Wuhan coronavirus predicted in Dean Koontz's 1981 novel 'The Eyes of Darkness'; 'Coincidence or prophecy?' asks Twitter
Literary coincidence or an unwitting prophet?
Twitter was abuzz with a new conspiracy theory on Tuesday as some users discovered a shocking piece of trivia regarding China's Novel Coronavirus epidemic. It has now come to light that a 1981 American novel had predicted the disease outbreak, even getting right the details, down to the exact location!
When bestselling American author Dean Koontz penned the suspense thriller novel 'The Eyes of Darkness' in 1981, he might have unwittingly penned a stark prophecy about the 2019 Novel Coronavirus epidemic that is plaguing the world almost 40 years later.
The Eyes of Darkness mentions a Chinese military lab outside of the city of Wuhan, where a deadly virus is invented as part of the country's biological weapons warfare programme. Owing to the lab's location, the virus is named 'Wuhan-400'.
This chilling coincidence did not go unnoticed on Twitter, as users highlighted the similarity of the novel's events to the real-life, where indeed, as it turns out, the coronavirus epidemic has broken out from a seafood market in Wuhan. What's more, according to a South China Morning Post article — the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which houses China's only level-four biosafety laboratory that studies the deadliest viruses, is just 32 km from the epicentre of the current coronavirus outbreak.
If that made the hair on your neck stand, check out some of these posts on Twitter:
Things really started to get serious when Congress MP Manish Tewari took to Twitter and highlighted the passage from 'The Eye of Darkness'.
However, one user said that this is an example of the 'infinite monkey theorem' which states that a random set of events will almost surely produce a defined set of results, given an infinite amount of time. The Twitter user explained that given the history of the written word, it almost surely can happen that any event at any given time has been written about in some text in any corner of the world.
Conspiracy theory or not, the new revelation surely has left Twitterati in a git.