Covid-19 Predicted Half a Century Ago?!!

EDIT – Following recent correspondence and having sought independent legal advice, large portions of the below post have been removed or edited.

If you had told me at the start of the year that by June I would be writing about an artistic recluse forgotten by all but the most hardened of art history nerds, I might have called you crazy. Up until recently I had planned to use this space to talk about the UK government’s preparations for negligence claims from frontline NHS staff and their families but somehow during the course of my research I’ve ended up down a rabbit warren. I don’t have any agenda, I am not aligned with the interest of any lobbying group and going to try to convince you of anything, I am simply going to lay out the facts and allow you to draw whatever conclusion you see fit. Where possible I have attempted to approach the subject from a perspective of rational cynicism. I am not going to try to convince you that Covid-19 is the result of 5G, or a Bill Gates orchestrated conspiracy to vaccinate the world’s population. I am also not going to attempt to engage with these arguments. While I see that it is important to consider alternative viewpoints and there may be important insights to be drawn from these hypotheses, this is beyond the scope of this argument. It is always important to embark upon research with an open mind. If you abjectly refuse to alter a hypothesis in light of emerging information, your argument is no longer based on the objective pursuit of truth, but a foundation of dogma.

My initial goal in researching this piece was to discredit the likes of Sylvia Browne, a celebrity medium known for founding her own church and her frequent media appearances. Browne has posthumously enjoyed a recent surge in popularity due to the following passage from her book in 2008:

In around 2020 a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and the bronchial tubes and resisting all known treatments. Almost more baffling than the illness itself will be the fact that it will suddenly vanish as quickly as it arrived, attack again ten years later, and then disappear completely.

I want to stress that I respect the reaction of those who have been moved by this startling prediction. The apparent accuracy when describing the symptoms of Coronavirus is chilling and at first glance it appears impossible that the above text could be the product of anything less than genuine psychic ability. However I feel that any such claims to prophetic foretelling should be taken with a healthy dose of scepticism. It is worth considering that Sylvia Browne has gotten countless predictions wrong over the years. From incorrect and misleading conclusions on child kidnapping cases, assurances that we would be visited by aliens and claims of miraculous medical advancements that never manifest, Sylvia Browne’s track record is patchy at best. Even the paragraph above her apparent Coronavirus prediction claims that a bacterial disease in 2010 could only be eradicated through a combination of ‘electrical currents and extreme heat’. One can therefore approach Browne’s predictions from two positions: either she was a flawed psychic who managed to glimpse some genuine insights into the future, or she was an charlatan reliant on the law of averages, knowing that enough random predictions can result in one or two perfect , one or two would end up being pretty much bang on.

Indeed there have been a number of seemingly startlingly accurate anticipations of the respiratory disease. The 2011 film Contagion saw a surge in popularity due to its eerily similar undertones to the global response to the pandemic. Similarly, the 2018 South Korean Netflix show My Secret Terrius contains reference to a weaponised coronavirus, lead to a collective gasp of conspiratorial horror across the full spectrum of social media.

One thing worth bearing in mind before jumping to supernatural conclusions is that we are drowning in screen media. In 2018, Netflix alone released almost 1,500 hours of original content. They were bound to stumble on something resembling the near future eventually. Another is that epidemiologists have long warned about a pandemic of this scale, based on mathematical models and an understanding of past pandemics. There is nothing extraordinary, or preternatural about this. Covid-19 is not the first Coronavirus, though it is the most devastating in recent years. Contagion and My Secret Terrius are simply doing what science fiction does best - predicting the near future through understanding the present, without resorting to tea leaves or tiger entrails. It is no more unusual for TV to predict a global epidemic than it is for Star Trek to predict mobile phones and automatic doors. Whereas one is the next logical step in a technological landscape of analogue radio communications, Covid 19 is the next logical step in the epidemiological landscape of SARS, swine flu, Ebola, MERS and countless other zoonotic diseases. The warning signs were all there, it didn’t need superpowers to figure it out.

During my research into the topic however, there was one individual who repeatedly emerged, not only in reference to Coronavirus, but in relation to a number of key events in the later 20^th century and new millennium. Ezra Maas, another individual who has received a recent spike in attention due the recently published Unauthorised Biography of Ezra Maas by Daniel James, was a reclusive artist that mainly operated in the 1960s and 1970s. Trying to find public domain information on this individual is like trying to draw teeth and it is at this point that I would like to thank the Ezra Maas subreddit, a group of enthusiasts who are dedicated to diligently scouring the internet for titbits of information that would otherwise have been lost to the tides of history. These individuals have made it their mission to separate the blurred lines of fact and fiction when interpreting Maas’s life, particularly important considering recent years of DMCA takedown orders, threats of legal action and reported DDOS attacks against Maas enthusiasts. Much work has been done to bury the topic of this artist since his seclusion from society and it is only thanks to those with a genuine intellectual curiosity that research into the topic continues to exist at all.

