Friends,

One century ago at 11:40 pm (ship’s time) 14 April 1912, the brand new RMS Titanic on its maiden voyage, carrying 2,223 people – and only enough lifeboats for 1,178 – sliced its starboard side on an iceberg. Two-and-half hours later at 2:20 am April 15, she slipped under still and icy 28-degree waters around 375 miles (600 km) south of Newfoundland taking 1,514 passengers to the bottom, many of whom numbered the elite of the Belle Epoch, the Edwardian Era, soon to end in the catastrophe of the First World War a few years later. A significant number of documented premonitions of the coming disaster remain – a prescient record not to be rivaled until almost a century later by seers and regular people alike who anticipated and documented their forebodings of the Twin Towers collapsing on “9/11”, from hijacked planes crashing into the World Trade Center towers on 11 September 2001. One of the most chillingly detailed and accurate premonitions about the sinking of the Titanic innocently enough appeared as a short story published in 1894. It previewed the disaster in a fiction opus fourteen years before it happened.

Morgan Robertson (1861-1915) had left a life at sea in 1894 to try his hand at short story writing. He would eventually publish 200 of them, but he will forever be remembered for one story he began composing on an evening in 1897. Robertson started by unraveling the mental knots of his all-day writer’s block. As he relaxed, he felt the familiar presence of what he called his “astral writing partner” take the helm and cast him adrift in an ocean of images. A vision for a new story coalesced through the imagined fog and icy waters of the North Atlantic. A great ocean liner on her maiden voyage, her three twisting screws pushing 75,000 tons at 25 knots, cleaved the chilled waters on a collision course with an iceberg!

Robertson saw the name Titan on her bow, and knew this 800-foot ocean liner would have 19 watertight compartments, giving both passengers and crew the illusion that she was unsinkable. The folly of such a claim would reveal itself when, on slicing her bow against the unseen iceberg, Titan would sink and a majority of her 3,000 passengers would drown because there were only twenty-four lifeboats.

Robertson set to writing The Wreck of the Titan, or Futility his fictional chronicle of the ultimate maritime disaster, which was to take place in the mid-Atlantic on a moonless April night. Fiction became reality fourteen years later. On her maiden voyage, the Titanic cut the icy waters of the North Atlantic off Newfoundland, her three propellers churning 66,000 tons at 23 knots toward an unseen iceberg. There were only twenty-two lifeboats aboard, since the 883-foot ocean liner was considered unsinkable. In spite of her designer’s arrogant claim, the collision with the iceberg had sliced open three of her sixteen watertight compartments – one too many to survive. The Titanic and a majority of her 2,223 passengers faced an icy death on the moonless night of 14 April 1912.

Robertson was not to profit from this story, never making more than $5,000 a year for any of them. Distressed by the financial strain and failing health of his wife and his fading creative powers, Robertson had himself committed to a psychopathic ward of Bellevue Hospital. After his release he returned to writing but his stories lacked the former “punch.” He was found leaning against a bureau in his Atlantic City hotel room dead on his feet from a heart attack, three years after the sinking of the Titanic in March 1915.

At least nineteen people had recorded premonitions of the sinking of the Titanic several weeks before the disaster. For instance, three weeks before the Titanic planned to set off from Southampton on her maiden voyage, English businessman J. Conon Middleton booked passage so he could attend a business conference in New York. Not long afterwards he experienced a nightmare wherein he floated, as if astral traveling, in the hoary night air gliding over a horrific scene of the Titanic laying on her side with a great and tangled mass of people splashing and drowning in the icy waters around the stricken ship.

Middleton, trying to retain his British stiff upper lip, initially rejected the dream as poppycock, just traveler’s anxiety, what? The more he tried to suppress memory of it the harder it was to forget the dream, especially as his date to board Titanic approached. He felt quite inwardly frightened and equally ashamed that friends and family might ridicule him if he would mention the nightmare. It was nonsense, really.

On 6 April 1912, four days before boarding time, Middleton received a telegraph from New York announcing that the conference would be postponed. He quickly cancelled his ticket. The Titanic sailed without him to its doom in the wee hours of a clear and frigid North Atlantic night of 15 April 1912. Upon recollection of the premonitory dream, Middleton recalled that he never saw himself as one of the multitude cast into the deathly cold waters. Just a consciousness hovering over the white splashing over blackened waves of struggling and screaming people in the dark.

