Articles tagged with "prediction"

In this article, I explore Ken Ring's (AKA The Moon Man) predictions he posted on his Facebook page from January 8th 2025, concerning dates of Earthquakes and where in the world these earthquakes were to occur. For those who don't know, Ken Ring is a writer from Auckland who claims weather and earthquakes are influenced by the moon cycle. He publishes almanacs each year for New Zealand, Australia, Ireland and, more recently, Japan and Italy, in which he provides weather predictions for the entire year. Ken's almanacs appear to take into account the position over the earth of the degree of perigee, or point closest to a part of the earth and the moon. So if the perigee is over say the North Island of New Zealand, that area will experience weather changes and increased earthquake activity. The degree or amount of perigee dictates the intensity of the weather or earthquake for that region. This article will focus mainly on earthquakes where weather predictions will be used to illustrate points. However, the reader can be assured, his predictions of both are as useful as each other.

I'm looking forward to the day that someone writes a reasoned critique of the New Zealand Skeptics that we can engage with. We receive quite a few emails from people challenging us, but so far there's been nothing we could get our teeth into - we mainly see bad faith arguments, people's personal bug-bears, and grievances based on misremembered events.

A couple of weeks ago I talked with a journalist about psychics, as she was looking into a story that Kelvin Cruickshank appeared to have muscled his way into. As well as giving her some information about how psychics work, and a little about Kelvin, I had also suggested to her that she should visit a psychic to get an idea of how they operate. A day later she let me know that she was planning to visit a psychic fair that weekend, and I suggested that I could meet her there to brief her on what to expect. So, on Saturday morning two weekends ago, Bronwyn and I headed to Upper Hutt and met with Virginia.

For those who were paying attention when reading the newsletter from two weeks ago, when I published a plea for help from an ex-member of the NZ Skeptics regarding a photo his mother had taken in Auckland, you may have noticed something odd. Despite claiming to be a skeptic, there was a strange sentence in the middle of the email we received. It read:

As I write this on Sunday morning in Auckland, we're beginning to see the start of bad weather from Cyclone Gabrielle, which is expected to cause high winds and extreme rain in the upper North Island.

Vangeliya Pandeva Gushterova, more commonly known as Baba Vanga, was a Bulgarian psychic. Although she died back in 1996, she was kind enough to leave behind some predictions that may or may not actually be about potential future events. Honestly, the Wikipedia Page for Baba Vanga leaves me suspicious about how much of what is attributed to her she actually said, and how much is just being made up by others (and it's also one of the worst Wikipedia pages I've ever seen grammatically - presumably it's mainly been written by people for whom English is not a fluent language).

The Australian Skeptics have spent the last few years working hard on an amazing project, led by Richard Saunders, to find and analyse as many psychic predictions as they could find.

Our recent Skepticon saw Richard Saunders, from the Australian Skeptics, present the results of The Great Australian Psychic Prediction Project.

Last week I attended an I Ching meeting online, where I learned how to use the I Ching to help me to make life decisions. The I Ching, or Book of Changes, is a book of 64 different sayings which are meant to be used for divination.

Speaking of COVID grifters, an amusing take-down has emerged from the UK.Piers Corbyn is an anti-vax activist, and elder brother of the former UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.

After last week's nocturnal earthquake, Ken Ring has been on Facebook proving how right he is. He's pointed out that he predicted the earthquake in his 2021 almanac:

Ken Ring is back selling his unproven weather, gardening, and best fishing predictions. You can also get his books on the global warming hoax, anxiety therapy, better parenting, and more on his predict weather website.

Lockdown timing predictions from a Hamilton based psychic, Sarah King, have been unearthed and posted to our Facebook group this week:

At the start of each year, it's common for psychics and mediums to put out a bunch of predictions for the coming year. These predictions generally fall flat, although a common strategy for some psychics is to put out so many, often vaguely worded, so that there's a chance that some of them will actually come true, at which point they capitalise on this, claiming to be the World's Most Accurate Psychic™!

Another newsletter, another election. This time the US appears to have, narrowly, come to its senses and chosen to vote out their current science-denying leader - and my guess is that most skeptics are breathing a sigh of relief. Those of us at Wellington Skeptics in the Pub on Friday certainly did a thorough job of dissecting the election, along with its many rules, regulations, polls, predictions and polemics.

This is an opinion piece. That is, it is my opinion. Some of you may feel that I am wrong. If so, you are welcome to disagree. Please feel free to express your own views in the next issue of this magazine.

I was contacted by a journalist for the Sunday Star times a few days ago with some questions about Ken Ring. He's predicting an earthquake for June or July the 13th to 15th.

The Herald published an article about someone's prediction that the world will end in a few weeks. David Meade, described as a Christian numerologist, claims that on or just after September the 20th (my birthday!), the world will meet a fiery end.

