What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: The World Is Ending in 2025
Are you already planning out your 2025 resolutions? Not so fast—this tweet from The New York Post has been viewed over 15 million times:
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Baba Vanga, a blind seer from Bulgaria, isn't alone in her prediction the End Times will start next year. French psychic Nostradamus also predicted a dire event will happen in Europe next year—at least according to The Times of India—and that was way back in the 16th Century!
With two of the top psychics of all time predicting the same thing, surely we should we all be cashing in our 401ks and telling our family how we really feel about them, right? No. No we should not be.
Who was Baba Vanga?
Born Vangeliya Pandeva Gushterova in 1911 in Bulgaria, Baba Vanga's early life was uneventful until she was 12, when a "tornado" supposedly lifted her into the sky and threw her into a nearby field. Vanga was blinded due to injuries from the incident, but after the loss of her sight, she began to make predictions and is said to have started healing people. By the 1940s, folks from all over Bulgaria were visiting Baba Vanga, mainly to ask her whether their relatives had died in World War II, and if so, where they'd fallen.
Vanga was taken seriously enough that the awesomely named Institute of Suggestology (part of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences) studied her throughout the 1960s and '70s, trying to prove she was more than just a weird lady. Vanga herself died in 1996 from breast cancer (which I assume she saw coming). Dead or not, Vanga's legacy lives on. She has a large number of followers in Bulgaria and North Macedonia, and especially in Russia.
The supposedly successful predictions of Baba Vanga
According to believers, Vanga accurately predicted the following:
The rise of the Islamic State
Princess Diana's death
9/11
Global warming
The 2004 Boxing Day tsunami
The Chernobyl disaster
Brexit
Barack Obama's presidency
The problem with these (and all other) Vanga predictions, is that Vanga was either illiterate or semi-literate, so she didn't write anything down. Unlike Nostradamus, who published bizarre verses (and a recipe for cherry jelly) that are open to interpretation and mistranslation, all of Vanya's predictions are based on what people said she told them, after the fact. Someone who visited her once would be like, "She totally told me about Global Warming in 1967!" (Global warming was first posited in a scientific paper in 1896.)
Unlike most psychics, Vanga had the backing of real academics, particularly Georgi Lozanov. Lozanov's suggestology methods were studied by UNESCO and ultimately declared, "the most cultural integral and effective learning method" in Second Language Acquisition. But Lozanov also studied parapsychology and clairvoyance, neither of which stand up to scientific scrutiny. Still, being connected to an actual intellectual is the kind of clout a seer needs to live on in perpituity, and a desire to protect Lozanov's reputation could account for some of the post-hoc predictions.
It's not all after-the-fact stabs, though. Sometimes people, including Vanga's niece, have offered up predictions about the future that are supposedly from Vanga, like the one about the end times starting in 2025. While no one can say for sure that the end of the world won't start next year (at least not before we see who wins the U.S. presidential election next week), we can consider earlier Vanga predictions to see how she did.
Vagueness: The psychic's most reliable friend
In 2023, a full slate of Vanga predictions were released for 2024. Here they are:
An attempted assassination of Vladimir Putin.
A "big country" will conduct biological weapons tests or attacks.
A global economic crisis.
Terrifying weather events and natural disasters.
A major breakthrough in quantum computing.
The more specific the prediction, the easier to debunk, so some of these are just vague gimmes—terrifying weather events happen every year, Vanga; that's just a weak-ass prediction. The rest of the list are things that would have seemed plausible to bet on for 2024, but they still didn't happen, unless we're in for a very eventual couple of months.
Even one correct prediction would have been enough to convince millions of Vanga's power; but even getting 0% right isn't likely to dissuade many people; there's always next year.
The unsuccessful predictions of Baba Vanga
When Vanga predictions are more specific, the hit rate goes way down. Here are some notable misses:
Barack Obama was not the last president of the United States (sadly)
Aliens did not land on earth in 2023 and start a war with Humanity.
There's more, but you can probably see a pattern: Whenever a Vanya follower gives a specific date in the future, it turns out to be wrong. You'll see this same pattern with Nostradamus, not to mention all other people who say they can predict the future. Because no one, not even blind Bulgarian ladies or mysterious French astrologers from the 1500s, can actually see the future, because the future hasn't happened, so there isn't anything to see.
How the world will end starting in 2025, according to Baba Vanga
Just for fun, here's the timeline of future events, according to Baba Vanga:
2025: A conflict in Europe will devastate the continent's population.
2028: Humanity will begin to "explore Venus as an energy source."
2033: The polar ice caps will melt, raising sea levels to drastic heights worldwide.
2076: Communism will spread to countries across the world.
2130: Humans will make alien contact.
2170: A drought will devastate much of the world.
3005: Earth will go to war with a civilization on Mars.
3797: Humans will have to vacate the Earth because it's become uninhabitable.
5079: The world will end.
How the world will end, according to me
Unlike Baba Vanya and Nostradamus, I can accurately predict the end of the world. You see, I was knocked over by a Toyota Corolla in 1994, and I awoke with the ability to look into all personal futures. Put your hand on the screen so I can read your aura and we will begin:
I see something; something dire! It's the end of the world! And it's coming soon! Sometime in the next 60 or maybe 80 years, everything will go dark and the world will end—for you, specifically. Probably in a hospital room surrounded by disinterested nurses assistants.
Please reach out in 2084 (or later) to let me know if I was right.