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Artworks That Predict The Future

gattino

Justified & Ancient
Joined
Jul 30, 2003
Messages
2,517
Someone drew my attention to this book, published in 1991, long before the Columbine school massacre.

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It reminded me of the large number of items which appear to have foreshadowed the events of 9/11 in particular. Trying ot find some online I found this cracker... the classic 70s album cover for Supertramp's Breakfast in America, when looked at in a mirror produces something rather eerie over the twin towers...

supertramp-911.jpg


There is also this painting produced by an obscure Scottish artist 15 years before the events in New York

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Most people on here will be familiar with the correlations between Morgan Robertson 1898 book Futility or The Wreck of The Titan and the real life sinking of hte Titanic 14 years later. (A giant unsinkable tranatatlantic passenger liner called the Titan goes down after hitting an ice berg in the north Atlantic, most of the passengers being loss due to a lack of life boats)



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But less well known, I think, is that the very same author wrote a story called Beyond The Spectrum about a Japanese surprise attack on the USA at Hawaii, the Japs being eventually defeated by an ultraviolet light weapon. Robertson, for the record died in 1915 long, long before Pearl Harbour.

So, anyway, my point here is I thought it would be good to gather all these alleged art based premonitions in one place...in particular those on book and album covers, and 9/11 being the obvious place to start. We've heard/read of such links so many times in the last 12 years that you tend to forget them.. I know have. So if anyone can find other fictional images that supposedly and "coincidentally" predicted events (as opposed to the conscious efforts of psychics) then please post them here. Plots from films and books are also welcome (the aborted pilot for the Lone Gunmen, xfiles spin off comes to mind)[/img]
 
Call me a sceptic but, firstly I fail to see what is so eerie about the Supertramp image, in a mirror or otherwise.
Secondly, how many pictures of the twin towers were painted that didn't have any kind of premonition of 9/11? We forget today how much of an icon of the US, and New York in particular, the twin towers were before 9/11. Just watch any film or tv series that is set in NY and you will see the towers.
 
Gah!! How do I upload pictures on here??

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You press the img button first, then you paste the url of the photo if its on the net somewhere, then immediately press the img button a second time.
 
The alleged eeriness of the reversed Supertramp image is not that it contains the twin towers but that the cut off letters P and U, when so reversed form the numerals 9/11 above said towers.

I don't think anyone is suggesting that it was either deliberate or evidence of goblins at work, but merely that it is rather apt and unfortunate.
 
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In a similar vein to the supertramp image, a Simpsons episode set in new york appeared to the eagle eyed to incorporate the twin towers into the date 9/11 itself...

simpsons911.jpg
 
I wonder if isolated traumatic events can somehow send echoes backward and forward in time?

Would mean the pre-destiny/fatalists are right though.

Unless time is not linear.

Someone once postulated that time might be like a groove in a gramophone record, and places a long way apart in time could also be quite close together in another direction.
 
Not quite the same thing, but thematically linked so worth gathering here is the ad people subsequently noticed in newspaper photos on the side of one of the buses destroyed in London's 7/7 terror attacks. "Outright terror. Bold and brilliant."

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The ad was for the movie The Descent, due for release the following day. The film company quickly changed it, noting the plot of the movie surrounded people trapped below ground..
 
On September 12th, 24 hours after the attacks, The Adventures Of Superman hit the streets. It contained the following panel showing the aftermath of an alien attack..

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Bizarrely it was not meant to depict the twin towers at all but is an illusion caused by the dramatic angle the artist used..its meant to be the single tower "Lexcorp" building in Metropolis with its L-shaped roof.

But it get freakier...

Other panels in the same issue show the global damage on other targets showing on tv screens. Including the twin towers themselves...

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The Twin Towers take a hit in the 90s blockbuster Armageddon, too. To be honest there's so much death and destruction in pop culture these days, and stretching back decades now, that it would be more surprising if there were no unwitting "predictions". Watch out, Eiffel Tower!
 
Well, I tried to put a pic in and it didn't work, but google the simpsons 9/11 and there are a fair few images that could fit into this thread!
 
It had occurred to me that if the twin towers had not been the target but rather the Statue of Liberty, the numver of matching images in movies and tv shows over the last 60 years would be legion.

But then again the fact it does strike us as surprising when we see these things suggests that consciously at least the twin towers haven't been quite so iconic or frequently used as a sceptic would suggest.

