Claims that the blind Bulgarian mystic Baba Vanga predicted a world war in 2026 and alien contact are false, according to experts who say her name is being exploited for clickbait and pro-Russian disinformation.
Ivan Dramov of the Baba Vanga Foundation in Bulgaria said many so-called prophecies circulating on TikTok, YouTube and in tabloids were never uttered by Vanga, who died in 1996. “Absolute lies have been told about this holy woman,” he told the Guardian. “Vanga dealt mainly with people’s health problems, not with upcoming cataclysms in the world.”
Born Vangeliya Gushterova in 1911 in what was then the Ottoman Empire, Vanga lost her sight after being caught in a tornado as a teenager. She gained local fame during the second world war by telling visitors whether loved ones would return from the front. By the 1960s, she was a regional phenomenon in Petrich, Bulgaria, attracting visitors from Russia, Romania and Greece.
Many predictions attributed to Vanga about Russia, including the fall of the Soviet Union and a glorious future for the country, can be traced back to Russian writer Valentin Sidorov, who claimed to have met her in the 1970s. “There are no recordings of these meetings, which allowed Sidorov a free interpretation, or possibly even construction of what Vanga has or has not said about Russia,” said Viktoria Vitanova-Kerber, a researcher at the University of Fribourg.
A 2024 report by BIRN Albania found that Vanga’s predictions were “often used by conspiracy and disinformation media to reinforce certain narratives against Nato and the EU”. The myth has become so entrenched in Russian culture that it inspired the verb vangovat, meaning to predict, and the expression: “How should I know, do I look like Baba Vanga to you?”
