Sometimes inspiration can be unexpected

The Earth will be torn apart by a nuclear disaster before the year is out, according to a legendary mystic credited with predicting many of the biggest events in history. Baba Vanga, a blind Bulgarian woman is said to have foreseen 9/11, the Covid pandemic and the death of Princess Diana, among other era-defining moments. And despite the fact she’s been dead for some 27 years, her loyal disciples still follow her prophesies with great devotion. They claim that many of her predictions came true long after her death, and there are still more to come. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Indeed, the rest of 2023 is set to be busy on the catastrophe front, according to Vanga’s followers as reported by The New York Post. Not only will a major nuclear power plant explosion take place at some point over the coming months – causing toxic clouds to settle over Asia – by the Earth will be hit by a devastating solar storm and suffer a potentially apocalyptic shift in its orbit around the sun. Other forecasts for the year allegedly include a bioweapons attack launched by an unnamed superpower, the emergence of a new religion based on artificial intelligence, and the end of natural pregnancies. According to her fans, she foretold that all babies would be grown in laboratories and parents would be able to select their physical traits. To be fair, that sounds eerily plausible when you consider one biotechnologist has already begun planning a “human factory” – though, admittedly, not before the end of the year. The issue with all of this is that Vanga’s predictions are cryptic and impossible to verify, as Sky History notes. And yet, there is a reason why a poor, blind woman from rural Bulgaria has been branded the “Nostradamus of the Balkans” and become a global icon. Legend has it that she was blinded in a dust storm at the age of 12 after which she announced that she had been endowed with the gifts of prophesy and healing. Her reputation soon spread beyond the local area and soon everyone from tsars to peasants would make the pilgrimage to her home in the Kozhuh mountains to seek her counsel. She was unable to write, however, so everything she said was documented by those around her, meaning there are no first-hand accounts of her visions on paper. Still, she is understood to have proclaimed in 1989 that “American brethren will fall after being attacked by steel birds […] innocent blood will be gushing” – which many people have taken to be an omen for the September 11 attacks. She also said that America’s 44th President would be Black, which was fulfilled by Barack Obama in 2009. And whilst her claim that Europe would “cease to exist” by 2017 hasn’t come to pass geographically, some have read this as a reference to the 2016 Brexit vote. She also predicted that the US’s 45th president would be faced with a crisis which would “bring the country down.” Given that the 45th president was Donald Trump, we’ll let you be the judge of whether or not there’s any truth to that one. Countless Bulgarian and Soviet scientists studied and tested Vanga throughout her life, ultimately concluding that she had an 85 per cent success rate with her predictions, Sky History reports. She even allegedly foresaw her own death on 11 August 1996 at the age of 85. All we can do now is hope that her doomsday visions for the rest of this year fall into that 15 per cent margin of error... Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

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