Baba Vanga’s prediction list
From her rise to fame during the dark days of the Second World War, right through to her death in 1996, the Bulgarian mystic Baba Vanga was renowned for her apparent ability to foretell the future. Comparisons were made with Nostradamus, and many devotees believed she’d predicted everything from 9/11 to the rise of Donald Trump.

We’ve already created a guide to some of Baba Vanga’s most famous prophecies, but did the legendary prophet have visions relating to 2023?

Since Baba Vanga didn’t officially record her thoughts, debate still swirls around what exactly she did and did not say. However, there are some particular predictions that have been linked to the coming year.

A devastating solar storm?
One of the most alarming 2023 predictions attributed to Baba Vanga concerns a solar storm which could have calamitous consequences. The term ‘solar storm’ can refer to several phenomena on the sun’s surface, including solar flares and coronal mass ejections. The latter are vast eruptions of plasma that are capable of reaching the Earth, causing geomagnetic storms that could potentially fry power grids and cause widespread havoc.

The most dramatic example in recorded history was the Carrington Event of 1859. Named after British astronomer Richard Carrington, it knocked out telegraph networks and even caused fires and electric shocks. If such an event was to happen today, in our electrified world, the effects on communications, services, and everyday lives would be almost unfathomable.

Indeed, experts believe the damage to worldwide infrastructures could lead to blackouts that last for years, triggering societal chaos and causing financial markets to go into a tailspin that would dwarf anything seen before. On the plus side, at least the aurora would look amazing.

A change in Earth’s orbit?
Could the path that Earth takes around the sun alter in 2023? This is a particularly fascinating 2023 prophecy and one which would have ramifications for us all.

Our planet travels 584 million miles around the sun every year, an epic voyage that is elliptical – shaped like an oval rather than a perfect circle. The precise shape of the oval is influenced by other planets’ gravitational forces, meaning the Earth’s orbit can and does shift. However, such changes take place in a cyclical way across many thousands of years.

The effects of even subtle, slow changes can be severe. For example, it’s been theorised that an orbital shift contributed to the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, a period of intense global warming that took place almost 56 million years ago.

If a radical shift occurred over the course of a single year, for whatever reason, the effects would be apocalyptic. There might be soaring temperatures and radiation levels, with terrible environmental consequences. And that’s putting aside the possibility that the orbital shift hinted at by Baba Vanga might be caused by an asteroid impact, which could well be an extinction-level event.

A bioweapon atrocity?
It’s also been said that Baba Vanga had a vision of bioweapons tests being carried out by a big country in 2023. This is arguably one of the more viscerally disturbing predictions ever provided by the prophetess. It also seems relevant to the current, heated geopolitical context.

It’s impossible to know what nation Baba Vanga had in mind, and it’s unclear what the extent of such experiments might be. Could it involve stockpiled viruses? Perhaps some weaponised variant that runs the risk of escaping the lab environment?

Even if such a leak didn’t occur, these kinds of experiments would presumably violate the Biological Weapons Convention, which bans the development and production of toxins and agents. There is precedent for this, with the Convention having been previously broken by countries including the Soviet Union and Iraq.

All of this makes for scary reading. Fortunately, as we’ve noted earlier, Baba Vanga’s predictions are cryptic and impossible to verify, and many of her other alleged visions have been disputed. Here’s hoping these too will be dismissed by the end of next year.