Woah! Did The Simpsons predict Ebola outbreak 17 years back?

If The Simpsons is one of your favourite TV shows, this is going to make you really really happy. A snippet from The Simpsons way back in 1997 shows that our favourite Springfield residents may have been on to Ebola a long time before the rest of us. In an episode entitled Lisa’s Sax from season 9 Marge tries to convince her sick son Bart to get out of bed. She then offers to read to him, and produces the book: Curious George and the Ebola virus. [caption id=“attachment_1767217” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Screen grab from The Simpson show[/caption] He isn’t interested. So, Marge suggests that he tries his hands at painting, at which point Bart ominously points at a drawing depicting some kind of apocalypse where he is dead, there is blood and bodies everywhere and the sky appears to cry. The clip was posted as part of a discussion video by user Controversy7, who wrote alongside it: “Is there something we are not being told? Is it by pure chance & coincidence that the Simpsons would do predictive programming? There has been numerous predictions from The Simpsons which revealed futuristic events which came to pass. What of the Ebola recurrence in 2014? Is it planned or is it just by natural means? Ebola was not in the 90’s, but it happened long ago in the mid 70’s… But The Simpsons reveal in late 90’s Ebola virus… Interesting right?” So what did maker Matt Groening know that we didn’t? Critics are calling it ‘mere coincidence.’ Ebola has been around since the 70s, and though this latest outbreak has been the worst yet, it killed 254 people in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1995 and 224 in Uganda in 2000. The current outbreak, which began last December, has so far killed more than 3,800 people, according to the latest World Health Organization figures.

But, this was not the first time The Simpsons predicted the future. In a 1997 episode of The Simpsons, a book that said New York, $9 with the WTC buildings as silhouettes right beside it can also be read as New York 911 if you treat the silhouettes as numbers. In 1994, Homer did the ‘Wrecking Ball’ just like Miley Cyrus. In 2008, Homer’s voting machine changed his vote. The same incident happened in reality in 2012, when a Pennsylvania voting machine was removed after it was found turning votes for President Obama into a vote for Romney. Wow!