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From Nostradamus to Mark Twain — ten predictions that actually happened. #prophecy #mythology #documentary
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00:00A king was told that if he went to war, a great empire would fall. He marched out in triumph
00:08and destroyed his own. A forgotten writer described a massive ocean liner called the Titan
00:14sinking in the icy Atlantic 14 years before the Titanic went down. A French physician wrote that
00:21London would burn a full century before the flames came. Across 3,000 years of history,
00:28certain predictions should have been impossible, lucky guesses, coincidences, and yet they came true
00:35with a precision that still makes historians uncomfortable. Tonight, we count down 10 ancient
00:41prophecies that came true from the smoke-filled temples of Greece to the pages of science fiction
00:47and number one may be unfolding right now in your lifetime.
00:56Number 10. The oracle that destroyed a king. In the year 546 BC, Croesus, the fabulously wealthy king
01:04of Lydia, stood at the height of his power. To the east, the Persian empire was rising under Cyrus the
01:11Great, and Croesus had to decide, war or peace? Like every Greek and barbarian ruler of his age,
01:18he consulted the most famous oracle in the ancient world, the priestess of Apollo at Delphi. He sent
01:25messengers loaded with gold and asked a single question. If I march against Persia, what will
01:31happen? The Pythia, breathing strange vapors over her tripod, gave her answer. If you cross the river
01:38Halys and make war on Persia, a great empire will be destroyed. Croesus heard exactly what he wanted to
01:45hear. He crossed the Halys, he attacked, and the great empire was indeed destroyed. His own.
01:53Cyrus crushed the Lydians, captured Sardis, and Croesus lost his throne, his gold, and his kingdom.
02:00The oracle had been perfectly accurate. The prophecy came true. Croesus simply never imagined the empire
02:07in question was his. Number 9. The dream that saved a nation. The book of Genesis tells of Pharaoh,
02:18the ruler of Egypt, tormented by a dream he could not understand. Seven fat, healthy cows came up out
02:25of the Nile River. Then seven thin, starving cows rose behind them and devoured the fat one's whole.
02:32Pharaoh woke in a cold sweat. None of his wise men or magicians could explain it. Then a young Hebrew
02:39prisoner named Joseph was brought from the dungeon. Joseph listened and gave an answer that would echo
02:45for three thousand years. The seven fat cows are seven years of plenty, he said. The seven thin cows
02:52are seven years of famine that will follow and swallow the plenty whole. Store grain now, or Egypt will
02:58starve. Pharaoh believed him, raised Joseph to second in command, and for seven years the granaries of
03:05Egypt overflowed. Then the famine came, exactly as dreamed, and it gripped the entire region.
03:12But Egypt had bread, because one man read a dream correctly. Whether you take it as history or parable,
03:19the pattern is unmistakable. The future was announced, in symbols, years before it arrived.
03:30Number eight. The physician who saw London burn. In 1555, a French apothecary and astrologer named
03:38Michel de Nostradami, known to the world as Nostradamus, published the first edition of his
03:43prophecies, hundreds of cryptic four-line verses called quatrains. Among them was one that his
03:50followers would quote for centuries. The blood of the just shall be demanded of London, it read.
03:55Burned by fire in the year 66. 111 years later, in 1666, a baker's oven on Pudding Lane caught fire
04:05in
04:05the early hours of September 2. Fanned by a fierce east wind, the flames tore through a city built of
04:11timber and thatch. For four days, London burned. 13,000 houses, 87 churches, and the Great St. Paul's
04:19Cathedral were reduced to ash. 80% of the city was gone. Skeptics argue the verse is vague, that it
04:27could
04:27mean anything. But the believers ask a simple question. How does a man in 1555 name a burning
04:34London? The Witch of Yorkshire. In the 1500s, in a cave near Knaresborough in England, lived a woman
04:48known as Mother Shipton. Ursula Sutil, a soothsayer with a twisted legendary appearance, was said to utter
04:55prophecies in rhyme. Centuries after her death, her verses were printed and reprinted, and some of them
05:02read like a dispatch from the future. Carriages without horse shall go, one verse declares, and
05:09accidents fill the world with woe. Around the world thoughts shall fly, in the twinkling of an eye.
05:15Her followers say she described the automobile, the telegraph, and the internet, 300 years early.
05:23Historians warn that many verses were added by publishers long after her death, shaped to fit
05:28events that had already happened. That may be true, but strip away the later additions, and a harder
05:35question remains. In an age of horses and sailing ships, someone imagined a world of horseless carriages
05:41and instant communication, and wrote it down in rhyme.
05:49Number 6. The Seer of the Highlands. In the 1600s, in the Scottish Highlands, a labourer named
05:56Koinich Odha, known as the Brahan Seer, was said to see the future through a stone with a hole in
06:02it.
06:03His prophecies were dark, specific, and local, and they terrified the powerful clans. He said that
06:09ships would one day sail through the middle of the Great Glen, a valley with no navigable waterway.
06:14He said iron horses would cross the highlands. He spoke of the day when the hills would be emptied of
06:19people and filled with sheep, a chilling image of the highland clearances that would come two centuries
06:25later. In 1822, the Caledonian Canal opened, and ships sailed through the Great Glen exactly as he
06:32described. The railways followed, iron horses across the glens. The clearances emptied the glens of
06:38families, and filled them with sheep. His enemies had him burned in a barrel of tar for his trouble.
06:44But the canal still carries ships through the glen today, sailing the route a condemned seer
06:49described 200 years before it existed.