Another counter argument to the paranormal is to wonder why people constantly demand and expect to find premonitions of 9/11 particularly when questioning claims of the psychic... big as it was, its main cultural significance is to the US and to american media. Far more deaths occur in dramatic events frequently..from the boxing day tsunami to the second world war itself..yet the deman to know "how come you/he didn't predict the tsunami?" never seems to be demanded by anyone, while "how come you/he didn't predict 9/11?" always is. Still the demand that it shouldhave been forseen obviously sends people looking for it. Which makes you wonder how many other major events have just as many correlations but aren't sought and published.

In many of the examples I've post of 9/11 in particular the timing of hte images adds a hell of a lot to it though.

Final thought is that if you do accept these things are evidence of precognition, then the pearl harbour one would seem to blow a hole in one particular theory about such an ability..the idea that the person is actually only foreseeing their own future encounter with the news, rather than foreseeign the event itself. Because Pearl Harbour certainly wasn't in Robertson's own personal future!
 
For myself, I don't see premonitions in those images, just popular culture's fixation on the biggest most famous towers in the city. If the number 9 is there, it's a bit more eerie, I guess, but the buildings already look like an 11 so that's halfway to the date.

I am fascinated with The Titan and would like to know more about the Pearl Harbor novel he supposedly wrote. :shock: He was a time traveler! He went back in time to get rich off the greatest disasters of the 20th century, but he wasn't a very good novelist, so he lived out his life in a middle-class bungalow, stuck in a world without wi-fi or lasix, slowly going blind while he searched the couch cushions for remotes that didn't yet exist. :eek:
 
The pearl harbor like story was a short story, not a novel and you can actually read it for yourself online (I'll not pretend I have, though I have just had a quick scan of it)

http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/25006/

Notably the dialogue has sailors describing the effects of this mysterious weapon...flashes of coloured light in the distance, causing them all to suffer sunbrun even at night, like a kind of radiation.

It was published in 1914 apparently.
 
The Robertson work about naval war with the Japanese was a short story entitled 'Beyond the Spectrum'. You can read it at:

http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/25006/

Pearl Harbor is not involved, though the plot does revolve around a Japanese sneak attack.

I'll leave it to you to decide whether the story represents any notable coincidences.
 
Oops! :oops:

Sorry for the inadvertent double posting ...
 
Very cool. Thank you, both. I'll read it later. :D
 
It's interesting to note that on the wikipedia reference to it the coincidence of the general theme of a Japanese sneak attack on the US is dismissed with a passing comment that this was a common theme/concern at the time...with no evidence of this claim presented.

Interesting in two ways..the first being I've seen identical throwaway but plausible sounding explanations about any number of other such "foreshadowing" stories,including the Titan one. Which sounds rather like an historical variation on the claim that the destruction fo the twin towers was a common cultural theme...but in all cases no actual detailed source for the claim is provided. Its the kind of thing you accept at face value without looking into it to see just how accurate and plausible it is.

The second point of interest is if you assume there is some relation to the truth about it. Eg Americans in 1914 were commonly imagining being attacked by japan and people in the 1890s were commonly concerned with /writing about similarly named liners and icebergs....because if it is/was true, it begs the question as to why such fixations emerge int eh popular culture at the time then seemingly vanished before later coming true. That itself has a whiff of mystery about it.
 
Another thought on the twin towers images and the idea that it was a common enough idea that they should be attacked..after all there'd been a previous attempt to blow them a few years earlier.... that such images were bound to be plentiful: There are some problems with that as a catch all explanation for the images here

Both the Johnny Bravo one and the principle Superman one are clearly not INTENDED to represent the Twin Towers at all. In the latter case the later addition of the actual twin towers and the specific damage to them in the same publication is a "coincidence" layered on top of coincidence.

The second thing of note is the timing. Of the 9 separate images posted here that are suggestive of 9/11 imagery, 3 were published or broadcast in the few months preceding the attack and two on the day after it.

The third thing that stymies the "it's a common idea" explanation is that that can only be of real debunking value if it were limited to the one event. You can't apply the same rule when the "foreseen" things are rather varied. Those superman images came from the following link, which provides comic book "premonitions" of several unrelated historical events that can hardly be debunked with the same appeal to the ideas in them being common currency:

http://www.cracked.com/article_18836_6- ... ?page=full
 
In a Simpsons episode that dealt with a supposed terrorist plot (caused by Mr. Burns sneaking radioactive waste in Homer's duffel bag), after they blow up the suspected bomb, a clock lands near Homer in his backyard hammock.

