Fact or fiction?

Prophecy or coincidence?

You tell me.

In 1898, fourteen years before the RMS Titanic sailed on her maiden voyage, twelve years before her keel was laid at the Harland & Wolff shipyard in Belfast, Ireland a man named Morgan Robertson wrote a book entitled "Futility" in which a large steamship strikes an iceberg in the north Atlantic with great loss of life. The similarities to the doomed liner Titanic and Robetson's fictional ship go far beyond coincidence.

Check these out and compare:

Robertson's ship in his book:

Name: Titan

Country: British

Length: 800 feet

Displacement: 70,000 tons

Top Speed: 24 Knots

Number of Propellers: 3

Number of watertight bulkheads: 19

Passenger Capacity: 3,000

Actual number of passengers aboard: 2,000

Number of lifeboats aboard: 24

Sunk by: An iceberg on her maiden voyage

Area of damage: starboard side forward

Month of disaster: April

Now compare those stats to the actual RMS Titanic:

Name: Titanic

Country: British

length: 882 feet

Displacement: 60,250 tons

Top Speed: 24 Knots

Number of propellers: 3

Number of watertight bulkheads: 15

Passenger capacity: 3,000

Actual number of passengers aboard: 2,200

Number of lifeboats: 20

Sunk by: An iceberg on her maiden voyage

Area of damage: starboard side forward

Month of disaster: April

Kind of makes you sit back and wonder, huh? Not only do I find this bizarre, but when Robertson wrote his novel, no ships were being built on that grand scale, nor were any in the planning stages. Here's another strange fact. Robertson later wrote a book called "Beyond the Spectrum". In this book, he described a futuristic war fought with aircraft that carried what he called "sun bombs". These bombs were so powerful that with one brilliant flash of blinding light, one single bomb could destroy an entire city (much like a nuclear weapon ).

When this book was written, airplanes were still tiny, dangerous machines that could barely carry one man and crashed frequently, and this was decades before the Germans started their "heavy water" experiments, Einstein was years away from his Theory of Relativity and the Manhattan Project didn't exist. Robertson's future war begins in the month of December when the Japanese stage a sneak attack on Hawaii.

Sort of make you site back and wonder about some of the science fiction written today...

And speaking of science fiction and UFO's and folks that are really out there on the fringe...

The first UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico occurred on July 31st, 1947...

Al Gore, former Vice President of the United States and also-ran for Prez was born exactly nine months to the day later on March 31st, 1948.

Coincidence?

I think not.

Copyright 2005 Thomas J Wolfenden