Dismissal is not analysis
Saying “that's pseudoscience” explains nothing to a person who finds a claim compelling, and it usually confirms their suspicion that no one engaged with it. Every claim below is treated the same way as every claim elsewhere on this site: what exactly is asserted, what would have to be true, and what happens when you check.
Several of these claims are partly right, and saying so matters. The arithmetic is often correct. It is the inference from the arithmetic that fails, and it usually fails in one of three specific ways.
Post-hoc selection. The pattern was chosen after looking at the data. With enough freedom to choose method, spelling, edition and target, a match is guaranteed.
Unstated flexibility. The claim quietly permits variation — in which letter-values, which text, which unit — that is never disclosed in the presentation.
Missing control. No one ran the same procedure on a text where the pattern should be absent. This is the single most common omission, and the easiest to fix.
Graded
disputed
The Bible Code (equidistant letter sequences). Witztum, Rips and Rosenberg (1994) reported that names of rabbis appeared near their dates in Genesis at rates beyond chance. McKay, Bar-Natan, Bar-Hillel and Kalai (1999) showed the result was sensitive to the appellations chosen, and — decisively — produced comparable results in War and Peace. The arithmetic was never in question; the experimental design was. Worked through in full on the methodology page.
disputed
Quranic “Code 19”. Requires excluding verses 9:128–129 from the text to make the counts work. A system that needs the corpus altered to fit is not evidence about the corpus. Mainstream Islamic scholarship rejects it. See Quranic numerics.
disputed
The Great Pyramid encodes π. The ratio is approximately present and follows automatically from the seked slope convention — as does the φ relationship, which is why both appear at once. One construction method, two “encoded constants”. See sacred geometry.
disputed
432 Hz is the natural tuning. Standardised concert pitch is modern, the hertz is a 19th-century unit, and historical pitch varied by city and by decade. There was no ancient frequency to prefer. Discussed under music and number.
disputed
The Dogon knew about Sirius B. Griaule's mid-20th-century ethnography reports Dogon knowledge of an invisible companion to Sirius. The central objection is not that the Dogon are incapable of astronomy but that Griaule's fieldwork method has been criticised for leading informants, and that European visitors with knowledge of Sirius B had been in contact before the reports were collected. Contamination is a simpler explanation than transmission. See West Africa & Ifa.
disputed
The golden ratio governs classical art and architecture. Almost every celebrated instance depends on the analyst's choice of measuring points, and φ is unattested as a design principle in the relevant primary sources. Its popularity as an idea dates largely from the 19th century.
exploratory
11:11 and repeated-digit synchronicity. There is a real phenomenon here, and it is a cognitive one: frequency illusion. Once a pattern is salient, matching instances are noticed and non-matching ones are not. Nobody records the times they looked at a clock and saw 11:09. The experience is genuine; the inference from it to external significance is unsupported.
exploratory
Nostradamus predicted specific modern events. The quatrains are syntactically ambiguous and undated by design, and the matches are made after the events. The test that would settle it is trivially available and never performed: publish a specific dated interpretation in advance.
remarkable
432,000 appears in both Indian yuga cycles and the Sumerian King List. Graded remarkable, not disputed — the convergence is real, the figures are what the sources say, and no accepted explanation exists. Proposed transmission routes are unproven, and both figures could arise independently from sexagesimal round-number habits. This is what an honestly open question looks like, as distinct from a failed claim.
Testing a claim yourself
You do not need statistical training. You need three questions.
Was the target chosen before or after looking? If after, the claim has no predictive content, and the impressiveness of the match is an artefact of how many targets were available.
What was allowed to vary? Gematria has several letter-value schemes; texts have variant editions; measurements have unit conversions. Each degree of freedom multiplies the chances of a hit. A claim should disclose its degrees of freedom, and almost none do.
Where is the control? Run the identical procedure on a text or building where the pattern should not appear. This is what MBBK did with War and Peace, and it is why that paper settled the question. If a claim has never been run against a control, it has not yet been tested at all.
You can run the first of these yourself in the alphanumeric calculator: pick a target number, then try to reach it with different systems and spellings. How easily you succeed is the point of the exercise.
Testing the Patterns
The full statistical treatment, with the Torah codes case worked through.
Alphanumeric Calculator
Test how easily a chosen total can be reached.
Comparison Matrix
Filter the whole dataset to grade "disputed" and see every contested claim at once.
Sacred Geometry
The ratio claims examined individually.
Cite this page
Formatted references for this page. The evidence grade is part of the claim — when quoting a graded statement, carry the grade with it.