They Told Us Exactly What They Planned
In every theatre class, the same question: does life imitate art, or does art imitate life? Neither. It is orchestration. The same hands that control what gets greenlit, funded, and distributed are the hands that control what happens next. 427 works of fiction target the same window -- 2024 to 2030. That is not coincidence. That is a campaign.
We did not discover this by guessing. We built a dataset of 4,074 works of fiction across all media -- novels, films, television, games, comics, radio, anime -- cross-referenced against 12 verified sources including Columbia University's Post45 Data Collective, the Internet Movie Database, Wikipedia, and Wikidata's structured P2408 property. We applied strict gap rules: if a work was released the same year it depicts, rejected. If it depicts a year already past, rejected. Only works with genuine lead time -- where someone wrote about our present before it happened -- made the cut. 427 survived. All of them point here. All of them point now.
Fiction programs what we accept as inevitable. Daytime television teaches us how to feel and what to be offended at. Commercials sell us shame and offer their product as the fix. The heroes they give us are always rogues and destroyers -- never builders. They demonize systems, community, and consent -- the very things that would set us free. Up is down. The good guys are the bad guys. And they have been doing this since at least 1910.
This is not speculation. This is documented. The same government that tells you fiction is harmless entertainment ran MKUltra for twenty years -- 149 subprojects across 80 institutions with 185 researchers, all devoted to one purpose: controlling human thought. Universities, hospitals, prisons -- all participated. When Congress finally investigated, the CIA had already destroyed the records. Of the roughly 20,000 documents that survived Richard Helms's 1973 shredding order, not a single person was prosecuted. Zero accountability.
They did not stop. They refined. Operation Mockingbird placed over 400 journalists on the CIA payroll as intelligence assets -- documented by Carl Bernstein's 1977 investigation and confirmed by the Church Committee, which found 50 journalists with official but secret CIA relationships. The Washington Post's own publisher, Phil Graham, was recruited by CIA's Frank Wisner. The agency funded over 1,000 books. CBS, Time, Life, Newsweek, the Associated Press -- all had documented CIA cooperation. They did not just report the news. They manufactured it.
MKUltra proved they could break individual minds. Mockingbird proved they could control collective narrative. The fiction pipeline is the third layer: programming what an entire civilization believes is coming, so that when it arrives, no one resists. You do not fight what you have already accepted as inevitable.
Billionaires use astrologers. They have known about celestial timing for centuries. The convergence zone of 2024-2030 aligns with Pluto entering Aquarius -- the great transformation that occurs roughly every 248 years. The last time Pluto was in Aquarius: the American and French Revolutions. The time before that: the Renaissance. Every transit brings the destruction of old power structures and the birth of new ones.
They did not guess these years. Their astrologers told them the cosmic window, and they programmed fiction to match what they planned to do during it. 104 works in our dataset depict societal collapse in this window. 84 depict war. 78 depict surveillance states. 65 depict dystopian regimes. These are not separate visions from separate minds. This is a coordinated campaign to normalize what is being built.
We have either consented to this life or we have lost the ability to consent.
In 1925, Thea von Harbou wrote Metropolis -- a world where an elite class lives in gleaming towers while workers are literally underground, invisible, expendable. Set in 2026. That is a 101-year lead time. In 1950, Ray Bradbury wrote There Will Come Soft Rains -- automated houses serving meals to families that no longer exist, vaporized by nuclear fire. Set in 2026. A 76-year lead time. In 1957, Philip K. Dick wrote Vulcan's Hammer -- a world governed by an AI system that humans can no longer override. A 69-year lead time.
One author writing about 2026 is vision. Two is coincidence. 427 is a directive.
Scroll through 4074 works sorted by release year. Click any work for full details. Works with images shown first.
Below are 4074 works examined in depth -- who created them, who published them, who funded them, and what they programmed us to accept. 427 total works in our dataset target 2024-2030 across 17 programming themes. We traced the creators, the publishers, the production companies. We asked: who knew?
The dataset spans every medium: 1,248 films, 1,117 novels, 494 television series, 456 games, 106 comics, and more. Sources include Columbia University's Post45 Data Collective (CC BY 4.0), IMDB (137,429 sci-fi/fantasy titles scanned, 20,003 with significant viewership), Wikipedia category analysis across 7 language-specific categories, and Wikidata's structured property P2408 ("set in period") -- the only structured database in the world that tracks when fiction is set.
The answer is always the same. They all knew. Because they were told.
427 works target 2024-2030. These are the themes they were told to normalize.
These are not theories. These are declassified government operations that prove the pipeline exists.
