Debunking Nostradamus

No, Nostradamus didn't predict the World Trade Center tragedy.

Every now and again, an eclectic bit of personal expertise comes in handy. In my case, it involves a 1999 newspaper assignment to write about Nostradamus, which required a thankfully brief immersion in the online network of Nostradamus enthusiasts.

Why is this timely? Believe it or not, for the week ended Sept. 17, "Nostradamus" was the most requested search term on the Internet, according to Google. This resulted from e-mail driven rumors that Nostradamus had predicted the World Trade center disaster in a quatrain written in 1654.

There's only one problem. In 1654, Nostradamus had been dead for nearly a hundred years. There are at least four different versions of alleged Nostradamus quatrains circulating regarding Sept. 11, all of which are either fraudulent or misquoted.

For a fuller exploration of the current Nostradamus rumors, you can visit these web sites:

Did Nostradamus Predict The World Trade Center Attack?

http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/weekly/aa091101b.htm

Nostradamus NYC FAQ

http://www.nostradamus-repository.org/nycfaq.html

For those who are new to the subject, Michel Nostradamus was a physician and astrologer widely believed to have predicted future events. His writings have been used to support a wide range of other prophecies and are a favorite topic of supermarket tabloid headlines.

His supporters say Nostradamus predicted the rise of Napoleon and Hitler with

uncanny accuracy and foresaw events, including the space shuttle disaster

and math-processing problems with the Pentium computer chip. His detractors say he was a mediocre 16th-century astrologer with no special gifts, whose vague writings have been wildly overinterpreted by prophecy enthusiasts.

One of the sources I spoke with in 1999 was James Randi, an illusionist who has made a career of debunking Nostradamus and other supernatural interests he believes qualify as urban myths.

"People are hungry for this kind of thing," Randi told me. "Knowledge of the future represents power, and people are looking for power, so they pay money to astrologers and 1-900 numbers, not realizing that if the astrologers and operators of the 1-900 service really had all this power, they'd use it for themselves and not have to do all this marketing to others."