06:55Number five, the writer who scheduled his own death. Samuel Clemens, the world knew him as Mark Twain,
07:03was born on November 30th, 1835, the night Halley's comet blazed across the sky at its closest approach
07:10to Earth. Twain never forgot the coincidence. In 1909, as the comet swung back toward the Sun on its 76
07:18-year
07:18orbit, the aging writer made a startling public prediction. I came in with Halley's comet in 1835.
07:27He said, it is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. The Almighty has said,
07:34no doubt,
07:35now here are these two unaccountable freaks. They came in together, they must go out together.
07:42On April 20th, 1910, one day after the comet reached its closest point to Earth,
07:48Mark Twain died of a heart attack. He had predicted the date of his own death,
07:53and the comet kept the appointment. Astronomers call it coincidence. Twain would have called it good
08:00scheduling. Number four, the novel that sank the Titanic. In 1898, an obscure American sailor turned
08:12writer named Morgan Robertson published a novella called Futility. It told the story of a massive
08:19British ocean liner named the Titan, the largest ship ever built, proclaimed unsinkable, steaming too
08:26fast through the North Atlantic in the month of April. The Titan strikes an iceberg, and because
08:32the ship carries far too few lifeboats, most of her passengers drown in the freezing water.
08:38Fourteen years later, in 1912, a massive British ocean liner named the Titanic, the largest ship ever
08:45built, proclaimed unsinkable, steamed too fast through the North Atlantic in the month of April.
08:51She struck an iceberg, and because she carried far too few lifeboats, more than fifteen hundred people
08:58died. The parallels are so exact, they feel scripted. The names, Titan and Titanic, the month April,
09:09the April, the month April, the North Atlantic, the iceberg, even the plagic title problems.
09:19The fact that the novel was based on a true crime story from real life events.
09:23The Titan had the more accurate bearing on how English and French people would have felt.
09:28The fact that the novel was based on a true crime story from real life events.
09:47The fact that the novel was based on a true crime story from real life events.
09:51The fact that the novel was based on a true crime story from real life events.
10:21a true crime story from real-life events. The missing lifeboats. The false confidence.
10:28Robertson insisted it was only seamanship, that he simply knew how ships and icebergs behaved.
10:34But readers have wondered for over a century, how do you write the Titanic 14 years before it sinks?
10:453. The Frenchman who aimed at the moon. In 1865, nearly a century before the space age,
10:52the French novelist Jules Verne published From the Earth to the Moon. In it, an American gun club
10:58builds a colossal cannon in Florida and fires a manned projectile at the moon. Verne, writing with
11:04a quill, got the details eerily right. His launch site was in Florida, just over 100 miles from
11:10Cape Canaveral, where Apollo would later lift off. His crew was three men, exactly like an Apollo crew.
11:16His capsules splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, exactly where Apollo splashdowns happened.
11:21He even calculated a launch velocity close to what physics actually requires.
11:26When Apollo 8 circled the moon in 1968, and Apollo 11 landed in 1969, engineers found themselves
11:33living inside a French novelist's imagination. Verne never saw an airplane, let alone a rocket.
11:39He aimed a cannon at the moon in 1865, and 100 years later, humanity followed his trajectory.
11:49Number two, the man who invented the atomic bomb, in a novel. In 1914, the English writer H.G. Wells
11:58published a novel called The World Set Free. In its pages, scientists discover that atoms hold
12:05enormous locked energy, and engineers build what Wells called, in print, for the first time in history,
12:11atomic bombs. Dropped from airplanes, they flatten cities in a single flash, and leave the ground
12:17poisoned for years. Wells was writing three decades before the Manhattan Project, before nuclear fission
12:24was even discovered. But his novel did something extraordinary. It landed in the hands of a young
12:29Hungarian physicist named Leo Szilard. Reading Wells, Szilard began to wonder if the atom's energy could
12:36truly be unlocked. In 1933, while waiting at a London traffic light, Szilard conceived the nuclear
12:43chain reaction, the idea that made the atomic bomb possible. He later said Wells showed him the vision.
12:50A novelist dreamed the bomb in 1914. A physicist read the dream and built it.
13:011. The prophecy we may be living inside. In the year 1139, an Irish archbishop named Saint Malachi is said
13:11to have written a list of 112 short Latin phrases, each describing a future pope, from his own time to
13:18the end of the papacy itself. The list was lost for 400 years, then published in 1595. Followers have
13:26matched the mottos to popes across nine centuries with unsettling precision. John Paul II was described
13:32as from the labor of the sun. He was born on the day of a solar eclipse, and buried on
13:38the day of
13:38another. Benedict XVI was the glory of the olive. The olive branch is a symbol of the Benedictine order,
13:45which gave him his name. And then comes the 112th, the final entry on the list, Peter the Roman. After
13:53him, the prophecy says, the city of seven hills will be destroyed. Skeptics call it a forgery,
13:59a clever puzzle written after the fact. Believers point to 900 years of matches and ask,
14:04what if the list is real? And if it is, then the final prophecy on the list is not history.
14:09It is now.
14:14From a smoking tripod in ancient Delphi to a French novelist's cannon aimed at the moon,
14:21the pattern never breaks. Someone speaks, the world laughs or forgets or burns the speaker. And then,
14:28years or centuries later, the future arrives exactly on schedule. Were these glimpses of something real,
14:35or just the law of averages wearing a convincing disguise? 10,000 predictions are made every year,
14:41and we only remember the hits. Maybe, but Crisa still crossed that river. The Titan still sank.
14:47And somewhere in an old list of Latin phrases, the last pope may already have a name. Which prophecy
14:54shook you the most? Tell us in the comments. And subscribe to Mythologica Geographic,
14:59because history's strangest true stories are still waiting to be told.