When flipped upside down, this is the image:

simpsons_911_clock.jpg


Disclaimer: I don't necessarily think that things like this are premonitions, but they do get you wondering. I mean, what if a little future-history slips through and inspires a creative mind once in a while?
 
gattino said:
It's interesting to note that on the wikipedia reference to it the coincidence of the general theme of a Japanese sneak attack on the US is dismissed with a passing comment that this was a common theme/concern at the time...with no evidence of this claim presented. ...

The second point of interest is if you assume there is some relation to the truth about it. Eg Americans in 1914 were commonly imagining being attacked by japan ....because if it is/was true, it begs the question as to why such fixations emerge int eh popular culture at the time then seemingly vanished before later coming true. That itself has a whiff of mystery about it.

There's a straightforward explanation to this seeming mystery - i.e., that after a century not many people know of the context that _may_ have instilled such thoughts.

Consider the following events from circa 1900 onward ...

- Japan pretty handily defeated the Russian empire in the Russo-Japanese War (1904 - 1905). The notion of a militarily modern and aggressive non-Euro nation caused quite a stir.

- Japan opened this war with a surprise attack on Russia's primary east Asian naval base (Port Arthur) scant hours before Japan's declaration of war was received in Moscow. Sound familiar?

- Japan and the USA were in occasional conflicts over territorial claims and trade issues relating to China during this period.

- The US had acquired the prized territory of the Philippines in 1898, fought an internal war there to suppress Philippine independence, and continued fighting Philippine insurgents up to circa 1913. Neighboring Japan was a tacit threat to locking down and exploiting the Philippines. Once Spain had been defeated, the US had no significant threats from across the Atlantic.

- In the first decade of the 20th century there were domestic US tensions regarding Japanese immigration and the treatment of Japanese immigrants. Restrictions - and even segregation - were imposed on Japanese immigrants in some areas.

So there you have it some 30 years earlier - Tokio aggressiveness, surprise attack, adversarial tensions in the USA's newly-entered area of territorial investment, and domestic racism toward Asians generally and Japanese in particular.
 
gattino said:
The second thing of note is the timing. Of the 9 separate images posted here that are suggestive of 9/11 imagery, 3 were published or broadcast in the few months preceding the attack and two on the day after it.
Because people don't examine all the media released in summertime 1975 (for example) for 9/11 imagery, but people did examine the media prior/following to look for things. People are actively looking for the 9/11 connections, for instance the mirror reversed or upside down images.

Keep in mind that between the US and the UK, 500,000 books are published each year http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_published_per_country_per_year. That's a lot of opportunity for authors to randomly have something suggestive. And some genres like military fiction are often concerned with possible scenarios in order to drive their stories, so these authors are actively trying to come up with scenarios.
 
If I keep coming back with ripostes to negative and/or "its the law of big numbers" debunkings it's not, I'm very keen to make clear, because I believe any given one of these things is an example of psychic powers or a pattern in the universe. Certainly anything that involves flipping things over, turning them upside down, multiplying by Alma Cogan, and picking your favourite colour in order to make it match is just plain silly.

On the other hand its worth saying as its clear from my other posts that I am perfectly convinced of the reality of precognitive dreams, as I experience them. So its not such a leap for me to be intrigued by the artistic products of creative minds - a process which surely must relate to the dream state and the unconscious etc - when they appear to use imagery that coincides with future events. If what I know to be real is so, then this similar seeming apparent phenomenon is certainly something I find plausible.

So with that confession in mind....

@enolagaia I was thinking more in general terms than the specific story, but they're all very good points which would indeed help explain the popularity of the japanese war idea...if indeed the idea was popular. But its interesting that one can form a rational and convincing explanation for something which may not in fact have occurred!

What the Wikipedia entry actually says is "a future war between the United States and the Empire of Japan, a popular subject at the time". No citation, expansion or footnote appears anywhere to back up the statement that it was a popular subject at the time, nor examples given. It's said and left unquestioned. Now it may well have been the case but we've been given no reason whatever to believe so.

It occurs to me to speculate how both a believing and sceptical mindset would approach a particular recent coincidence if it had turned out more dramatically:

A few months ago a movie was released called Olympus Rising or some such, about a terrorist attack on the White House. I'v not seen it and no idea if it was well rated or not. But its selling point at the time, which got it an awful lot of attention on the chat show circuit was its remarkable prescience in its choice of villain. The imagined attack came from an aggressive North Korea, and hte film, made many months before as these things are, came out on schedule at the precise moment in time when North Korea's saber rattling and threats of nuclear holocaust and attacks on the United States were at absolute fever pitch and topping the headlines every night.

