A year in which some just didn’t see ‘that’ coming

This is the time of year when numerous crackpots come out of the woodwork and give us their predictions for the year ahead.

Some of the forecasts are outlandish and others are just plain common sense, predictions that any one of us could have made - for instance, there will be flooding in many parts of the world - without reference to the occult.

So, I thought I’d look back at some of the claims made at the beginning of 2016 and see how correct, or hopelessly inaccurate, they were.

I started with ‘‘16 shocking’’ predictions made last year by a certain Dr Carmen Harra in the Huffington Post.

As I expected they were a mixture of the wildly inaccurate and the bleeding obvious.

Her first prediction was that earthquakes would increase during the year. This a stock-intrade tip by all the seers. After all, quakes are sure to happen and who is going to count them, apart from GeoNet.

The centres of seismic activity were going to be Europe, Japan and Indonesia – spot on but hardly revealing. Italy, Japan and Indonesia are regularly victims of severe quakes. Strangely, Kaikoura didn’t figure in Harra’s calculations, even though it must have suffered one of the strongest quakes of the year.

On the political front she was way off beam with her insights. She predicted North and South Korea would join forces in 2016. No points for that one. There’s as much sign of that happening as there is of John Key changing his mind and wanting his old job back.

Harra also fared poorly with her political forecasts. Regarding the two most seismic events of the year she got one totally wrong and didn’t even foresee the other.

She said Donald Trump wouldn’t figure in the final stages of the US elections and Jeb Bush would be the Republican nominee (he dropped out in the early stages).

And there wasn’t a mention in Harra’s political crystal ballgazing of Brexit, Britain’s decision to pull out of the EU, which has tremendous repercussions for Europe and the rest of the world.

Several of her failed predictions included a new monetary system and an end to the monarchy, although to be fair she did tantalisingly say that ‘‘something may happen to the Queen this year’’. I presume that was a reference to the Queen suffering a heavy cold at Christmas, not exactly earth-shattering stuff and certainly not abdication material.

To be fair to Harra she wasn’t as wildly wrong in her conjectures as some of her fellow seers.

Pastor Ricardo Salazar of the Global Church of the King of Israel said he had ‘‘a revelation from God that a 9-kilometre asteroid (Salazar didn’t say whether God indicated if that was length or circumference) would hit Earth, wiping out a billion people. And while Salazar may have been a bit vague about the asteroid’s dimensions he was certainly more precise on the date of the catastrophe – May 16, to be precise.

The nearest thing to such a cataclysmic event on that date was that a report was called for in Britain into the discovery the previous day of a fake bomb (a training device) that resulted in a Manchester United match being called off at the last minute.

I suppose The Sun’s headline was: Billions safe after Old Trafford bomb scare.

Meanwhile, a Bulgarian blind woman and self-declared clairvoyant, known as the Balkan Nostradamus, Baba Vanga was busy with her own insights into 2016. She had supposedly previously predicted that the 44th President of the United States would be an African-American.

Barack Obama is indeed the 44th President but Vanga’s supporters’ claims that she predicted his elevation smacked more than a little of hindsight revisionism.

However, Vanga also claimed the 44th President would be the last, giving hope to the whole world that, for whatever reason, Donald Trump will not be inaugurated as the 45th in just over a week’s time.

I’m going to climb on the bandwagon here and claim that he is going to be hit by a stray asteroid. Remember, you read it here first.