A gigantic giraffe attacks a city, aggressive squirrels storm a university, a farmer finds a UFO and the Eiffel Tower breaks in half. In 2024, fortune tellers have once again been very wrong with many predictions, as an evaluation by the Society for the Scientific Investigation of Parasciences (GWUP) in Roßdorf in southern Hesse shows.
A “hit list of the absurd” also includes strange noises from space that cause airports to be closed or a shark killed by a billiard ball. King Kong doesn’t appear again.
Some important things were not said
“The annual GWUP forecast check reaffirms that forecasters’ predictions do not demonstrate clairvoyant abilities,” the annual report states. Important events such as the re-election of Donald Trump are rarely predicted or not predicted at all, as was the case with the overthrow of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad.
“Some of the annual forecasts for 2024 read more like science fiction scenarios than serious predictions,” says the psychologist from Lüneburg’s Leuphana University, Timur Sevincer, who was involved in the evaluation.
“The predictions of fortune tellers and astrologers are useless,” says the head of the GWUP scientific center, Nikil Mukerji. There is no serious evidence that they can really see the future, and certainly not with the help of supernatural powers. “For Germany, none of them predicted the founding of the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), the knife attack in Solingen or the death of Franz Beckenbauer,” the report says.
Predictions from many sources
“The forecasts came from different sources: These included self-proclaimed experts, card readers, conspiracy theorists, astrologers, spiritual advisors, esotericists, numerologists, fortune tellers and clairvoyants,” says the GWUP. But established media were also there. Some predictions such as the end of the world or the reversal of the magnetic field are made almost every year.
Medium with many prophecies
One medium from Canada alone made more than 1,500 predictions, including a gorilla like King Kong on an island at number 1,038. If you predict so much, it is practically inevitable that in some cases you will be right. The Canadian media correctly predicted that people would be attacked by snakes in the US states of Florida and Louisiana and that a seaquake would occur in the Pacific. “These events are not surprising, however, as they occur regularly,” says Mukerji.
However, the medium was right with the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, says Mukerji. However, it predicted ten more attacks, none of which occurred. “The newly elected US president may have lost part of his ear in the assassination attempt in July 2024,” the report says. However, he was spared the predicted black eye as well as the divorce from his wife Melania.
Accurate predictions through analytical thinking
Anyone who tries to make predictions using supernatural abilities should not be taken seriously scientifically. “Such methods do not work empirically and contradict established knowledge about our world,” says Mukerji. These included astrology, card reading and coffee grounds reading. A clairvoyant would throw asparagus on the ground and then interpret the pattern.
For predictions to be as precise as possible, analytical thinking, logic, statistics and probability theory are required and even then the prediction does not necessarily have to be correct.