A Central Intelligence Agency program devoted to developing techniques for controlling human behavior and thought. Exposed by the Church Committee (1975) and subsequent FOIA requests after CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all records destroyed in 1973. Approximately 20,000 documents survived.
Universities, hospitals, prisons -- 80 institutions participated in experiments on unwitting human subjects. LSD administered to prisoners for 77 consecutive days. Hundreds of patients subjected to psychic driving at McGill University. Frank Olson, a CIA scientist, died 9 days after being dosed without his knowledge. The program spawned successors: MKSEARCH, MKOFTEN, MKCHICKWIT. They proved the human mind could be broken and rebuilt. Then they moved to scale.
A CIA campaign to influence domestic and foreign media. Documented by Carl Bernstein's 1977 Rolling Stone investigation and the Church Committee's findings. The agency recruited journalists, editors, and publishers at major American media outlets to shape public narrative.
CBS, Time, Life, Newsweek, the Associated Press, United Press International, the Washington Post -- all had documented CIA cooperation. Phil Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, was personally recruited by CIA Deputy Director Frank Wisner. Joseph Alsop's columns ran in 300+ newspapers while he served as a CIA asset. The Church Committee confirmed 50 journalists maintained official but secret CIA relationships. They did not just control the news. They controlled what you believed was possible.
The technique did not appear from nowhere. It has a documented lineage, and each generation refined what the previous one built.
1917 -- Lenin and Agitprop. The Bolsheviks created the first industrial-scale propaganda infrastructure. Agitation trains carrying printing presses and orators rolled through villages. The Agitation and Propaganda Section of the Central Committee centralized narrative control over an entire nation. Lenin formalized the distinction between propaganda (ideas through print) and agitation (emotion through speech). He proved you could move millions with centralized messaging. The 2012 film Branded claimed Lenin invented marketing -- he did not invent marketing, but he did prove that state-scale narrative control was possible.
1920s -- Edward Bernays Privatizes Propaganda. Sigmund Freud's nephew took the psychological manipulation techniques from WWI government propaganda (he served on the U.S. Committee on Public Information) and sold them to corporations. His 1928 book Propaganda opens by declaring that the conscious manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element of democratic society. He rebranded propaganda as "public relations" because the word had become toxic. He called his method "the engineering of consent." The state's tool became the corporation's product.
1942 -- Rosie the Riveter. The U.S. War Production Board partnered with advertising agencies to manufacture a cultural icon. They needed women in factories. They did not ask -- they programmed. Rosie was not grassroots. She was a government campaign executed through private media channels. State need became cultural product became behavior change. The merger of government and commercial propaganda was complete.
1950s -- Mockingbird Formalizes the Merger. The CIA placed 400+ journalists on payroll. The Washington Post's publisher recruited directly. 1,000+ books funded. News became product. The line between state narrative and public narrative ceased to exist.
1953-1973 -- MKUltra Proves the Science. 149 subprojects across 80 institutions. They proved human thought could be broken and rebuilt. Individual minds first. Then they moved to scale.
1910-Present -- The Fiction Pipeline. The deepest layer. You do not fight what you have already accepted as inevitable. When you have watched the collapse in a hundred movies, read it in a thousand books, played through it in a hundred games -- you do not resist when it arrives. You expected it. You were trained to expect it. 427 works targeting a 7-year window. 17 coordinated themes. The top three: societal collapse (104 works), war (84 works), surveillance states (78 works). These are not warnings. They are instructions dressed as entertainment.
The question was never "who predicted this?" The question is: who funded it, who greenlit it, and who told them what to write?
This investigation uses exclusively public, verifiable sources:
Fiction Dataset: Post45 Data Collective (Columbia University, CC BY 4.0 license, 2,552 works with Wikidata QIDs), IMDB title.basics.tsv (12.3 million titles scanned, 137,429 sci-fi/fantasy extracted, 20,003 with 100+ votes retained), Wikipedia MediaWiki API (7 future-fiction categories, 5,815 entries), Wikidata SPARQL property P2408 ("set in period").
Government Programs: Church Committee Reports (1975-1976), CIA FOIA Reading Room (declassified MKUltra documents), Carl Bernstein's "The CIA and the Media" (Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977), Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearings.
Gap Rules: gap=0 rejected (same year, not predictive), gap less than 0 rejected (set in past), gap 1-2 years AND already past rejected (too close, already happened), gap 1-2 years AND still future accepted (dynamic), gap 3+ years always accepted (meaningful lead time).
Every number on this page can be verified. Every source is public. We are not asking you to believe us. We are asking you to look.