--- title: "We Counted The Ones That Did Not Come True. There Were 1,411." dek: "Every few months a film is found to have predicted something. Nobody counts the films that predicted nothing. We took 240 titles from one decade, logged every specific catastrophe depicted in them, and checked all of them." kind: investigation (Investigation) desk: Culture author: Marguerite Lyle and Dev Rajagopal (fictional) published: 2026-08-10T12:00:00Z url: https://theyburied.com/article/predictive-programming-misses tags: predictive programming, base rate, film, hindsight, method genre: satire status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented --- # We Counted The Ones That Did Not Come True. There Were 1,411. *Every few months a film is found to have predicted something. Nobody counts the films that predicted nothing. We took 240 titles from one decade, logged every specific catastrophe depicted in them, and checked all of them.* A film depicts a disaster. Years later something similar happens. Somebody notices, and the clip goes round. Nobody has ever counted the films that depicted a disaster and nothing happened. That number is 1,411. > **Figure:** 1,428 specific catastrophes depicted in 240 films and series, 1990–1999 — see https://theyburied.com/article/predictive-programming-misses ## Building the denominator Two researchers spent five months on 240 titles from a single decade. They worked blind to each other. For every specific catastrophe depicted they logged the place, the mechanism and the approximate date. They coded 1,428 events. They agreed on 91 per cent of them; the 9 per cent they disagreed on is flagged in the published list rather than settled by us. Only after all the coding was finished did anybody check what had actually happened in the world. ## The result Seventeen arguable matches. Four on the stricter coding, which required the mechanism *and* the place. One thousand four hundred and eleven depicted catastrophes that simply did not occur — the volcano under the city, the second civil war, the comet, the sea wall, the eleven separate pandemics with the wrong pathogen in the wrong year. Nobody has ever written about any of those. There is no reason to. That is exactly the problem. > A hit rate needs two numbers and this subject has only ever published one of them. > > — Dr. Emeka Sandoval-Trần ## Whether four beats chance Our statistician's answer is no, and he asked that the reasoning be printed rather than the verdict. Fiction depicts catastrophe constantly, because catastrophe is what plots are made of. The world also produces catastrophe constantly. Two large sets drawn from the same small library of human fears will overlap, and the expected overlap for 1,428 depictions across thirty years is — on his model, with his stated assumptions — larger than four. "You do not have an unexplained signal," he wrote. "You have slightly fewer coincidences than I would have guessed, which is the least publishable sentence in English." ## Where the ideas came from We interviewed a screenwriter who has two "predictions" to his name and who has been sent clips of his own work for fifteen years. Both, he says, came from the same place: a newspaper. "I read about a near miss in 1994 and thought, what if it had not been a near miss," he said. "That is the whole job. Everybody in this trade reads the news and asks what if it had been worse. Then sometimes it is worse, later, and somebody edits my scene next to a photograph." He was asked whether he found it flattering. "I found it flattering for about a week in 2011. Now a man emails me every few months to tell me I am part of it. He is very polite. I do not know what to say to him and I have stopped trying." ## The hindsight machine Professor Halvard Nkemelu-Reyes supplied the mechanism, which is not mysterious and is very well studied. After an event, memory reorganises around it. Details that were ambiguous become foreshadowing. A map on a wall in a film becomes a place name. You are not lying and you are not stupid; you are running a piece of standard equipment. "The interesting question is never why people see the pattern," he said. "It is why anybody expects them not to." ## Sources (invented) - Two research assistants, Named in our notes; coded independently and blind to each other — Five months; 240 titles; 1,428 coded events (February–June 2026) - Dr. Emeka Sandoval-Trần, Statistician — Wrote the analysis plan before coding began; report published (January 2026) - Prof. Halvard Nkemelu-Reyes, Psychologist, hindsight bias — Interviewed by video call (May 2026) - A screenwriter with two 'predictions' to his name, Named with consent — Interviewed in person (June 2026) ## Documents cited (invented) - PX-2035: https://theyburied.com/vault/PX-2035 ## What we could not confirm - Whether another decade would give the same rate. One decade, one language, one coding scheme. - The 9% of events our two coders disagreed on. Both codings are published and we did not adjudicate. --- They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.