Nostradamus and Eco Disaster/ Classic Horror and Suspense

Considered a world authority on Nostradamus, the occult, and parapsychology, John Hogue returned to update his prophecies. Hogue sees drastic changes in the Earth’s climate in the next 10-20 years, supported by scientific research. Scientists, he suggests, are actually "lowballing their findings to the best case scenario." He believes that there are many potential catastrophic events, which if any one of them came to pass, would trigger "climate destruction - ecocide." Hogue said that a global civil rights movement called the "Ecocide Rebellion" will commence on the 15th of this month, where people all over the world will engage in civil disobedience in order to bring attention to climate issues (this was an observation, not a prediction.) He did add that he believes that the old version of humanity "will autodestruct."

Hogue examined some of Nostradamus’ predictions, given in poetic passages called "quatrains" (since they occur in groups of four lines each) and their accuracy over the last few decades. He pointed out that the prophet referred to the Challenger disaster by saying that a group would be separated from the rest of humanity and used the Greek letters T, H, and L in his prediction, which Hogue interpreted as representing the company (Thiokol) which installed the faulty O-rings on the spacecraft engines, which were the reason for the crash. He also referred to a passage that reads "He will come to take himself to the corner of the moon. He will be taken and placed on an alien land," which Hogue said was a direct prediction of the Apollo 11 landing in 1969.

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Long-time scholar and one of the world's foremost experts on Sherlock Holmes and Dracula, Leslie S. Klinger joined the program in the second half to share his research of the strange and creepy (his new work is on ghost stories and classic tales of horror and suspense). He was joined by supernatural and horror author and researcher Lisa Morton, who has recently co-edited a new anthology of classic ghost stories with Klinger. Morton said that the enduring popularity of the ghost tale may stem from that "we love being scared that there is something we just can’t understand after we die." Klinger added that "ghosts reflect the spectrum of human beings," in other words they essentially come in the same variety as people, at least in the realm of fiction.

The guests discussed the history of Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his belief in the phenomenon of Spiritualism, which was a late 19th/ early 20th-century religion that held communication with the dead was possible. At the time, Morton said because of the American Civil War and then WWI, people felt a tremendous need "to connect with the loved ones they had lost." Paradoxically, Doyle was a founding member of the Society for Psychical Research, which attempted to debunk phony psychics. Some of the stories in their anthology are based on real events, or at least inspired the writers, such as the tale of a train accident by Charles Dickens. As for film and TV treatments of hauntings, Morton believes that "real ghost stories are scarier than what comes out of Hollywood." Klinger concluded, "Any good story is about how we understand ourselves better."

News segment guests: ‪Lauren Weinstein, Steve Kates.