Paranoia can destroy your life. But, like that great sage Kurt Cobain once said, "Just because you're paranoid, don't mean they're not after you." Tragically, Guru Cobain was shortly thereafter taken from us by the Ant People who secretly rule our media. Every once in a while, though, a paranoid suspicion is just a truth that sounds too crazy to be real until it bites you right in the ass with its supernaturally powerful mandibles.

5 Billy Mitchell Thinks Pearl Harbor Is Ripe for Air Attack

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Billy Mitchell once made the farfetched prediction that "wars would soon be fought in the air and under the sea." That seems pretty reasonable, until you consider that he said it way back in 1906. When World War I rolled along, Mitchell earned the rank of brigadier general and showed the world that he wasn't just full of hot air, becoming one of the most feared Americans in Europe as his aerial forces plagued the German ground forces with hot leaden rain.

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Mitchell's airborne prophecies came to a head with his famous battleship trials in 1921, in which he demonstrated how properly equipped airplanes could totally kick a battleship's ass. But this is all firmly in the realm of common sense masquerading as prophecy. Things really only get weird when you consider his prediction that war with the Japanese would begin early one Sunday morning with a surprise air attack on Pearl Harbor, shortly followed by an attack on the Philippines.

Yes, he got that specific.

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The War Plans Division filed his report under B, saying that "Since he so notoriously overestimates what could be done with air power by the United States it is not improbable that he has likewise overestimated what Japan could do." He was court martialed, convicted of insubordination, and suspended from active duty without pay for his lunatic ravings about those awkward metal sea-beasts and strange flitting gunbirds being anything more than novelty items in the grand old tradition of ground warfare.