French physician and pharmacist Michel de Nostredame, also known as Nostradamus, gained fame during his lifetime after publishing a long series of prophecies that continue to astonish the public to this day.
Most of Nostradamus's prophecies are written in a very challenging to understand form, which gives incredible possibilities for interpretation. This is mainly because Nostradamus wrote his prophecies in intricate quatrains that can be reinterpreted endlessly.
But is there any truth to his predictions? Was Nostradamus a true clairvoyant who could predict the future, or was he simply a clever wordsmith whose ambiguous poetry could be interpreted in countless ways?
But a less-explored theory suggests another explanation for his abilities: What if Nostradamus wasn’t predicting the future as we understand it, but was a remote viewer—someone who could access events or places outside the normal boundaries of space and time?
This isn’t just a fanciful idea, but one that is tied to phenomena that the U.S. government once took seriously enough to study with its secret remote-viewing programs. To understand this possibility, let’s look at the parallels between the so-called “prophecies” of Nostradamus and the up-to-date concept of remote viewing.
Nostradamus' “Predictions”: Prophecy or Remote Viewing?
Before delving into Nostradamus’ connection to remote viewing, it’s worth explaining what both terms mean. Nostradamus’ quatrains are typically considered predictions or prophecies.
Written in a deliberately hidden and cryptic style, they are often interpreted as predicting future events. However, some scholars argue that the language of his quatrains is so open to interpretation that their accuracy can only be assessed retrospectively.
Remote viewing, on the other hand, refers to the ability to describe a place, event, or object from a distance – regardless of whether that distance is geographical or temporal.
Remote viewers often describe seeing a mental “snapshot” of distant events as they happen, even though they are physically removed from the scene. Unlike prophecy, which suggests a divine or mystical ability to predict the future, remote viewing is often discussed in more scientific terms, sometimes even presented as a form of extrasensory perception (ESP).
The U.S. military took the possibility of remote viewing seriously enough to fund a program in the 1970s and 1980s called the Stargate Project to explore its potential for espionage and intelligence gathering. If the government believed remote viewing could be real and practical, is it really that demanding to imagine that Nostradamus might have drawn on a similar phenomenon?
Evidence in Nostradamus' Quatrains
Nostradamus’s quatrains are notorious for their obfuscation, archaic language, mixed metaphors, and symbolism that make them challenging to read. Yet some of his most renowned prophecies bear a surprising resemblance to what we might now call remote viewing experiences.
Take, for example, the following quatrain, often interpreted as referring to Adolf Hitler and World War II:
“From the depths of Western Europe,
A small child will be born into a poor family,
He who will seduce a great army with his tongue;
His fame will grow towards the kingdom of the East.”
This passage, written centuries before Hitler came to power, has been credited as a description of Hitler’s humble beginnings, his persuasive speeches, and his alliance with Japan. Whether we believe this interpretation or not, the specifics are unsettling.
The remote viewer describes the scene as if he were looking at it from a distance but through a hazy lens—the details are there but somewhat obscured. Could Nostradamus have “seen” Hitler’s rise not as a prophecy but through the prism of remote viewing, the ability to perceive events unfolding in distant time?
Similarly, consider the prophecy regarding the Great Fire of London in 1666:
“The blood of the righteous will make a mistake in London,
Burnt by the lightning of twenty-three sixes:
The senior lady will fall from her high place,
Several members of the same sect will be killed.”
Interpreted by some as a description of the Great Fire of London, this quatrain provides imagery consistent with the event, although it is shrouded in symbolic language. A remote viewer can see images of a city burning, a fire started by an unknown force, and interpret them through their own limited understanding, much as Nostradamus describes these events in cryptic terms.
Could Nostradamus have been one of the first practitioners?
In the 20th century, the CIA and the U.S. military were so fascinated by television that they began formal investigations into its potential, producing programs such as Stargate.
The idea was that if individuals could describe a distant location or event, even if they weren’t physically present, that ability could be used for intelligence purposes. Remote recipients were tasked with trying to describe military bases, secret installations, or events happening on the other side of the world. To the surprise of many, some of the results were surprisingly accurate.
What sets remote viewing apart from traditional concepts of prophecy is that it does not rely on divine intervention or mystical practices. Instead, it operates on the premise that the human mind has the potential to access information beyond the constraints of time and space.
This was the main idea behind the research conducted by the Stargate Project, and it is not much different from what, at least in theory, Nostradamus seemed to be doing.
Imagine for a moment that Nostradamus wasn’t “predicting” the future, but rather engaging in a form of remote viewing. His quatrains might be the closest he’s come to describing the strange and distant images he’s seen.
Just as modern television viewers claim to see fragmented, often confusing images when looking at distant places, Nostradamus may have had difficulty fitting his experiences into a framework that made sense to his contemporaries.
Can remote viewing explain the visions of Nostradamus?
If we accept the possibility that Nostradamus was not a prophet but a remote viewer, how does this change our understanding of his work? First, it removes the need for a mystical explanation.
Remote viewing, while still controversial and not fully understood, at least operates within a framework that could one day be scientifically explained. The fact that the U.S. government once devoted funds to studying the phenomenon lends it some level of credibility.
What’s striking about this theory is how neatly it fits into both the historical and contemporary fascination with Nostradamus. Rather than being an outsider, a mystical figure whose prophecies can only be understood through faith or blind belief, Nostradamus becomes part of a larger human experience—one that has been explored, however tentatively, by modern science.
While we will never know for sure whether Nostradamus was a prophet or a remote viewer, the similarities between his visions and the concept of remote viewing are compelling.
The vagueness of his descriptions, the fragmentary nature of his quatrains, and the possibility of understanding them only after the fact are hallmarks of remote viewing as described by contemporary practitioners surveyed in government programs.
Nostradamus may not have been the first person in history to access this mysterious ability, but his quatrains constitute one of the earliest documented examples of what may have been remote viewing—a phenomenon that would come to the attention of the U.S. government centuries later.
Perhaps Nostradamus was not a mystical prophet at all, but rather an unwitting pioneer of a scientific phenomenon that we are only just beginning to understand.
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