Johanson, Anton

Johanson, Anton



(1858–1928)

A Norwegian from Finnmark in the far north who received glimpses of the future, or what he took to be so, in three ways—through intuitions, through visions seen as if from a height, and through hearing a voice that he believed to be Christ’s.
Johanson was largely self-taught. His most important employment was as a surveyor. His first communications were sad ones about the deaths of relatives and neighbors, with more or less the nature of second sight. Gradually, his scope widened. He is credited with foreseeing the Martinique eruption in 1902 and the San Francisco earthquake in 1906. In a vision of a ship going down, which could apply to the Titanic, he picked out a member of the Astor family as lost. John Jacob Astor was, in fact, among the Titanic victims.
Most of Johanson’s predictions of public events resulted from a single prolonged experience on the night of November 14, 1907, combining all three of his sources of information. The experience ranged over two future periods, 1914 to 1921 and 1947 to 1953. Some of the forecasts in the earlier group were published in Scandinavian papers during 1913. Johanson spoke of World War I, the military deadlock, the flu episode near the end, and Germany’s victory in Russia followed by a rapid collapse and social turmoil. His second group of prophecies was far less successful. It included a Franco-Russian alliance making war on Norway and Sweden and a debacle of skyscrapers in New York. However, it also included the founding of the state of Israel, within the period specified.
Some of these prophecies can be explained by intelligent appraisal of current affairs. Some, of course, may have been improved retrospectively. Johanson’s reputed bull’s-eyes with Martinique and San Francisco are impressive if genuine, since, with natural disasters, no scientific techniques of forecasting existed. The oddly specific detail about an Astor perishing in a shipwreck is interesting. There was no obvious reason for Johanson to think of a faraway American family, however renowned and affluent. This touch has an air of authenticity.