Such a vantage point of prescient safety was not granted to our next precognitive passenger of the Titanic. In 1909, English journalist and pioneer investigative reporter W. T. Stead had had a tiring day of lectures while visiting New York. He turned in early and experienced a terrifying visionary dream about a giant ocean liner heaving under the waves. He saw himself struggling in icy waters; his cries for help dying out in fading mists of brittle air as he drowned.

A year later, Stead sought a consultation about the dream from palmist and prophet, Count Louis Hammon, aka Cheiro as his occult handle (taken from the divination word Cheiromancy, i.e. palmistry). Cheiro reading the lines of his palm warned that Stead would indeed face an approaching danger in the future from drowning. Cheiro had advised that the danger would pass only if Stead avoided traveling over water in “the month of April 1912.”

He boarded Titanic to make an appearance in a peace congress at Carnegie Hall, New York. Eyewitnesses report sighting Stead after the Titanic’s iceberg collision helping women and children into lifeboats, in an act “typical of his generosity, courage, and humanity.”

Once all the boats were cast away into the darkness, Stead is said to have excused himself and headed to the First Class Smoking Room where Walter Lord in his classic non-fiction account of the disaster (A Night to Remember) recounted witnesses seeing him calmly sitting in a leather chair reading a book.

He did not go down with the ship; instead, he was deposited in the terrible scene of his visionary dream. Another account by survivor Philip Mock recalled in an article published after the sinking in the Worchester Telegram recognized him struggling to stay afloat like hundreds of others splashing and freezing to death in the icy waters. He clung to a raft with millionaire John Jacob Astor IV.

“Their feet became frozen,” said Mock, “and they were compelled to release their hold. Both were drowned.

It just so happens that in 1908, four years before Titanic slipped under the waves, Scandinavian seer Anton Johansson predicted the sinking of the Titanic, naming the ship and millionaire John Jacob Astor IV outright as one of its many famous victims.

Circumstantial evidence gives the story of Stead’s premonitions as well as his famous reading by Cheiro some credibility because of his own observations in print, often claiming his belief that he was destined to die either by lynching or drowning. On 22 March 1886, he published an article named “How the Mail Steamer Went Down in Mid-Atlantic, by a Survivor” It was a hypothetical and cautionary tail of what might happen if a passenger steamer should collide with another ship causing a high loss of life due to an insufficient number of lifeboats aboard. “This is exactly what might take place and will take place if liners are sent to sea short of boats,” he wrote. Next in 1892, Stead published another fictional story along the same lines called From the Old World to the New”. He creates a vessel with a larger than life name, similar to Titanic called the Majestic, not a victim of maritime disaster but performing the role of rescue ship for a vessel that collided with an iceberg in the North Atlantic.

One angle to the much-told Titanic story seems to have been neglected for a century, the astrological influence.

Given that on occasion the best mechanical ambitions of men can go on the fritz during a three-week period happening every four months because of Mercury retrogrades, I consulted my JPL Ephemeris and discovered some interesting astrological data about the wee hours of 15 April. A century before I finished writing this article for Hogueprophecy, exactly at the moment Titanic hit the dark glacier in its path just before midnight, the moon was in Aquarius. It was just a sliver, close to new phase and would not rise until a few hours before dawn, after a rescue ship RMS Carpathia entered the waters seeking to rescue 710 survivors in lifeboats.

The Moon, that night to remember, was in Aquarius sextiled Mercury in Aries in retrograde.

Perhaps this aspect had something to do with the mechanical failure of the Titanic’s hull. It might have influenced the impetuosity of Captain Edward Smith badgered by the White Star Line’s chairman, J. Bruce Ismay, to charge through waters known to calve icebergs off glaciers at a high speed in an attempt to prove RMS Titanic was not only unsinkable but the fastest ocean liner in the world.

