The writer Michel de Nostredame, better known as Nostradamus, is widely known as a French physician, astrologer and prophet. Nostradamus remains famous over four hundred years after his death mostly for a 1555 book he wrote titled “Centuries,” a collection of one thousand quatrains (four-line rhyming verses) which are said to foretell the future. Depending on which source you consult,
Nostradamus has been credited with accurately predicting the bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945; the Space Shuttle Challenger accident in 1986; the French Revolution in 1789;the Apollo moon landing in 1969;
the death of Princess Diana in 1997; both World Wars, and so on. In fact you’d be hard pressed to name some significant global event that Nostradamus was not said, by someone, to have foreseen.
Perhaps the most famous assertion made in the past 20 years was that Nostradamus predicted the September 11, 2011, terrorist attacks. It’s a story that circulated widely in late 2001, and is still widely believed. One verse in particular went viral on the Internet:
