Nostradamus

Michel de Nostredame (1503–1566), Latinized as Nostradamus, was a French astrologer and physician whose book 'Les Prophéties' — first published in 1555 and expanded across later editions — eventually collected 942 cryptic four-line verses, or quatrains. Vague and open to endless interpretation, they were rediscovered by each anxious generation — and as the 1990s wound toward the year 2000, they found their biggest modern audience.

One verse did most of the work. Quatrain X.72, in its popular English translation, reads: 'The year 1999, seventh month, / from the sky will come a great King of Terror.' It anchored a wave of paperbacks and TV specials as Y2K anxiety built, and the VHS-era primer for many kids was 'The Man Who Saw Tomorrow' (1981), a documentary hosted and narrated by Orson Welles that laid out apocalyptic readings of the prophecies. (Scholars note the popular translation is shaky — the word rendered 'of terror' doesn't appear in the original printing, and the verse most plausibly refers to a 16th-century event, not the future.)

July 1999 arrived and departed without a King of Terror, but Nostradamus had a strange coda. After the September 11, 2001 attacks, a chain email spread a fake 'prophecy' — 'In the City of God there will be a great thunder, / Two brothers torn apart by Chaos' — whose lines had actually been written by a Canadian student, Neil Marshall, in 1997 to demonstrate how easily prophecy can be stretched to fit events. It was the perfect epitaph for a 90s obsession: a prediction that predicted nothing, believed by everyone.