REUBEN's GRIFT

REUBEN .I d driven to Santa Ana from South Laguna to tell John Blackburn, a reporter from the Santa Ana Register, about two future forecasts I d recently completed. I d had a particularly intense dream and tried a rebuilt simplified set of equations without the earth tides that still eluded me. But I d gotten two results that were very persuasive. It was February 5, 1971. Blackburn, smiled. Reuben, you ve got quite an impressive history here, Eighty-seven percent accuracy in 35, you said? I looked up the July 11, 1935 New York Times article, he added. The writer, Lawrence, was pretty complimentary. I appreciated he did his homework, but I had mixed feelings about his comment. I feared he might have seen the August 1, 1935 Times Science Editor article, which was the opposite of complimentary . This is good work, Reuben, John said, But these predictions are history. What about the future earthquakes you mentioned on the phone? That s what our readers want to know. I smiled. I had a hot one for him in Southern California, Magnitude 6.6 at 6:03 AM, in just four days, and a less imminent forecast, for January 1973 in San Francisco. That was the one that excited me, even though some of the computational results needed double-checking. It could be an accurate prediction of the Big One. But boy, did I hit a home run on February 9, 1971 the Southern California Sylmar earthquake struck at 6:01 AM with Magnitude 6.7 it was only two minutes early