Mercury rules intellectual judgment but in retrograde, in rambunctious Aries and despite a positive sextile of the Moon in Aquarius, it seems that judgment was blinded by impetuousness that night, charging forward against all hazards and would not take prudence as helpful but a threat to freedom loving Aquarian action. After the collision, Mercury retrograde may have influenced Captain Smith’s shock and inability to take charge of the evacuation. He stood stiffly on the bridge resigned to his fate, unfazed by as number of lifeboats, which in the best of circumstances could only load half the people aboard, were lowered half filled! There was a lifeboat capacity for 1,178 people. Only 710 survived the wreck. Smith could have saved 468 more if fatalistic mood and perhaps Mercury retrograde had not broken his nerve.

Objectively speaking, the cosmos might have had a more direct influence on the tragedy. Astronomers Donald Olson, Russell Doescher and Roger Sinnott proposed their theory in Sky & Telescope. A few months before Titanic sailed, the oceanic tides were unusually high as the Sun, Moon and Earth lined up for an especially powerful “Spring Tide” on 4 January 1912, because the day before, the Earth made its closest annual approach to the Sun around the same time the Moon made its closest pass to the earth in 1,400 years! The tides, therefore were huge, lifting icebergs calved off Greenland out of their usual wallowing grounds between Greenland and Baffin Island to float and herd south spreading into the main shipping lanes off Newfoundland.

I would add that many of these bergs we old, made of blue ice and soiled. Witnesses said that the iceberg floating in Titanic’s path was made of dark ice. This perhaps made spotting its mass in starlight more difficult – too late to warn – before the ship’s wheel had time to spin the rudder. The technology of the time handicapped the vessel with a very slow wheel to rudder reaction time. First Officer William Murdoch on watch at the time had ordered a turning the ship too late, just enough to port so that a head-on collision, which might have saved the ship, became a slicing scrape of hundreds of feet along the starboard side, flooding one too many watertight compartments keeping Titanic afloat. An astrologer would call this perfect convergence of dysfunctional technology in the hands of impaired human sight and judgment cause for one of the greatest disasters under Mercury in retrograde.

Some of you may recall my telling of this tale in more than one of the over 100 documentaries I have taped for television on prophets and prophecy since 1987. The usual TV game is to roll in some grumpy, professional skeptic to give a good prophecy story the debunking brush off. I recall one particularly sourpuss, long-faced professor, who when asked to rationally explain how Morgan Robertson, 14 years before the sinking of the Titanic, could be so close on so many details of a real disaster to come, even to the point of calling the Titanic the “Titan.”

The skeptic, pursing his lips in a sneer said, “Well, he wasn’t going to call it ‘the little mouse’.”

This would have been a wonderful opportunity for television to educate rather than go for the cheap shot. I strive with every show to get these producers to have me answer any charge of skeptics. It seems only fair that any claim either for or against a theory should be challenged, not just those sympathetic to prophecy stories being shot down and disparaged without consequence. This would not only help me but also help skeptics to sharpen their wits and be held accountable for your sake and your enlightenment. The pro-prophecy interpreters, like Dolores Cannon, need their theories challenged on camera.

If she time travels and talks to the living Nostradamus, prove it.

If Morgan Robertson would not call a big ship “the little mouse” and his use of Titan for Titanic can be brushed off as coincidence –challenge me on camera to explain why the skeptic is wrong.

Here is my answer: there are in the English language over 300 words to choose to name something large. Given the consistent way Robertson in a fictional story closely matched what became so many factual elements – including that Titan is just missing the “i-c” of Titanic – should be enough circumstantial evidence to give this mystery more than a snide dismissal. Avoidance is not an answer. He didn’t call Titanic “the little mouse”. Robertson got right two out of three syllables of the actual name. That is a 75-percent accuracy! Moreover, in meaning, even more close, 90 percent, as a Titan is the noun for Titanic the adjective qualifier.

John Hogue

(15 April 2012)

For further information on Titanic related prophecies, read the following printed books available at Hogueprophecy.com:

The Millennium Book of Prophecy

1000 for 2000 Startling Predictions for the New Millennium

For further reading about the RMS Titanic in prophecy and the history of famous mass premonitions, please read Nostradamus: Premonitions of 9/11:

Also Available as a Lulu deluxe Trade Paperback.

PROPHECY NEWS FLASH!

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