Now tension dissipated, no conflict occurred and north korea has ceased to be an ongoing news story...for which reasons this little coincidence of timing will not presumably be remembered or reported in years to come. But suppose in fact it did..or that in future it does..play out more precisely and a similar attack were to occur. Naturally people would be seeing some extraordinary power at work in the universe, and they may be idiots if they did. But what would people of an opposing mindset do? They would explain the movie's choice of villain and plot by claiming there had been tensions with north Korea in recent years and picking out reported events from the inside pages of various publications to show it was reasonable deduction and/or concern on the part of the film makers given events of the time....ignoring the fact one can find stories relating to tense US korean relation every week of the last 70 years or more with no matching outpouring of stories and imagery in the popular culture.

In other words, I'm suggesting, a "rational" explanation of this kind would be found to explain the thoughts of the film makers if events had played out more precisely in accordance with their movie, but are not required or applied when events do not appear to come uncannily true. In those latter circumstances the sceptic would leave the film maker's imagination as the sole creative force at work with no recourse to searching the press for "obvious" influences.

A film about a north Korean terrorist attack on the Whitehouse which does not come true in real life is a product of pure imagination, but a film about a north Korean terrorist attack on the Whitehouse that does come true in real life would, we would be assured, have been both inevitable and predictable based on the zeitgeist and cultural memes and recent events in the media etc.
 
gattino said:
Certainly anything that involves flipping things over, turning them upside down, multiplying by Alma Cogan, and picking your favourite colour in order to make it match is just plain silly.
ok, but your original post includes the mirrored Supertramp album cover. If it is silly, please remove it.

The problem with precognition is that the precognitive event is seen as so only in retrospect. If you want to say the event sets up some sort of psychic emanation back through time before the event, that (perhaps subconsciously) manifests in imagery or books or some other media, then you do need to look at probability and control groups and such if you want to say with certainty.
 
EnolaGaia said:
The Robertson work about naval war with the Japanese was a short story entitled 'Beyond the Spectrum'. You can read it at:

http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/25006/

Pearl Harbor is not involved, though the plot does revolve around a Japanese sneak attack.

I'll leave it to you to decide whether the story represents any notable coincidences.
Mysterious ray weaponry is not a unique idea however. I'm a fan of E. E. "Doc" Smith's Skylark series, which is chock full of such things and has ray weapons of many different wavelengths.
 
kamalktk said:
ok, but your original post includes the mirrored Supertramp album cover. If it is silly, please remove it.

Oh yes, I know I did and its precisely what I was referring to. By silly I mean that the further you go down that road the less credible it becomes as something to find odd and entertaining because it's less striking and obvious and certainly can't be held up as evidence of anything "spooky" without being sniggered at. But why would I remove it? It's not being supplied as evidence for anything but the kind of image I seek to gather here. The Supertramp image is the first I found online and is, to me, cute, entertaining and tickles the imagination with its discovered inclusion of a 9/11 simulacrum above the towers. The starting point of this is not remotely to prove anything as I begin with the assumption that such proof is impossible or it would have been recognised long long ago.

Again I'm hoping others will post other such images, not specifically 9/11 related, so they can be gathered in one place. I seem to recall one where a dream "psychic" who used to paint or sketch his dreams and photograph himself in front of the calendar clock in his local Barclay's Bank as proof of the date produced a 9/11 related image and was photographed holding it a year before the event, with the added coincidence of the date on the clock behind him in fact being September 11 (or else the time was 9:11, or both). It would be good to find that.

kamalktk said:
then you do need to look at probability and control groups and such if you want to say with certainty.

Again, no I don't. But you do give me the opportunity to go off on one of my thought tangents about the application of statistics and probability to striking coincidences. This is no way directed at you, I'm just gathering some thoughts on the subject.

Whenever a remarkable seeming coincidence is observed the sceptic will demystify it by making one of two points on the subject of likelihood.
First that Joe Schmo is ignorant of probability and if he stopped to multiply the number of Xs in the world by the frequency of Ys he would realise how inevitable and unremarkable its is that Z will turn up eventually and quite regularly.
Secondly he'll quite rightly draw attention to the fact that the longest of odds against an event in no way count against the event happening. This is usually expressed in the form of pointing out the odds of winning the lottery are millions to one and yet the lottery is always won. (This strikes me as a remarkable misapplication of logic, since the two events referred to bear no relation to each other. The former is about the odds of a SPECIFIC INDIVIDUAL winning. But still, let's accept the general principle..long odds are not evidence of spookiness.)

