The so-called 27 predictions were so drastic that they created a furore among many devotees for years on end. Sathya Sai Baba did not react to this until well over a decade had passed. Some of those devotees who took the dire world catastrophe predictions seriously decided to become residents in his ashram, for these would be saved from it all! It is typical of religious cults to enrol and entrap people in this way. Such rumors are their bread and butter. Did they think a good time would be had by them while all while the rest of the world suffered massive carnage and its aftermath? One has to wonder.
Sathya Sai Baba probably told his students these things to impress and also apparently to intimidate them. It was said by persons in the ashram who claimed to know about this that the students were strictly told by him never to tell anyone else about them. This is typical of Sai Baba's way of spreading 'secrets', which soon leak out. The disaster predictions were written down by someone - reportedly by a mother of one of the 18 fearful young boy students - and spread by various permanent residents in the ashram, including a Westerner lady who introduced and made salads for years for the canteen ('Salad Auntie'). The version below, which list the predictions as 38 points in all, came into my hands as a secret privilege and sign of confidence from an elderly Danish lady devotee. When I laughed at them, this lady was most offended and insisted on their genuineness. I had already heard enough of them and some of the details from various other devotees who were very keen to confirm them, but also to spread them. Firstly, here is a word-for-word 'copy' of the predictions, warts and all (for those who wish to check this further, see the scan of the paper as it was widely circulated for years).
| 1. Kali Yuga will become very bad everywhere | |
| 2. There will be no nuclear war but there will be a great nuclear accident. But the hand of God will come down to nuetralise its effects on mankind. | Comment: Predictions of such accidents had been rife among educated people before Chernobyl, which devotees see as predicted by Sathya Sai Baba. Did 'the hand of God' come down to neutralise its effects on mankind? If so, it made a very poor job of it! |
| 3. Some countinets will submerge or disappear. | |
| 4. 70% of the world population will be destroyed between 1990 and 1999 | Comment: So much for that one & for the subsequent years! |
| 5. 25% of the world population will die in one day in 1999 | |
| 6. On that particular day people will be crazy and will loot, kill, murder. rob, steal etc., better to stay indoor with locks on, on that day. | |
| 7. The world will become too overheated on that day as if to be cooked. | |
| 8. The world will be protected by God consciousness to save devotees. | |
| 9. U.S.A. is a land of immorality, sin and curruption. | Comment: But India (also sinful, immoral) is far, far more corrupt, as UN statistics prove. |
| 10. 70% of the U.S.A. will disappear as man power and land area. | |
| 11. Explosions in the English channel will damage heavily London and Paris. | Comment: A miscalculation? Paris is so far away that explosions would have to be truly gigantic. |
| 12. Singapore, South Africa, San Francisco will disappear for ever. | |
| 13. Safe lands: Australia, Newzeland, Indonasia and South India. | |
| 14. A New Star will appear in the sky. | Comment: What, the Second Coming of Christ too? |
| 15. Earthquakes and volcanoes etc, will destroy the world. | Comment: Strange that, now suddenly it's the whole world! |
| 16. This will be the beginning of a new age and end of the present age. | |
| 17. Baba's students will usher in the new Spiritual Age. | |
| 18. North India will be destroyed by war and calamities. | |
| 19. The Himalayas will sink lower and South India will rise higher. | |
| 20. China will enter North India, make it communist and then try to enter south India; but will be stopped by natural calamities etc. | |
| 21. China and North India will be eventually destroyed. | |
| 22. Baba will uplift a whole South Indian mountain range. | Comment: That'll be the day! To prove he is Krishna? |