The key difference between Maas and charlatans such as Browne is that Maas consistently got it right. Amongst his most notable predictions were the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam, the victory and subsequent defeat of Garry Kasparov at the metaphorical hands of IBM’s Chess supercomputer Deep Blue, the meltdown of reactor No. 4 in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and even arguably the second law of black hole mechanics as postulated by Stephen Hawking. These instances of historical significance are clearly alluded to through Maas's artwork, years or even decades before their occurrence.

There are individuals that note that there is more written about Maas than Maas ever wrote himself, some going so far as to say that the most seminal accounts of his life were self-curated. As much of the information on Maas’s life was written after his death in absentia, there is a dearth of primary sources available to verify many of the predictions. For example, Maas’s 1989 Correlation is widely acknowledged as a commentary on Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm which would not happen until later the following year. When attempting to locate more information on the piece, not only is it clear that there are no known copies in existence but there is a general confusion as to whether Correlation was a novel, a play, a work of fine art or even by some accounts Maas's pet Labrador.

Having said that, there are a number of Maas works that are verifiable. Here is an excerpt from Maas’s personal journal, confirmed to be genuine by the Maas Foundation:

I often wander about the future, what will I be doing in three years time, eight, nine or even fifty one years from now. I will not venture outside. The sky is of a spectacular quality but with a lack of restaurants, bars and barber shops it is better to stay indoors. There are many that live as I live, perhaps the whole world, though unlike me they suffer it reluctantly. The masks we wear today are metaphorical. Yet all metaphors begin life in reality and it is the tendency of all things to return to the place of their origin.

The casual observer could be forgiven for assuming that Maas is waxing lyrical on his gradual but well documented withdrawal from society. Throughout this period Maas actively and relentlessly cultivated his own image as a recluse, preferring to be seen as an introvert even when attending an endless hedonistic slew of parties, obsessed with the idea of being seen not to be seen.

When reading the segment in hindsight however, it is impossible not to pick up on some further points of intrigue. The references to social isolation and masks can be written off as a product of Maas’s persona and even allusions to closed barber shops, restaurants and bars seem vague enough to not warrant further attention. When considering Maas’s interest in numerology however, some disturbing insights begin to take shape. Firstly, the journal entry was dated 01 March 1969, almost 51 years before the first case of Coronavirus was identified in the state of New York, Maas’s erstwhile home. Secondly, the number sequence of 3, 8, 9, 51 can be interpreted through the Pythagorean System of Western Numerology as ‘China’, which has previously led theorists to believe that Maas’s final disappearing act was actually a planned retirement to the orient. In light of current world news it is easy to read this as a reference to the viral epicentre of Covid-19.

The final point I would like to draw attention to the role of the Maas Foundation, in burying and obfuscating intellectual discussion around Maas and his work, ensuring that many of his original works in particular are removed entirely from the public domain. It has often been speculated that the Maas Foundation employs this strategy to maintain an air of exclusivity, desirability and mystique, controlling the supply of Maas artwork to ensure the artificially high value of his work. Alternatively, it is worth considering that the Foundation has profited considerably from its investments in Monsato and Dow Chemical during the Vietnam war, as well as shorting US public electric utility stock prior to Chernobyl, making it is easy to speculate that Maas’s “psychic” abilities are just a small part in a series of insider trading scandals going back generations. Particularly worrying is the Foundation’s current position, hedged to benefit greatly from a Indonesian humanitarian catastrophe resulting from the sinking of Jakarta by 2025.

The human brain is configured to look for patterns everywhere and struggles to separate correlation from coincidence. It is commonplace for individuals to look back at the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, noting that a relatively innocuous first wave was followed by a terrible viral tsunami, leaving between 20 and 50 million dead. To assume that Covid-19 will follow a similar pattern is misinformed, yet we remain drawn to patterns, thinking that if we can somehow grasp the landscape of the past and the present, the future is ours to hold and interpret as we see fit. On occasion we get lucky and there are those amongst us that are more capable than others of distinguishing the hidden weave of the world. I believe that Ezra Maas was, or is, one of these individuals.

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Kosher Cavell is an independent scientist and researcher based in Quebec.