And this is all fine and rational and perfectly persuasive. But its always struck me that the same misunderstanding and abuse of probability is employed by the sceptic. He tries to apply odds to something which cannot be calculated. Namely, the likelihood of a unique event.

What am I talking about? Take two of the 9/11 themed images posted here and see how they are dealt with. The Simpsons one and the Coup record cover one.

The simpsons image was from a webpage about unlikely coincidences which supplied various conspiracy themed oddities, acknowledged their intial ability to pull you up in wonder and then added a "why its bullshit" explanation to demystify it. In the case of this image it pointed out the simpsons has been going over 20 years, produced perhaps thousand of episodes with ten of thousand themes or ideas, so that its inevitable some of them would occassionally coincide with world events. Indeed it would be far more remarkable if it never did.

Sounds convincing, reasonable, scientific? Does to me. I'll go along with that.

Now take the Coup album cover...ostensibly an identical coincidence: an image that appears to relate to a specific external event in advance. How would this be dealt with? Well when you consider how many thousands of bands and artists there are, and the number of album covers that must have been produced in a given time frame we must be talking many countless thousands of such covers, in which context its inevitable one or more of them would appear to coincide with 9/11 or a similar news event.

Sounds convincing, reasonable, scientific? Does to me. I'll go along with that too.

But there's a problem I suspect 99% of people would never notice let alone question. I wasn't remotely consistent. It sounded like I was. It looked like I was. Even I would swear that I was. But I wasn't.

Between the two examples I randomly changed the parameters, the values being multiplied to come up with the desired outcome...a sufficiently large number to make the coincidence seem inevitable. And this happens all the time with the sceptical application of probability without anyone ever questioning it...after all it sounded like I was beign rational, I used ..you know..maths 'n' stuff.

In the Simpsons example I used the output of the Simpsons show itself (not the number of cartoons generally, or frames from cartoons, or general tv shows or anything else) to produce my large number. But if I'd applied the same logic consistently or according to any kind of fixed rules for calculating these things I'd have been buggered in my attempt to demystify the Coup album. Because I've never heard of them and imagine their output of album covers would be somewhere between 1 and 3. If I'd been consistent with the maths what made the Simpsons less spooky would make the Coup more so. That wouldn't do. So without a second's thought I simply changed the parameters..its not about their output, its about the total output of album covers by anyone and everyone. If the number hadn't been large enough I'd have changed it again from teh output in one year to the output in 20, if that still wasn't large enough I'd expand it from the United States to the world, and if there'd been an album cover drought, I'd have expanded it from album covers to creative photographs or images generally. In other words the maths would remain completely sound, the logic would be completely sound, the appearance of reason would remain steadfast and unquestioned.....but the values being multiplied to make the point there's nothing to see here are entirely up to me, I can pick and choose them on a whim if it produces the desired outcome.



How can I do this? Simply because there IS no mathematics for calculating the probability of a unique event or a personally meaningful coincidence! What values you choose to include or exclude in your calculation are entirely at your own discretion. And this is not even confined to the size of the group I choose to place my given event within... I can even change the direction and subject of the group at my own free will to meet my purposes. For example what principle dictates I should calculate the likelihood of the Coup cover in terms of album covers in the world rather than in terms of the number of buildings in the world they could have chosen to depict being blown up? If we'd based our calculation on the latter the odds of them choosing to use the "correct" one, on purely statistical grounds, would appear not less spooky but astronomically more so!

THAT DOES NOT MEAN ANYTHING SUPERNATURAL IS GOING ON!! What I'm suggesting is that the sceptic deeply misuses and misapplies probability to certain kinds of coincidence every bit as much as the gullible punter does...only the veneer of mathematical objectivity means he gets away with doing so more often.
 
Won't quote because its long, but I like the argument you put forward.

Despite working all my life with numbers, algorithms and statistics, I have a great suspicion of the use of of numbers by scientists in other disciplines - especially outside physics and chemistry - to justify arguments or even courses of action.

They are incredibly easy to twist, often subconsciously.

You'd need someone like Heinlein's 'Fair Witness' to validate them all before you could trust them.

Your example over the lottery is just one such that is commonly used.

At least with scientists I believe in the main they are misleading themselves just as much because numbers aren't really their discipline. When we get to politicians and the media all bets are off.
 
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