If you've never heard of Baba Vanga, strap in, because the long-dead mystic has some pretty bold predictions for what's going to happen in the rest of 2024.
She died in 1996, but Bulgarian Baba Vanga was well-known for making predictions after being blinded in her childhood, and these have continued to propagate long after her death.
Some people have been shocked by how accurate these have proven down the years, and 2024 seems no different, with some of her predictions already having come true.
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For one thing, Baba Vanga predicted an economic crisis this year, and while there might not be a truly global collapse, many economies are nonetheless struggling in a big way, making this seem fairly accurate.
She also predicted that this year would bring some medical breakthroughs and new treatments, and the announcement of a new vaccine against lung cancer being tested is fabulous news on that front. It's being developed in the UK and will make a run of 3,000 vaccines at first.
Some of her other apparent predictions are more precise and as yet remain unproven this year, less than halfway through.
One of these was that there would be a rise in terrorist attacks, something that isn't too easy to prove with empirical data but certainly speaks to how the world feels now from a news perspective. Another said that we'd be subjected to more weather events of terrifying scale and ferocity, something that increasingly feels like part of the annual cycle.
Of course, there is a slightly controversial part of the Baba Vanga story - whether these predictions are actually genuine in the first place.
It's been noted down the years that Baba Vanga left very few written records, such that many of the reported predictions that have come to light since her death are reportedly from word-of-mouth conversations.
Given that a list of predictions now comes out every year, it would seem that she was fairly dogmatic in producing a long list of things she'd foreseen stretching forward into the future, now approaching 30 years on from her death.
There's nothing to necessarily show that these predictions aren't real, then, but it still takes a pretty sizeable pinch of salt thrown over the shoulder to believe that she made them all to these levels of detail.
