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  • 2020-02-18 (xsd:date)
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  • Was Coronavirus Predicted in a 1981 Dean Koontz Novel? (en)
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  • When readers first came across a biological weapon named Wuhan-400 in Dean Koontz's novel The Eyes of Darkness, we doubt anyone had the notion that the famous thriller author was predicting a real-world outbreak of COVID-19, coronavirus disease. But in February 2020, after such an outbreak had occurred, eagle-eyed Koontz fans shared this passage as if the famous thriller author was a prognosticator. This is a genuine page from the novel The Eyes of Darkness. The passage can be seen in Amazon's preview of a mass market paperback edition of this novel that was released in December 2008. It's true that Koontz named a fictional biological weapon Wuhan-400 in this novel. It's also true that Wuhan, China, is the city at the center of the 2020 coronavirus outbreak. However, that's pretty much where the similarities end. Here are a few things this prediction gets wrong: But there's more bad news for this prediction. While the page from Koontz's novel displayed above is genuine, other iterations of this book used a different name for the fictional biological weapon. In fact, when we searched a 1981 edition of this book available via Google Books we found no references to Wuhan. In that edition, this biological weapon is called Gorki-400 after the Russian city where it was created. We're not entirely sure when or why this change occurred. From what we can tell, the biological weapon was originally called Gorki-400 when this book was published in 1981. But by 2008, the name had been changed to Wuhan-400. Regardless of when Wuhan-400 made its way into Koontz' novel, this is not a prediction. Koontz did not claim that the events that took place in his novel would later come to fruition, and the similarities between Wuhan-400 and COVID-19 are minimal. Furthermore, readers only noticed this prediction after an outbreak of coronavirus was reported in Wuhan, China, which makes this prediction nothing more than a coincidence. Another image supposedly showing a second page from Koontz' novel The Eyes of Darkness was also circulated on social medias as further evidence that the author had predicted the COVID-19 pandemic: This page does not come from Koontz' novel The Eyes of Darkness. This actually comes from a book called End of Days by self-described psychic Sylvia Browne. You can read more about Browne's prediction here. (en)
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