Claim:   Scholars at the Smithsonian Institution have uncovered new interpretations of Nostradamus that relate to Barack Obama.

Status:   False.

Example:   [Collected via e-mail, November 2008]

Origins:   The game of inventing Nostradamus prophecies that supposedly describe or predict current political events from a vantage point 450 years in

the past is a familiar one. Most such inventions flare briefly and die out once they’re revealed as hoaxes, but the item referenced above has enjoyed continued circulation several months after its inception, likely because its prediction of “The great empire [that] will be torn from limb” due to “power given to the dark one from slaves come” is of renewed interest given the outcome of the recent 2008 U.S. presidential election.

Nonetheless, this Nostradamian “prediction” is nothing more than another bit of satire from The Daily Squib, which describes itself as “a satirical publication not be taken too fu**ing seriously.” The article, entitled “Nostradamus Obama Prophecies Revealed,” was published back on 10 April 2008 but continues to circulate widely enough (stripped of context which identifies its origins) that the Smithsonian is still fielding questions about it. As that institution has been noting in its responses to such inquiries, they have neither “professors” nor anyone named Eugene Randell on staff, and neither the Archives nor the Libraries (which are two separate Smithsonian organizations) has any Nostradamus book or manuscript such as the one described by the Daily Squib.

Last updated:   6 November 2008