Janitch is, as his lesser-known rivals are, part of a rich history of dubious claims about quake prediction. Raffaele Bendandi, an Italian watchmaker and self-taught scientist, became massively famous in the early 1920s for his earthquake predictions, claiming to have accurately predicted a 1915 one, for instance, which killed more than 30,000 people. Bendandi held that the planets had a gravitational pull on the earth’s crust that caused earthquakes. (That is not how earthquakes work.) His predictions became so respected that he was knighted by Mussolini in 1927, though the dictator also “banned him from making any public predictions, on pain of exile,” per the Telegraph. Bendandi’s reputation held up so well, even after his death in 1979, that thousands of citizens of Rome fled the city in May 2011, fearing an enormous earthquake the watchmaker had supposedly predicted before his death. (Italy is a strange ground zero for various kinds of earthquake pseudoscience, which can sometimes have life-alerting consequences. In the aftermath of a 2009 earthquake in L’Aquila that killed 309 people, six geologists and a government worker were convicted of manslaughter for failing to predict the quake. Before the conviction was ultimately overturned on appeal, the seven faced years in prison and fines in the millions of dollars.)