Baba Vanga, Bulgarian Mystic Known For 9/11 Prediction, Forecasts 2018 Scientific Discovery

Baba Vanga, a blind Bulgarian mystic who died in 1996, is said to have predicted a huge scientific discovery for 2018: a new form of energy on the planet Venus. With no planned missions to Venus this year, her prediction is not expected to come to fruition.

More than 20 years after her death, people are waiting to see if Baba Vanga’s prophecies for 2018 will come to pass. They reportedly include the Venus discovery, as well as China passing the United States in economic power, although it is unclear where these statements are coming from.

Baba Vanga, whose real name was Vangelia Gushterova, was blinded as a child during a tornado. She grew in fame after making multiple predictions about world events before her death at age 85.

Perhaps her most famous assertion came in 1989 when she made a statement some people claimed prophesied the Sept. 11 attacks. She allegedly said, “The American brethren will fall after being attacked by the steel birds. The wolves will be howling in a bush and innocent blood will gush.” People have read the American brethren as being a reference to the fallen Twin Towers; steel birds as the hijacked planes that were flown into them; and the bush as President George W. Bush, who was in office during the attack.

As the Tech Times points out, sometimes such vague predictions land with eager listeners, like when her prediction that Europe would end in 2016 was interpreted as her foreseeing Brexit. But she has also alleged that former President Barack Obama would be the last American president, which has ultimately been proven false.

Yet to be determined is her alleged prediction that the world will end in 3,000 years.

This effect, in which people apply Baba Vanga’s vague predictions to real-world events, is linked to confirmation bias, a tendency to look for information that confirms one’s own beliefs or interpret information in a way that does this. It is also similar to something called the Barnum Effect or the Forer Effect. That phenomenon describes how people see generic personality descriptions as being about them specifically, leading them to believe horoscopes and psychics are accurate.

With these effects, people tend to remember predictions that they could interpret as being true and not the ones that they couldn’t.

The Baba Vanga predictions are even trickier because there is no clear evidence that she actually made them or what they specifically said, as Forbes points out. Over time, details as basic as the years of the projected events have changed.

Her Venus prediction was made public 10 years ago: “Creating a new energy source (probably a controlled thermonuclear reaction). Hunger is gradually being overcome. Launched a manned spacecraft to Venus.” That was once said to apply to the year 2028 but reports circulating now, which have changed the forecasts somewhat, say they were meant for 2018.

There are no manned missions to Venus planned — the human spaceflight focus is currently on the moon and Mars — although a small satellite could shoot over there to learn more about the hot planet’s atmosphere.

More research into Earth’s inward neighbor could also tell us more about whether water ever existed there.

Baba Vanga is not the first alleged clairvoyant who has gained international popularity. She has been compared, for example, to Nostradamus, a 16th-century French physician and astrologer who some say predicted world events like the rise of Adolf Hitler, the French Revolution and the 9/11 attacks.