| 23. Bombay will be destroyed by bombardments. | Comment: Bom Bom - poetic author got carried away? |
| 24. Bangalore will be destroyed but not Baba's Whitefield. | Comment: Bang Bang too! |
| 25. India need not fear of pakistan and U.S.A. | |
| 26. No crops will grow in North India for 9 months due to calamities. | |
| 27. Will need a permit to enter the Ashram. The Ashram outside will be well surrounded by Baba's army: inside Ashram will be safe and sound. | Comment: This one IS getting close to fulfillment. The armed men are all over, but safe and sound it is not inside, as was seen in 1993 and in other years where murders and suicides occurred there. |
| 28. Weekly lots to those devotees to have a chance for Baba's Darshan. | |
| 29. Baba will rule the world for 24 hours. | Comment: Odd, that! Doesn't he rule all anyhow? |
| 30. India will have18 provinces ruled by Baba's students. | |
| 31. Puttaparthy will become colder than Bangalore climate. | |
| 32. Yogis of Himalaya will come down to South India. | |
| 33. Five South Indian rivers will merge into the Chitravati River. | Comment: An extension of typical Indian religious iconography. |
| 34. All these things will be so as to bring the world back to Dharma (righteousness) | |
| 35. Iran and other moslem countries will burn up their oil deposits to hurt enemy nations. There will be hardly any fuel for commercial or military use. The Europeans and American Financial and world stock markets will suffer a heavy crash. | |
| 36. This will bring the end or death of the modern mechanical age. | |
| 37. Baba told these things to some students at Bangalore. The students began to cry and asked why He had told them few boys all these horrible and sad things. Baba told them "because you are the 18 students who will rule India under my guidance and protection. | |
| 38. Baba will at the age of 96 enter the Chitravati river and Vanish. | Comment: Sai Baba will be copying Rama now, who drowned himself in the Ganges. Pull the other one... it's got bells on! |
Notes
on the above showing that Sai Baba has lent substance to some points in published
talks:-
Point 30. about India
being 'ruled by Baba's students' partly accords with what Sathya Sai Baba predicted
to Dr. John Hislop about his students in 1968 as transcribed in 'Conversations
with Bhagavan Sri Sathya Sai Baba...' (p. 39 old edition, p. 47 new edition), where
Sai Baba claims his students will bring about a "great change in the Indian
nation" within ten years (which meant by 1978). So far this prediction
is certainly totally unfulfilled.
The lifting a mountain range was predicted by SB in one of his published public discourses (p.92 in Sathya Sai Speaks Vol. 3 new 1990s edition). In the former edition, p. 25 in Sathya Sai Speaks Vol. 3 - more correctly, he claimed he would lift two mountain ranges. This is, of course, a kind of re-enactment of the Krishna myth in which he supposedly lifted up with one hand the Govardhana mountain to shelter devotees under it from a deluge. It is truly amazing... i.e. what grown-up people will credit!
The allegedly "all-knowing" Sathya Sai Baba let this scaremongering continue to spread unchecked until faced with a pending crisis in the Sai movement. The rumours were so rife and widely reckoned to contain some truth that leaders of the Sai movement and Organisation were repeatedly questioned about them, but could neither confirm nor unconfirm them. Peggy Mason informed that she was phoned up from around the world by disturbed followers (often neglecting time zones and waking them in the mid of night). Around Christmas 1991, Sai Baba responded with denials of the rumours to worried questioning from a series of top foreign Sai Org. officials, including Michael Goldstein, Robert Bozzani and Bernhard Gruber. The concern and anxiety did not die down even then, and so Sathya Sai Baba made a public denial in his Shivarathri discourse in 1991, where he massively berated the 'rumour-mongers' in quite threatening terms. This was a great relief to some leaders in the Sai Org., for at last they were able to refute the rumours.
