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The Vancouver Province - Feature Article 
Sunday July 04, 1999 

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By Jason Proctor 
Staff Reporter 
 

Given the weather British Columbians have experienced of late, it's not hard to believe the end of the world is nigh. 

Throw in the prophecies of Nostradamus and you may never set foot outside the basement again. 

According to his followers, the famed 16th-century clairvoyant predicted the beginning of the end of the wold would take place sometime around this weekend. 

If all goes according to plan, the action should get under way later today when a "king of Terror" appears in the skies, triggering fiery hail, a world war, the death of all heretics and the demise of one-third of the world's population. 

The vision looks good on paper, especially given Nostradamus's track record. 

The Frenchman's supporters say he foretold the French Revolution and the rise of Hitler. 

But local futurist Frank Ogden says there's more to the art of prediction than scoring the occasional hit. 

"I just think that Nostradamus had a good press agent," says the man known to Vancouverites as Dr. Tomorrow. 

"I'm starting to wonder if there's any future for futurists." 

It's a long, sordid trip down luminary lane from Nostradamus's home in southern France to Ogden's coal harbour houseboat, but it could turn out to be the journey on which both of them have staked their reputations. 

Michel de Nostradame made his predictions using a mixture of astrology and self-hypnosis, sitting on a brass pole and staring into a bowl of water before transcribing his visions into anagram filled verse littered with Latin, Provencal and French. 

Dr. Tomorrow relied on the much more modern, much less romantic tool of demographics, predicating the rise of the Internet and the decline of the job as we know it by crunching numbers and forecasting trends. 

Dr. Tomorrow says that in Nostradamus’s pre-industrial day, the rate of technological, social and economic development we know in the dying days of the 20th century was unimaginable. 

"Change as unknown," he says. "Predicting the future was easy. The Nile will flood. There will be four seasons." 

With hindsight, we're been able to interpret Nostradamus's vague verse as dead-on prediction. 

We're fascinated with the future, and Nostradamus made some eerie calls. -- seemingly foretelling both world wars and the rise of a man named Hister. 

Which brings us to this weekend. 

Sooner or later, you have to put it all on the line, and in the 72nd stanza of his 10th book, Nostradamus goes for the gusto. 

One accepted translation reads: "In the year 1999 and seven months / from the sky will come a great King of Terror / He will resurrect the Kind of Angelmois / Before and afterwards Mars rules happily." 

Angelmois - if you buy into the myth -- is most likely an anagram of Mongolois, meaning a revival of the empire of Genghis Khan, which is to say China. 

All well and good for a medieval doomsayer, says Ogden, but futurists in 1999 have other things to consider. The rate of development, research and innovation makes the speed of change impossible to follow. 

"My idea now of a long-range planning is lunch," he says. "There’s so much change that any one thing could destroy everything." 

As a result, Dr. Tomorrow has done what every clairvoyant -- even Nostradamus -- has done at least once in a visionary life. He's reinvented himself. 

These days, Frank Ogden runs a global television network through the Internet, trying to reach an audience of billions with a budget of thousands. 

It's a proposal skeptics once laughed at, but Dr. Tomorrow believes it's the way of the future. 

And if the world doesn't end today, Ogden says, he'll keep right on doing what he's doing -- just like Nostradamus did after he was laughed at by his detractors. 

"I believe he was a forward thinker," says Ogden 

"And his time was chaotic." 

 

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