Baba Varga and her prophecies

As a young girl, she was caught in a tornado, ripped from the ground and hurled through the air. While in the grips of the storm, her eyes were covered with sharp stinging sand. She was missing for several days, and when she was found, she couldn’t open her eyes without great pain. It was soon determined that Vangeliya was blind, but she was already beginning to see in a different way.

Her married name was Vangelia Gushterova, but she would become known as Baba Varga, a mystic, clairvoyant and herbalist. When someone stood in front of her for a reading, she said she could literally see their entire lives. She could see events before they happened, both in the near and distant future. Included among them are two for 2018.

Baba Vanga, which means Grandmother Vanga in Bulgarian, died in 1996 at the age of 85, but not before she had predicted events all the way to the end of the world. Known as the Nostradamus of the Balkans, many of her prophecies are scary. Like Nostradamus, her predictions are often symbolic and need interpretation.

For instance, her prediction of 9-11 read this way:“Horror, horror! The American brethren will fall after being attacked by the steel birds.The wolves will be howling in a bush and innocent blood will gush.” The steel birds, of course, could represent the airplanes that struck the World Trade Center buildings. The wolves could be the terrorists and the bush could be George W Bush, who of course was president during the event.

Baba Vanga accurately predicted that the 44th president of the U.S. would be an African-American man. However, she also said he would be the last president. Now we have Trump, who some contend is not a legitimate president, because he lost the popular vote and often acts non-presidential. But in spite of his behavior, he is the president and that seems to nullify that particular prediction.

Among other predictions were the 2004 tsunami, global warming and  the rise of ISIS. Her followers put Baba Vanga’s success rate at 85%. What qualifies as accurate is sometimes difficult to determine. For example, she predicted that Europe would cease to exist by 2016. That seems clearly wrong. However, some of her followers point out that was the same year that the vote on Brexit resulted in Great Britain departing from the European financial alliance. That changed Europe, but didn’t cause it to cease to exist.

For 2018, Baba Vanga predicted that China will become the new super power, by-passing the United States. Indeed, China’s economy is growing and could pass the U.S. economy, if not in 2018, then in coming years. The second prediction for this year: Humans will travel to Venus in search of new energy sources. They might even set up a colony there. It seems our eyes are more set on Mars than Venus. But there is a spacecraft—the Parker Solar Probe—that is scheduled to by-pass Venus and gain energy from the planet as it heads toward the sun.

Baba Varga also predicted that the year of 3797 would be the year when the party ends and everything on Earth will cease to exist. However, humans will be advanced enough to move to a new star system, she predicted. Let’s hope so.