 2001. However, Nostradamus's supposed predictions are only ever noted after the fact. There has never been an instance in which a verse by Nostradamus has been used to accurately predict an event before it occurred.

The work of Nostradamus has also been a theme in a large number of outright hoaxes—instances in which verses were falsely attributed to him. For instance, during World War II the Nazis spread propaganda claiming that Nostradamus had prophesied the success of Hitler. The Allied countries retaliated by spreading propaganda claiming Nostradamus had foreseen Germany's defeat. After 9/11 interest in Nostradamus surged thanks to some verses of his, circulated by email, in which he seemed to predict the tragedy. However, the verses had not actually been written by him. They were the work of an anonymous hoaxer.