However, in addition to the 27 and/or 38 predictions, a number of reports tell of Sathya Sai Baba allegedly materialising maps and sometimes a globe in interviews, showing how the world would look after a global catastrophe. These tend to back up the likelihood of Sathya Sai Baba having actually made the predictions, despite his last ditch denials made more than a decade later. In the late '80s, rumours were circulated (and reached me) of a Hungarian group that had been shown such a globe in an interview. Allegedly, much of the known world had disappeared and little remained of Western Europe but for England isolatedly in the Atlantic ocean. A Danish friend knew the Hungarian man who reported this, but it was impossible to trace him again. I made various attempts to identify and question this group, including one through Mr. Lucas Ralli (then the UK Central Coordinator who was receiving many questions about this). Ralli knew well the leaders of the Sai centre in Budapest, but they could not confirm anything to him. However, Mr. Bernhard Gruber of Germany, then Central Coordinator for Europe, told the European leaders' group (Easter 1991, where I was present and heard him at Sai House, Divignano, Italy) that he had at a recent interview asked SB about the disaster predictions from the Hungarian source. Sai Baba had told him there was no substance in it. Then he asked whether Sathya Sai Baba had produced the globe in an interview, to which he said Sathya Sai Baba replied as if affirmatively, then adding the following exact words "...it is not ready yet". No more could Gruber ascertain than that!
Further, at that time, I knew an American lady, Mrs. Marge Hendel, who assured me that a Californian family she knew had been given by Sathya Sai Baba in an interview a map of the future post-catastrophe world (which in fact agreed on several major features with the above predictions), which she claimed to have seen herself. She said the family had rejected Sathya Sai Baba and so had eventually thrown the map away. Similar reports of maps and predictions by Sathya Sai Baba in interviews are found in some of the writings of devotees in the ever-growing hagiography by amateur writers on Sathya Sai Baba.
The once-prominent US devotee, Al Drucker who held lectures for foreigners in Prashanthi Nilayam in 1984/5, stated that he had been present at Ootacamund teaching a class of boys when SB entered the classroom and began to tell them stories about his childhood and youth. Then Drucker, who had sat at the back of the room, told how Sathya Sai Baba 'materialised' a kind of metal globe and sent it around for examination, saying that the names of 18 students who would run the 18 states of India at some future date were inscribed on it. The boys produced a magnifying glass to try to study the characters on the object, but Sathya Sai Baba became thunderously angry and told them they should concentrate instead on him, the avatar, in whose presence they were so fortunate to be. He then took the globe-like object and threw it into the corner of the room, where Drucker said it could not be found later on. Believe what one can of all this... but the account itself is at least further evidence that Sathya Sai Baba indeed HAS made these kinds of predictions.
Most of the 38 points of the above predictions seem to be a hodge-podge concocted partly of borrowings from prophesies by various known soothsayers, including the alleged US clairvoyant Edgar Cayce (eg. as to the sinking of continental masses and a time of excessive overheating of the earth). Apropos, none of Cayce's predictions have so far come true. Some are proven false already, for he predicted that Bermuda would sink beneath the waves before 1950!). Whether or not Sathya Sai Baba really made these predictions, despite his vehement but very belated denial (Sathya Sai Speaks Vol 24 - p 37f) is not really so important. Firstly, there is already enough evidence to show that he denies what he has has predicted in private and tells untruths as it suits him. Secondly, he did not lift a finger to quell the massive unease among many devotees for many years... which shows that he does not care or that he is far from omniscient... but most likely both at once!
The incident with the 18 students above is doubtless the same as referred to by Ra. Ganapati in his semi-official biography of Sathya Sai Baba Baba: Sathya Sai Vol II - page 85) where he wrote:
His college students had the privilege to see
another unique creation in the Ootacamund Summer Course in June 1976.
Svami, who declared that He would live to see ninety six years in this
body, mentioned that eighteen important institutions would be established
by Him all over India in the remaining forty six years, and circled
His hand. Immediately there appeared in His hand a big medal with the map of India engraved. There were inscribed therein the eighteen institutions that are to appear in the next near-half-century. Not only that, the medal also carried the important 'achievements-to-be' of Svami in the future, in microscopic Devanagiri characters in the Samskrit language." |
The discrepancies between this account and that of Al Drucker, who told a group of us in the Prashanthi lecture room in January 1985 that he was the only adult present to that incident, are considerable. This is just typical of the highly varying accounts and rumours that fly about every incident due to the secretive Sathya Sai Baba and his staff. Drucker had remained behind after the Summer Course to be with some students, and it was then that Sathya Sai Baba - who was believed to have left Ootacamund - came into the room without warning.
