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:

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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.

Mother Shipton was a sixteenth-century Yorkshire seer who supposedly made a number of startlingly accurate predictions. However, it is uncertain whether she actually existed, and many of the predictions attributed to her are outright hoaxes.

The first extant reference to her is found in a booklet, The Propheceyes of Mother Shipton, published in 1641, eighty years after she was said to have died. This work claimed she had accurately predicted the deaths of a number of her contemporaries such as Cardinal Wolsey. However, there are no written references to her, or her predictions, during her own lifetime.

Other works about Mother Shipton subsequently appeared, and with each work new prophecies were credited to her. However, all the prophecies were backdated prophecies (i.e. prophecies which described events that had already occurred).

Mother Shipton's most famous prophecy was that, "The world to an end shall come / In eighteen hundred and eighty-one."

These lines circulated widely throughout England as 1881 approached and caused great popular concern. However, this prophecy was actually the work of a Brighton bookseller, Charles Hindley, who in 1862 had published what he claimed to be a reprint of a 1684 biography of Mother Shipton. To make the biography seem more relevant to nineteenth-century audiences, Hindley had inserted some new verses of his own creation into the book. Some of the other verses Hindley wrote made it seem as if Mother Shipton had accurately predicted the invention of technologies such as the railway, telegraph, submarines, and hot-air balloons. More >>>