Nigel Antony Gray, who shot to infamy last November when he "predicted" an earthquake, gave a talk in Petone last night.

Australian Ken Ham's Creation "Museum" has opened its newest attraction, the Ark Encounter, on Thursday.

And so another year begins, and as I write this on New Year's Day 2014 there is the opportunity, as with every new year, to reflect on past years and consider the prospects for the future. 2014 will no doubt be an especially busy year for recollections and commemorations, marking as it does the centenary of the start of World War I. Few could have had any idea, on that New Year's Day of a century ago, of what the next few years would bring.

The paranormal field contains both con artists and the well-intentioned. It's often impossible to tell one from the other, but in the end it makes little difference. This article is based on a presentation to the University of the Third Age.

In the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquakes, Ken Ring's predictions were widely, though often inaccurately, reported. David Riddell looks at Ring's writings, and compares them with actual events.

Bernard Beckett (Skeptic 95 , p8) says the ability of Creationism to make the same predictions as evolutionary psychology shows that the latter is not a scientific process. But the same is equally true of evolutionary biology. ("God made cats resemble tigers, and apples resemble pears, because He felt like it.") The fault is with Creationism, not evolution. An omnipotent Creator can be used to explain/predict absolutely anything, not only the universe as it is, but any other universe, possible or im-. You might say that Creationism, like Nostradamus and astrology, is very good for predicting the past. That is their fundamental failing.

I just wanted to make a comment on the clipping from the Christchurch Star concerning "nuclear extinction" which appeared on p.9 of the NZ Skeptic periodical. In the clipping, a refutation of this possibility was based on some writings of one Bruce Cathie who is claimed therein to be a mathematician among other things.

Remember the '90s? It was the decade when:

IT'S BEEN a busy year on many fronts for the Skeptics, with a number of major firsts:

1996 was an interesting year. Rush Limbaugh became the Republican nominee for President; Roseanne killed off her popular TV character; cures for baldness, arthritis, and AIDS were

The world's best psychics seem to have cracks in their crystal balls, says the Skeptical Inquirer.

From a Skeptics' mailing list comes a record of psychic slip-ups for the previous year.

This book explains an approach to interpreting the French "prophet" Nostradamus's predictions. It is the culmination of 16 years research by an English woman, V.J. Hewitt. She has invented a system of decoding his quatrains using anagrams -- and not just the sort that you get in cryptic crosswords, but huge, French ones. She takes a Nostradamus quatrain, mixes up all the letters, removes the letters of the subject she is interested in (and it could be anything from soccer hooliganism to an air traffic controllers' strike), adds the date, and then rearranges the remaining letters to produce the prophecy that Nostradamus had clearly intended. What's more she does it in French.

Are the End Times drawing nigh? Are fires and floods from heaven on the brink of seething down in wrathful purge, damning the damned and raising the faithful? Is God's finger poised on the panic button?

For those of you who didn't notice, the end of the world came and went on November 14th. It also ended on November 24th, and is set to do so at the end of this year. If you've got a Christmas trip to Los Angeles planned, don't bother going -- a massive earthquake wiped out the city of the Angels as well as neighbouring San Diego at 7pm on May 8th.

President Bush was not re-elected. Madonna did not become a gospel singer, and a UFO base was not found in the Mexican desert. These were just a few of the many predictions that had been made for 1992 by famous "psychics", but were dead wrong, as chronicled by the Bay Area Skeptics.

Every year the Bay Area Skeptics takes a look at how successful psychics were in predicting the preceding 12 months. It looks like 1991 was as much a fizzer as previous years.

In a memorable encounter, National

About this time every year some diligent journalist trawls through all the year's events that made news and matches them against a list of predictions published a year earlier.

There were some strange responses to New Zealand's first big earthquake prediction.

A HAMILTON woman claims the predictions of a computerised horoscope she subscribed to were so accurate that she had a nervous breakdown.

When the local paper carried a new advertisement, for 'Esoteric Astrology,' I had to reply to the number given. 'Esoteric,' of course, means 'intelligible only to the initiated' and the account given by its exponent laid her open to prosecution under the trades description act since it was clear that she, at least, had no idea what she was talking about. She said that her kind of astrology made no attempt to foretell the future, but that she used the predictions obtained to counsel people who were worried and perplexed. When I asked her what was the connection between the movement of the planets and the personal problems of people in New Plymouth, she replied in the pitying tones of a teacher talking to a backward five year old, "Well, you know that the moon is responsible for the tides." The following dialogue then ensued.

Nostradamus and the Millenium. By John Hogue. Bloomsbury/Roulston Greene. 1987. 209 pp. Illustrations. $45,

The Evening Post, 28 December 1987

—in the New Scientist, 21 January 1988