Jucelino Nobrega da Luz: A major earthquake will hit Nagoya tomorrow

Jucelino Nobrega da Luz, the Brazilian “psychic” who wowed Japanese TV audiences with fraudulent claims of predicting major history events, has announced that a major earthquake will hit Nagoya on September 14th. Seek Japan ran an article about the prediction:

Walk around Nagoya this week and it will be almost impossible to miss the topic on everybody’s mind.

Yes, the big, long overdue earthquake has been predicted to strike Aichi this coming weekend.

A Brazillian with a habit of accurately predicting historical events has predicted it to hit Nagoya with a bang on September 14. This guy is not to be laughed at; he has a 90% accuracy rate and one of his successful predictions includes September 11th, the day America was attacked.

Of course, the article is wrong. Jucelino Nobrega da Luz does not have a 90% accuracy rate and his “successful prediction” of the September 11th attacks was announced after the attacks took place, using forged letters as proof. Unfortunately, an irresponsible Japanese TV network gave credibility to his claims by airing a special in December 2007 introducing his “true” predictions. The special failed to note that most of the “predictions” it mentioned has been debunked, and now this man’s lies are freely circulating in Nagoya.

It is highly doubtful that an earthquake will hit Nagoya tomorrow, but that won’t matter for Jucelino Nobrega da Luz followers. They’ll just ignore the 1000 km distance between Nagoya and Hokkaido and announce that his prediction actually referred to the earthquake that hit Hokkaido earlier this week. (If I recall correctly, they’ve already claimed that a previous false prediction about an earthquake hitting Osaka was actually meant to refer to an earthquake that hit Niigata at a later date!)

Update: 3Yen’s News blog reports that he has also predicted a magnitude 9.1 quake will hit Tokyo today!

Update 2: There was a magnitude 3.1 earthquake in Niigata Prefecture today. It was several hundred kilometers away from the location he predicted, and many many times weaker than the massive quake he claimed was going to happen, but his fans will stretch this into a victory.

[Story via social linking site JapanSoc]